Narrative is often thought of as a string or sequence of events in time: a linear progression from beginning to end. What this purely temporal conception overlooks, however, is the imaginary space opened up and generated by a story’s narration. Through techniques like detailed description, and a focus on world rather than sequence, narrative may give way to narrativity. A possibility space for action and meaning unfolds, where the world itself and its spatial arrangement isn’t beholden to direct linearity, but rather allows the reader to resonate with the environment of an imagined world.

At the 2026 Symposium in Environmental Storytelling, these conceptions of narrative as possibility space were some of the primary concerns. Keynote speaker Austin Walker, a game designer and critic, opened up the two-panel symposium with his talk, “The Body is the World and the World is the Body.” Walker described the essential conjoinment of space and action, wherein the abilities of the body and the space of the world are synthesized into our experience of narrative.

In the specific case of videogames, Walker highlighted a game like Titanfall 2, where the game’s core actions, such as double-jumping, wall-running, and summoning a giant robot, necessitated the design of environments that can properly facilitate these actions. A player’s abilities are taken into account by level designers, in order to craft an experience befitting the actions afforded to the player and player-character. In the medium of game design, the body and the world become mutually determining of the possibility space of narrative and action.

The symposium’s panels continued to elaborate on the intersections between spatiality and systems in regard to narrative form. Opening the first panel, Erick Verran presented his work on the game Crow Country, “Amusing Ourselves to Death in the Survival Horror Theme Park,” where he interrogated the hyperreality of the game’s virtual theme park, with games inside of games that both suspend and reinforce a kind of verisimilitude. Following Verran, Jose Zagal presented his investigation of, “Why Do Sports Videogames Have Referees?” detailing the many examples of the seeming redundancy of referees in sports videogames, where the system of game code already acts as a kind of law that delimits the possibility space. Clay Grubbs concluded the first panel with “Technomasculinity and Simulation in Metal Gear Solid 2” which focused on the intersections between hypermasculine action-games and the structure of simulacra in the game’s protagonist, Raiden, an insecure techno-soldier trained solely with VR simulations.

The second panel began with Alf Seegert's presentation, “Laying Bare the Device: Forced Perspective in Videogames” where he investigated different uses of perspectival techniques in games that literalize the player’s point of view into a mechanical reality, akin to paintings by M.C. Escher. Saxton Nelson followed Seegert with “‘Who chose this face for me?’: Reading Joyce Through Videogame Narrative Forms” which extrapolated the intersections between Joycian literary devices and often unquestioned generic tropes in games, such as character

creators and visual parallax. Ending the second panel and symposium was Justin Carpenter, with his presentation, “Tropes of Storyworld Formation in the Outer Wilds Ventures Museum” which connected techniques used to initiate the player into the game Outer Wilds’s simulated solar-system with techniques central to all kinds of narration and storyworld generation, revealing a fundamental congruence between game systems and storytelling traditions.

Across the varieties of presentations, the alignment between body and world, narrative and space, and the way in which our lived and recounted experiences are thoroughly shaped by, as well as capable of shaping, the world and systems around us was on clear display. Through the investigation of environmental storytelling, this symposium offered a wonderful space for those in attendance to consider the ways in which story is, and has been, so thoroughly bound up with place. With the forthcoming Tanner Lab in Environmental Storytelling, a modular physical space available to rapidly prototype and experiment with constructing spatialized narratives, these theoretical concerns will be able to find direct application in practice. The Tanner Lab will afford interested researchers and students the ability to continue to experiment, think about, and play with space, and will no doubt lead to new ways of seeing the body in the world.

Clay Grubbs
MA student in Video Games Narrative and Aesthetics, Department of English

Views expressed in Tanner Humanities Center events do not reflect the official views of the Center, its supporters, or the University of Utah.