What's narratology?

Put simply, narratology is the study of narrative. It's a formalization of ways to examine how narrative structure affects our understanding and perception of a piece of media. Narratology puts a lot of focus on categorization and taxonomy, which means there are a lot of different terms and concepts floating out there from different thinkers. I'll collect my favorite and most often used terms here for reference.

An important note: I use narratology exclusively to study fictional narratives. I'm not interested in applying narratology to real-world scenarios (at least, not here on the blog).

What's fabula? What's syuzhet?

Fabula refers to the chronological order of events in a story. Syuzhet refers to the order in which these events are relayed to the audience. These terms come to us from Russian formalism, a school of literary thought in the early 1900s that focused on distinguishing literary language from everyday language.

I like to look at both fabula and syuzhet in most of my fiction discussions because the story's presentation to the audience isn't always as simple as just showing the events as they happen, in the order they happened. We've got flashback, parallel storylines, frame narratives, time skips, and all kinds of other devices that affect how we experience the story. Especially once you throw in games like visual novels that have branches of story that happen independently-but-simultaneously, such as when we're asked to juggle the stories of multiple characters at once, I find syuzhet to be a useful tool when discussing narrative development and impact. Similarly, untangling the true fabula of a story can sometimes be the entire puzzle when it comes to genre-aware games that are trying to manipulate your perception of timeline.

What's narrative hardware? What's narrative software?

Short answer: Narrative hardware is the terrarium, and narrative software is the thing that lives in it.

The anthropic principle of fiction states that every fictional universe has fundamental elements that are required for the story to exist. That, for me, is narrative hardware, the term I use to loosely describe the elements that construct the world of the game. This typically includes things like setting, on-ramping, worldbuilding, and game mechanics. These are all things that shape the story's world before the audience even gets there. Narrative hardware elements are the basic building blocks of fictional life.

Similarly, narrative software is my term for everything that happens within this construction. This typically includes things like story, characters, pacing, aboutness, and themes. Different types of software can run on the same types of hardware: you can have a fantasy setup and run a realistic love story, a creature feature, a grand epic, and a tragic downfall without having to change too much hardware. You're part of the software, too!

What's on-ramping?

On-ramping is my term for the beginning bits of a story that introduce you to the world, the characters, and the story itself. This includes things like exposition, tutorials, character introductions—anything the story needs you to know from the start. Some stories don't have much on-ramping (think literary stories set in a realistic city, following normal people), while others will have a lot. Speculative fiction stories that have giant mechs or dragons will usually require at least a little on-ramping to make sure the audience doesn't get lost.

I look at on-ramping as a narrative technique to bring the audience closer to the world of the story. If the on-ramp is swamped with exposition dumps, something may have gone wrong narratively or the story may truly just be nightmarishly large.

What's UI?

UI stands for user interface. This is a shorthand term for things like screens, button design, menu layout, and other ways you interact with a program. If you've ever struggled to find a button on a website, you know the struggle of bad UI.

I look at UI mostly because I'm curious about what makes UI feel good within a story. There are tons of different design philosophies, but I'm primarily interested in ones that lend themselves well to narrative experiences. I'll often put UI and control schemes close together because they're so tightly interwoven.