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Parallel: authorial intent in a self-reflective narrative game

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Parallel: authorial intent in a self-reflective narrative game

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PARALLEL:

AUTHORIAL INTENT IN A SELF-REFLECTIVE NARRATIVE GAME

by

Bonnie Harris-Lowe

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
INTERACTIVE MEDIA & GAMES DIVISION

May 2020

Copyright 2020 Bonnie Harris-Lowe
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables.................................................................................................................................. iii
List of Figures................................................................................................................................. iv
Abstract............................................................................................................................................ v
Introduction...................................................................................................................................... 1
Process............................................................................................................................................. 3
Lessons............................................................................................................................................. 5
Reflection....................................................................................................................................... 11
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................... 14
Works Cited................................................................................................................................... 15

iii

List of Tables
Table 1: Response breakdown for narrative playtest questionnaire.................................................6
Table 1: Progression of Nohla's hair rendering................................................................................9

iv

List of Figures
Figure 1: Concept art for Nohla Maskwell by Devon Gadzinski.....................................................7
Figure 2: Concept art for Nohla Maskwell by Saife Hussein...........................................................8
Figure 3: Final 2D concept art and first concept 3D model for Nohla.............................................8
Figure 4: Arc of the player's experience vs. arc of Nohla's experience..........................................11

v

Abstract
At once a postpartum and an analysis, this paper examines the production of Parallel, a
game about a woman exploring the multiverse to find her family. It dissects experiences both
personal and professional that guided the production process with emphasis on the issues of
authorial intent and storytelling as a vehicle for change. With references to Dennis Patterson’s
analysis of authorial intent in law as well as Carly Kocurek and Antoinette Wilson’s
investigations of storytelling in narrative focused video games and educational settings,
respectively, this thesis takes a varied approach to understanding the purpose of synthesizing
one’s personal experiences to create a video game.

1

Introduction
The predominant coming of age narrative is one of teenagers going on indulgent
adventures in an effort to truly “live” before succumbing to the brutal uniformity of adult life.
There is a prevailing sense that this moment in adolescence is the time when people figure out
who they are and then they are solidified for the rest of their lives. What is less prevalent in pop
culture, perhaps for its comparative lack of romance or its recent surge in ubiquity, is the coming
of age that occurs in early adulthood. While the adolescent’s coming of age is depicted through
risk taking experiences including experimentation with substances and sexuality, in my
experience, and that of many others in my age group, the young adult’s coming of age is equally
internal as it is external. We venture into a turbulent world with varying degrees of self-
assuredness and readiness to tackle the myriad of obstacles laid out before us. In taking on these
challenges, we discover new things about ourselves and in turn experience shifts, sometimes
dramatic ones, in our relationships. My journey has frequently been defined by such dramatic
incidents, often forcing me to change in ways I didn’t want to or wasn’t ready for as I coped with
the reality that the world was calling out to me, and it was time for me to answer.
Thus, Parallel was born. Parallel is a 3D action platformer about a woman exploring the
multiverse to find her family. Beneath its sci-fi surface, this game is a story about loss, family,
friendship, and resistance standing squarely in the heart of this defining moment of my life. As a
young woman in the uncomfortable early stages of adulthood during a time of global socio-
political unrest, upheaval of my family dynamic has coincided with the frightening uncertainty of
our collective future. Parallel imagines a world where stability similarly does not exist for the
protagonist, Nohla Maskwell. She is a woman for whom stability has never been an option: when
she was a child, her parents were kidnapped by an evil organization hellbent on using the
2

Maskwells’ technology to conquer the multiverse. Determined to rescue them, a young Nohla
used one of their inventions to set out on a journey across spacetime and all its potential realities.
Parallel takes place twenty years after this incident, when Nohla has had time to adjust to her
unstable life and learned to thrive in it. As a person, Nohla represents my hope that I too will be
able to rise above the adversity threatening to upset every aspect of my entrance into adulthood.
As an artist, she is my hope for the world to do the same. I do not believe that the challenges in
my life are unique; in fact, I expect the opposite. However, this tension between an uncertain
family and an uncertain world coinciding is something that previous generations in living
memory have not dealt with at the same scale. For millennials like myself, finding the strength to
persevere in a world threatening to swallow us is a daily struggle. My goal in creating Parallel is
to give millennial gamers a mirror in which to see their struggles reflected and rewarded. It is to
assert that we can find our strength despite our challenges, just as Nohla has done, and save
ourselves and each other.
As I near completion of the project, the question of authorial intent vs. audience
interpretation looms large. What meanings will my players project onto the worlds and
relationships that I developed with specific purposes in mind? In truth, while Parallel is inspired
and deeply influenced by my personal experiences, I want players to find themselves within its
world. But will they see themselves in the ways that I have designed for? Will they see
themselves at all? I will address these questions and others with the insights of research on the
subjects of authorial intent, storytelling as a mode of affecting change, and the effects that
narrative driven games have on players. In keeping with the theme of this game, though, I must
first examine myself internally as well as the production process before delving into the game’s
broader implications.
3

