ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how game mechanics and art create storytelling opportunities. It also explores the different types of narrative spaces, as well as how modular level assets can be utilized to create environmental narratives or even show narrative progression. The chapter examines narrative rewards to illustrate how narrative may be used to allow players opportunities for exploration, discovery, and writing their own narratives through gameplay. As level designers, we should be concerned with finding the connections between narrative development, the embodiment of cultural ideas, and expressions of usable gamespace. Many game designers begin their work from core mechanics, the basic actions a player takes in a game. In digital games, a lot of games designed this way end up as action games, games in which a player performs some action to overcome antagonistic entities or hazards.
