The Ludic Narrator: Towards the New Typology

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2026 by Maciej Nawrocki of SWPS University, aims to summarize initial diagnoses for a broader research project on ludic narrators: characters or entities within games that verbally recount, frame, or comment on in-game events. The author argues that while narratology has long been a central tool for analyzing narrators, its adaptation to digital, interactive, and multimodal media remains limited. The work seeks to reassess classical models associated with Genette, Stanzel, and Booth, and to propose a more integrative, game-oriented approach that distinguishes narrators from the much more widely studied category of ludic narratives.

The paper situates its argument within the historical development of game studies, noting that scholarship has long concentrated on narratives rather than narrators. The narratology/ludology debate produced a lasting assumption that digital games are primarily distributed, multi-agent forms of storytelling in which designers, systems, interfaces, and players jointly construct meaning, leaving the single narrator marginal. The author contends this overlooks the many games that contain explicit narrators, whether textual, voiced, diegetic, extradiegetic, system-generated, or player-instantiated, and that the absence of a coherent typology leaves the phenomenon theoretically underexplained.

The framework treats the game as an autonomous, bounded entity and the narrator as a prescripted, finite construct, offering a counterpoint to Daniel Vella's player-centered theory of the ludic subject. The paper draws on three areas: analog precedents such as tabletop roleplaying game masters, the multimodality of verbal expression in games, and interactivity as a constitutive feature of narrators that may respond to player actions or adapt their discourse in real time.

The proposed typology is preliminary and includes distinctions between playful and serious narrators, fixed and interactive narrators, and voiced and textual narrators. These are presented as analytical tools rather than rigid taxonomic categories. The presentation aims to outline these components as a step toward a typology that bridges classical narratology, game-oriented theory, and the affordances of interactive digital media.