Process
In fall 2018, I enrolled in Maureen Yeager’s Advanced Storytelling for Interactive Media
class. Our first assignment was to write a short story with a recognizable game mechanic. For
this assignment, I wrote Blink, which would later become Parallel. In the original story, the
protagonist had the innate ability to travel across dimensions by simply blinking, but she had no
control over it. An organization called The Collective had been monitoring her for a potential
mentorship in their ranks. They offered her a position, which she refused after realizing that The
Collective was in fact hunting people with her abilities, but she was apprehended by them
regardless. During her imprisonment, the leaders of The Collective came to her to explain the
situation. It was then revealed that the leaders were her parents who disappeared when she was a
child and had been looking for her ever since.
While quite different from the final result, the authorial intent of Blink merits further
review. Patterson (1989) attempts to divine the true purpose of “authorial intent” by comparing
two conflicting schools of thought, one deeming that “to search after the “real intentions” of an
author was to chase ghosts,” the other asserting that “[w]hat a text means and what its author
intends it to mean are identical.” At the time that Blink was written, my intent with the story’s
symbolism was nearly identical to the aforementioned goals of Parallel. However, Blink arose
from a much more painful state of being. The realization that my future was entirely in my
hands, yet the future of the world was beyond them, was still new and terrifying. Tensions
between my family and I had recently risen to such a peak that I was unsure if my future would
include them. In my anger and hurt, my parents became the face of the evil Collective, intent on
destroying the girl who was caught between infinite worlds, infinite possibilities, realities of
darkness and light--me. My intent at the time was to make sense of our fraught relationship and
4

to blame them for further throwing off my balance in these turbulent times. Yet even that first
story portrayed them as two equally hurt people who had been coerced into their roles.
Looking back, I’m not sure if I consciously realized that all three of us were in pain or
that I had written that reality, but I must have known that there was more to be learned from this
story. With Maureen’s permission, I spent the rest of the semester rewriting this narrative in
different formats, constantly getting feedback on each iteration until I could understand its full
potential. From a short story, Blink evolved into a screenplay, two twine games, and ultimately
culminated in a web-based alternate reality game. Over the course of the semester, I learned
more about who Nohla and her parents were, the Collective’s motivations, and the worlds in
which the game took place. By the end of it, I thought I had learned everything there was to
know about this story. In fact, when it came time to choose a thesis project, I actively avoided
pursuing Parallel any further; it was too personal, too big, too risky to work. But none of my
other concepts had such a unique and potent blend of my design philosophies and my heart, and
eventually I realized that Parallel was the only thing that could be my thesis, my one chance to
make what I want, tell my own story, create without limits. I decided that while risky and
ambitious, it was also completely necessary to use this opportunity for something that held deep
personal significance and to explore what that meant for me as a designer.
Wilson (2019) discusses the role of storytelling as a vehicle for guiding institutional
change in schools. She concludes that storytelling is an empowering, reinvigorating experience
that inspires greater commitment to change in the workplace. I believe storytelling is similarly
useful as a means of facilitating individual change. As much as this story is about my personal
growth, as I began to adapt the concept into a game, I shifted towards relaying representations of
my experiences in a way that felt grounded and universal despite the fantasy of travelling
5

through the multiverse. Having had plenty of time to explore myself through writing the stories
that led to Parallel, I wanted to grow the narrative into something that could be felt on as deep a
level for other people dealing with the complexities of human relationships in an uncertain world
like I was (and to some extent, still am). Synthesizing the universal from the personal is
something that I feel called to do as an artist, but as a game designer, this means placing power
in the hands of others, allowing the personal to be molded by the thoughts and feelings of others
while guiding it so that its core remains intact.
Lessons
My first experience with this tension came early on when deciding on the narrative
structure of the game. Over the course of several iterations, I had come up with three
possibilities:
1. Nohla would have a pseudo-companion comprised of memories of her parents. She
would talk to herself as a means of communicating with them and making sense of their
lives.
2. Nohla would travel through the game with her friend and companion, Axel, guiding her
remotely. They would talk about Nohla’s parents, but the parents would not have a
presence in the game until the end.
3. Axel would still be Nohla’s companion, but Nohla would also find research logs recorded
by her parents during her childhood giving her a vehicle to explore her feelings about
them.

