This study will examine how branded games in the LEGO Ninjago franchise communicate the brand narrative through their mechanical, semiotic and referential design. Digital games as communicative tools facilitate a new paradigm of marketing focusing on experience creation through integrated marketing communication plans. The LEGO brand creates highly successful games that communicate the brand effectively. To explore the possibilities and counteract the simplistic use of branded games, this study introduces an innovative framework to formally analyze branded games and their communication of a brand narrative through mechanical, semiotic and referential layers. This framework introduces formal game design to advertising studies, while dragging game studies into branded ecosystems. Using the framework, we analyze LEGO Ninjago the Movie – The Videogame, to identify how this paid digital game expands the Ninjago universe and fulfills specific marketing purposes oriented to LEGO toy sets. Our analysis shows that on a mechanical and semiotic layer, the game presents a standalone experience catering to the universe of the Ninjago movie and the values of the Ninjago brand narrative. However, by framing the whole game as LEGO – in its materiality and interactable objects – the LEGO brand narrative of creative construction informs the act of play. The referential design in these games makes use of playful disruption of rules to instill additive comprehension in the player related to purchasable sets and content.
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The entertainment games industry is still in its early years regarding storytelling, and the field of 'narrative design' is a growing area of attention for students, professionals, and researchers. Like many forms of 20th century media, games use many forms of communication beyond the written word to tell their stories, but they also explicitly centre on the audience's power to interact with the world. This talk gives a brief overview of a narrative designer's toolbox which has previously been shared by Prof. Haggis-Burridge at entertainment industry conferences.
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A research theme examining story structure (linear, branching, and procedural), narrative design, and writing for video games.
In 2007 at Ropecon, a large Finnish roleplaying convention, Emily Care Boss coined the term bleed to refer to emotional transference that sometimes happened to players of roleplaying games. Bleed describes an effect where emotions and attitudes experienced while roleplaying a character continue on after the roleplaying session was over, or the other way around, where a player brings their own feelings into the character they are embodying. For example, a player would roleplay a romance with another player's character, and then develop feelings for said player after the game was over. Bleed can create powerful effects in a roleplaying session, both positive and negative, which has resulted in the development of various best practices and safety tools that analogue game designers can draw upon, and roleplaying games frequently have mechanics designed around inducing and maximizing particular types of bleed in their players. Bleed mechanics lend themselves particularly well to exploring queer and otherwise marginalized identities, generating empathy, and exploring acts of political resistance. They are a powerful tool in the analogue game designers’ toolbox. Digital games make comparatively far less use of bleed in their designs than analogue games—the concept of bleed is not well-known among digital game designers. Consequently, there is little guidance for designing digital bleed mechanics, and insufficient safety tools with which to do so. With how powerful these effects can be, the knowledge and tools gaps for digital games needs addressing. This research project will create primarily digital narrative games that are explicitly designed to invoke bleed, and seeks to provide designers with new frameworks and safety tools to create bleed effects for digital games. Games will be created with varying themes and approaches regarding identity and storytelling to explore how, in particular, narrative design influences bleed in digital games.
This is a doctoral research project on the Professional Doctorate Arts + Creative pilot scheme. The project studies design and safety tools around 'bleed', a term used in roleplaying game spaces to describe emotions from a roleplaying session affecting the player outside of the game (and viceversa). Bleed design will be applied to the production of digital narrative games.
