Reframing Your Experience for Narrative Design Roles
One of the biggest misunderstandings about getting writing jobs in the gaming industry is this:
People think studios are hiring writers.
But they are not.
They are hiring narrative designers — people who can build meaning inside systems.
This distinction changes everything.
Writing is about expression.
Narrative design is about experience.
And experience in games is not linear. It is interactive, branching, responsive, and constrained by mechanics.
What Narrative Design Actually Requires
From my work in leadership storytelling and narrative consulting, I’ve learned that narrative design requires:
- Structuring emotional progression over time
- Designing how meaning unfolds through interaction
- Translating abstract systems into human experience
- Maintaining coherence across multiple possible paths
In organizations, I’ve seen similar patterns.
A leadership decision is never just a decision. It becomes:
- a chain reaction
- a shift in behavior
- a redefinition of identity
This is not far from game systems.
It is systems storytelling.
Why My Background Matters Here
In narrative medicine, the goal is not to perfect a story.
It is to understand what the story reveals about experience.
That same principle applies in game narrative design.
In both cases:
- The story is not static
- Meaning emerges through structure
- Emotion is part of design, not decoration
When I began to see this overlap, I stopped thinking of gaming as a separate industry.
I started seeing it as another expression of narrative systems thinking.