Since the story of Nohla’s family is the central theme of the game, I worried about it
becoming lost in the shuffle or not resonating appropriately if their presence (or absence) was
muddled by the additional relationship between Nohla and Axel. With the help of other writers
on my team, I conducted a playtest of the narrative; I wrote three sample scripts of the same
gameplay scenario using each of the options above and took a poll gauging people’s
understanding of the scene and their emotional response to the characters and story. The results
were as follows:
6

Key: Which draft made you feel the strongest
connection to the main character?
Which draft made you reflect the MOST on
people and events in your life?
In which draft did you feel you had the BEST
understanding of the overarching narrative?
In which draft did you feel you had the BEST
understanding of the scene?

Which draft do you think worked BEST with
the introductory cutscene?
Table 2: Response breakdown for narrative playtest questionnaire

Frankly speaking, I was shocked to see that option three surpassed the other two choices,
particularly my favorite, option one, by such a large margin. However, this was a good wakeup
call for me to have so early in the project. I would classify myself as a writer and narrative
designer above all other things, so this was the hardest decision for me to be flexible with when
7

my opinion was challenged. Ultimately, though, putting my ego aside and trusting my audience’s
feelings about the piece of the game I felt most knowledgeable and personally attached to gave
me the strength I needed to trust that even if not every part of my project fit my original visions,
as long as I collaborated openly with my team, it would be something that fulfilled my core goal
of becoming a personal and emotionally resonant experience.
At the same time, there were certain things that I could not compromise on. While the
main goal of my thesis was to create a specific experience, the secondary goal was to showcase
diverse characters in a story driven action game. From the beginning I was adamant that Nohla, a
Black woman, should have a natural hair texture, as this is something that’s frequently absent
from even the most robust character creation systems in games. As a Black woman myself and
understanding the special relationship between Black women and hair (which could be a thesis in
itself), I felt a responsibility to give Nohla’s hair the love and care it deserved to look real. The
general shape of her hair went through several concepts:
Figure 1: Concept art for Nohla Maskwell by Devon Gadzinski
8

The goal was to come up with a style that allowed her curly texture to shine but remained
practical for the high intensity movement of the game without requiring extra animation. Once
we settled on a look, the challenge proved to be creating a model that worked well in Unity.

Figure 3: Final 2D concept art and first concept 3D model for Nohla.
Figure 2: Concept art for Nohla Maskwell by Saife Hussein
9

Once character rigging and remodelling were complete, character artist Vanessa Torres
used ZBrush to generate a high-Poly fibermesh of Nohla’s hair to create hair cards, and then
textured them in Substance painter.

Hair base

Low resolution render

High resolution render

Final product
Table 3: Progression of Nohla's hair rendering

10

It took Vanessa about a month to fully render Nohla’s hair. While this may seem like too
long of a time to dedicate to such a small part of a character model, it was a huge part of her
identity that we were determined to do justice. By dedicating plenty of time to this task from the
beginning of production, we managed to come to a beautiful final product without having to
scramble to get other work done. Had we not foreseen the difficulty and time consumption of
this task, though, it easily could have gotten away from us and hurt the game in the end. While
the narrative playtest taught me to trust others, creating Nohla taught me the importance of
refusing to sacrifice things I believed to be truly crucial to my vision and the necessity of
planning ahead in order to keep the most important things in the game without sacrificing the
overall integrity of the project.
Through all of the challenges I faced and lessons I learned, I had to consistently remind
myself what this project was about: I was creating a fantastical microcosm of myself by distilling
a complex, confusing, and painful moment in my life into something that looked and felt bigger.
But as I worked toward making Parallel a reality, I was working on myself too; I was healing.
Over the course of the last year, my relationships with the people who inspired these characters,
myself included, have changed in unexpected ways, some for the worse, but more for the better.
In the middle of production, I found that I simply wasn’t so wounded anymore—or at least, I had
moved beyond the wounds that inspired the original story. I reject the notion that good art only
comes from pain, but it can be difficult to write about pain when you’re no longer in it. For a
long time, Parallel’s narrative was stuck in limbo; we were writing, but nothing felt quite right.
At first I attributed this loss of direction to my recovery and genuinely wondered how I would
finish this story without tapping into those memories in ways that harmed me. In actuality, it was
the opposite that saved my story. When we came back after winter break, I went to my
11

whiteboard and thought about questions that I had received from professor Tracy Fullerton a
month before: she had asked me what the arc of the player’s experience vs. Nohla’s experience
was in Parallel, which was something that I had not considered. For four hours I worked to
produce a detailed breakdown of each of these experiences and their relationship to each other;
after that, the narrative of Parallel became exponentially clearer and the pieces started to fall into
place. After spending a restful month at home with my family, I was able to synthesize a story
breakdown that gave Nohla more direction, Axel more purpose outside of a sidekcik role, and
Nohla’s parents more intrigue. In turn, my writer was able to capture their voices better than ever
before. This is something I doubt I would have been able to do so efficiently had I remained the
same as I was when I wrote Blink. In writing a story about a character who was relentlessly
capable despite her trauma, I found my own capability as I recovered.

