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I initially developed the concept of Nocturna about a year ago for a browser game. That game never really materialised, but I found the characters too appealing to be chucked aside.

I envision my FYP animation as a pitch for a much longer story, involving a large rotating character cast and a plot that addresses questions about life, death, existence and meaning. The characters are more quirky than grim, and I envision the backdrops in lush purples and magentas with spots of cyan, a lighthearted spin on the Gothic genre.

At this point, I no longer really care which direction(s) the project ends up taking as long as I get to tell the stories of the world and its various characters.

The setting is a town in the liminal zone between heaven and hell, where their influences meet and swirl. It is trapped in perpetual dusk, but sees the moon and stars pass through familiar phases. The one thing they do not see is the sun, because its light is taken by the angels on the border.

All magic in this world is drawn from the dance and alignment of celestial bodies across the map of the sky. Planetary conjunctions, full moons, new moons, accord the magical adepts of this town power in different flavours and strengths. Some spells must be performed on specific days. Some people’s powers rise and ebb in synchrony with the distance between the moon and Venus.

This is a world that’s just a couple of steps away from the ordinary. For most, magic isn’t something that is dealt with daily, but those who see it merely think of it as a part of daily life, as with rainfall or snow (angels and demons pass through frequently enough). On that note, all magic is aligned with either Heaven or Hell, and the angels and demons are the ultimate wielders of the aforementioned powers, which they weaponise in their neverending war with each other. They live in small strongholds close to and on the border, battling to advance the territory of their realm. Neither is strictly “good” or “evil” speaking from an outsider’s perspective, and the difference between them lies is in the magical means by which they attain their powers.

The oldest and probably dearest character in the Nocturna project is Mort, a young and zealous reaper created from the ghost of a girl. You see, Mort died when she was thirteen, and when she woke, she was not terribly thrilled to discover that she had been plucked from the living world so soon. As soon as she discovered that accepting a job as a reaper would let her back into the living world, she leapt at the opportunity to do so. She dresses like a magenta witch because she loved witches as a child and dreamt of becoming one.

[Mage], tentatively named Amari, is a magician with a natural penchant for magic. A “tainted” third magic emerged from the interaction of the two forces at the border, and Amari picked it up with ease. They use it to perform stage magic, conjuring objects and making them behave in seemingly unnatural ways, in performances just believable enough that people do not believe that they wield any real magical powers. They lost their younger brother to starvation, which they see as their fault.

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(Just a long ramble that came to me in the middle of class because I loved where the discussion was going.) As we discussed interactive narratives today, it began to seem to me that Minecraft was the one game I knew that bore all the features we seemed to so deeply crave–except for one problem: Minecraft doesn’t seem to have any narrative to speak of.

I am of the belief that as a game approaches maximum interactivity–that is, as the player’s will increasingly becomes the sole factor shaping the narrative experience–its structure must grow increasingly “porous”. There is no room for high contextualisation, because just as it is much easier to damage a smartphone such that it loses functionality than it is a chalkboard, narratives with high contextuality are extremely difficult to mold and adapt because any change threatens to damage whatever makes them tick.

The ultimate interactive experience is, of course, life itself, and to create a game so responsive without the developers having to account for every single choices in analogue (identifying discrete option paths and scripting out the individual outcomes), it needs to mirror real life in several ways. This implies that as a game becomes more interactive, it also necessarily loses elements that would qualify it to be a narrative, simply because that is the nature of interaction. That is why I’d propose that Minecraft is the closest thing to a model of a true interactive narrative that exists at present, being an excellent balance between both.

Is it a narrative? This is a game that, to me, straddles the boundary between narrative and pure organic experience. Being an open sandbox game where one can do practically anything one chooses with the materials made available, one might initially be tempted to believe that it is entirely absent of a narrative, but I would dispute that.

For simplicity’s sake let’s say that a narrative is an emotional thread realised through events involving characters, organised in the ternary structure of introduction, body, and conclusion, in which the conclusion offers a satisfying resolution to that which is troubled in the prior segments. This emotional core is what makes the story worth traversing, the resolution being the reward of the turmoil–and learning–that one endured throughout.

To me, Minecraft has a narrative, and that narrative is self-generating; it emerges as the player plays, within the framework supplied by the game. It has an emotional thread, and that thread is survival and discovery. The feeling of a story arc lies, I think, in the process of realisation one undergoes, as one comes to understand that the world is vast and that one is tiny, and that one’s thirst for exploration is endless as the world within which one resides

It is a very particular kind of “empty world experience” as described in class. The world bears evidence of a past and of outside influences–other consciousnesses shaping the landscape, building monuments outside of one’s notice–and within that framing, AI monsters and creatures are imbued with intelligence. Within the framing, the randomness becomes indicative of organic life appearing and morphing outside one’s control. The ever-present threat of death and the pressing need to survive, to move, maps a trajectory or various trajectories along which one’s self-generating narrative proceeds. One moves forward because 1) there are things one must discover, and 2) one is afraid to die.

And it would be wrong to say that there is no ultimate goal in even a concrete sense. There is a distant goal, an ultimate quest (the same way religion or existentialism supplies our lives with an ultimate quest, perhaps?), in the End, a realm that embodies the very concept of ending, a realm with as much psychological and philosophical dimensionality as it is has physical aspects, an abyss into which the very universe, and the reason for its existence, threatens to be swallowed.

But this ending is so impossibly difficult (probably requiring hundreds of hours of playtime on average), and it can be arrived at in so many different ways, that it never feels omnipresent in a way end goals tend to be in other games. Minecraft questions whether a game’s raison d’etre necessarily has to be the ending, the boss fight, by presenting us with an ultimate objective which one is free to ignore if one does not think it will improve the gaming experience (I mean, if you think about it, you could choose to ignore the plot or the ending in any game, in favour of indefinite exploration)–something that one will arrive at “someday”, a goal that oscillates between concrete and immaterial–a feeling of one, rather.

There is a reward to “completing” the game, however, and that reward is an explanation. As the credits roll, one is presented a short story that offers a troubling yet immensely moving ontological reflection on the meaning of one’s existence within the world of the game, and why one plays at all.

I think Minecraft has a narrative–perhaps in the loosest sense–but it has a narrative, because I decided to play it and inhabit its world as if it does, and yes, not everyone will. To me, it represents the closest thing to a truly interactive narrative.