Figure 4: Arc of the player's experience vs. arc of Nohla's experience
12

Reflection
Kocurek (2018) asserts that “effective narrative immersion can offer...counsel, or
wisdom, by refusing to provide pat answers or neat conclusions.” There are no neat answers in
Parallel by its nature. Its themes of coming of age in unstable times, changing family dynamics,
and doing your best to fight against forces you barely comprehend do not lend themselves to
prettily wrapped endings. By embracing this, I have intentionally refused to provide clear
answers to many of the questions that Parallel asks: though she’s won this battle, does Nohla
ultimately defeat the Collective? How does Nohla and Axel’s friendship change in light of his
betrayal and her harshness? Though the Maskwell family has begun to reconcile, will they ever
recover? The ending of the game begins to address these questions, but leaves plenty of room for
players to imagine their own outcomes. Rather than counsel players by telling them what should
happen in a story meant to reflect their feelings and experiences, I focused on creating an
experience that is emotionally satisfying and allows players to take what they need. While my
intent was to use this strategy as a means to offer wisdom to others who would play Parallel, I
have benefitted from it immensely as well.
“To tell a story, then, is not merely to tell what happened but to offer a means of making
sense of it,” Kocurek goes on to say. Creating this game has taught me much about myself: who I
am as a leader, a friend, and a daughter. I have changed and grown alongside this project and
ultimately come to understand myself and my loved ones better through it (coincidentally
fulfilling the original intent of Blink). In doing so, I have been able to make some sense of the
events in my life that generated this idea while developing wisdom, both emotional and practical,
that will last beyond the scope of this project. While I did not accomplish each and every thing
13

that I set out to do with Parallel, I will carry the lessons that this process has taught me into
future endeavors with confidence that I lacked before.

14

Conclusion
Storytelling is “a non-threatening self-reflective tool that motivates change” (Kitchell et.
All, 2000, as cited by Wilson, 2019). When this process began, I set out to to create a game that
would motivate change in others dealing with problems similar to the ones I was facing in my
life. At the time of this writing, I have not had the opportunity to exhibit or extensively playtest
Parallel so I cannot say definitively whether this endeavor was successful. Returning to the
question of authorial intent vs. audience interpretation, it is entirely possible that once Parallel is
properly shown, my intent as the author to create a game that would help people feel seen in their
struggles and feel strong in spite of them may remain invisible to a larger audience. However,
given the positive feedback from the intial narrative playtest, I am optimistic that players will be
able to have a powerful reflective experience with the finished game. As much as I tried to create
this experience for others, I was creating it for myself just as much. Telling this story changed
me in ways I didn’t think were possible; it gradually opened my heart and mind to seeing my
experiences and people in my life in new lights. By confronting the design challenge of creating
from a deeply personal place, I was able to create something both engaging and healing. I can
consider my goals fulfilled knowing that I am better for having made Parallel.

15

WORKS CITED
Kocurek, C. A. (2018). Walter Benjamin on the Video Screen: Storytelling and Game Narratives.
Arts, 7(4), 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7040069
Patterson, D. M. (1989). Authorial Intent and Hermeneutics. Canadian Journal of Law and
Jurisprudence, 2(1), 79–84.
Wilson, A. (2019). The role of storytelling in navigating through the storm of change | Emerald
Insight. Journal of Organizational Change Management. Retrieved September 25, 2019,
from https://www-emerald-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JOCM-
12-2018-0343/full/html

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Asset Metadata

Creator Harris-Lowe, Bonnie Olivia EthelMae (author)

Core Title Parallel: authorial intent in a self-reflective narrative game

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/21/2020

Defense Date 04/22/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag authorial,Games,intent,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,parallel,reflective,self,Storytelling,video

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wixon, Dennis (committee chair), Fullerton, Tracy (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member)

Creator Email bharrisl@usc.edu,bonnie.harris.lowe@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-284100

Unique identifier UC11674936

Identifier etd-HarrisLowe-8296.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-284100 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HarrisLowe-8296.pdf

Dmrecord 284100

Document Type Thesis

Rights Harris-Lowe, Bonnie Olivia EthelMae

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA