Comparing Narrative Elements in Games: Lessons for Learning Design

 As I work toward designing my own narrative learning game, I’ve been exploring how different games tell stories and teach through their mechanics. For this round, I focused on my mentor game, Egypt: Old Kingdom, and two shorter titles: Spent and Gods Will Be Watching. All three approach narrative in unique ways, and looking at them side by side helped me understand how interactive stories can support meaningful learning.

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Egypt: Old Kingdom – History Through Systems

My mentor game is a historical strategy sim where you guide Egypt from small tribes to a thriving kingdom. Its narrative doesn’t unfold through cutscenes or dialogue; instead, it emerges from systems and events. Famine, flood cycles, and technological advances appear as choices and consequences that shape your kingdom’s fate.

Playing for several hours, I noticed how the story of Egypt’s growth is told through each decision: where to build, when to expand, and how to balance religion, culture, and survival. I felt immersed not just as a player, but as a pharaoh responsible for a people. That perspective aligned perfectly with my course readings on how games can create identity and agency for learners.

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Spent – Building Empathy Through Hard Choices

Spent is a very different experience. It’s a simple, browser-based game that gives you $1,000 and challenges you to survive one month while paying bills, buying food, and making difficult personal choices. Every decision—skipping a doctor visit, taking a risky job, or denying your child a treat—hits hard because you see its immediate consequences.

The narrative is minimal, delivered as text prompts, but the emotional impact is strong. I finished my first run with less than $50 left, and it felt like a gut punch. The game succeeds because it teaches empathy: it lets you feel a fraction of the stress faced by people living on the edge of poverty.

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Gods Will Be Watching – Dilemmas and Tension

Gods Will Be Watching sits somewhere between the other two games. It’s a
minimalist point-and-click adventure where each chapter places you in extreme situations—negotiating with hostages, rationing supplies, surviving torture. Success depends on balancing survival, ethics, and time pressure.

I appreciated how the game used moral dilemmas to keep me engaged. In one scenario, I had to decide whether to give precious rations to a sick teammate or save them for the group. The tension was palpable because there wasn’t a single “right” answer. That feeling connects to what my coursework calls “productive failure”: struggling through complex choices to build understanding.

[Insert Figure 3: Screenshot of a survival scene in Gods Will Be Watching]

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Cross-Comparison and Accessibility

Looking across these titles, I found three narrative elements present in all of them:

1. Player agency – The ability to make meaningful decisions.

2. Conflict – A challenge or problem that drives the story forward.

3. Consequences – Feedback that reinforces the stakes of each choice.

Yet their methods differ. Egypt builds narrative through systemic growth, Spent uses sharp life events, and Gods Will Be Watching thrives on moral ambiguity.

Accessibility also varied. Spent scored highest in my Level 1 metric: it’s web-based, clear, and can be played with just a mouse. Egypt offers adjustable text but is more complex. Gods is the least accessible because of small text and strict timers, which could make it hard for players with low vision or motor challenges.

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Lessons for My Game Design

Studying these games taught me that narrative learning doesn’t require walls of text. Story can emerge through mechanics, stakes, and feedback. For my own project—currently titled Final Cut: A Media Lab Story—I want to combine the agency and systems of Egypt, the empathy of Spent, and the decision tension of Gods Will Be Watching.

My goal is to create a short simulation where students direct a small film crew, balancing time, resources, and morale to finish a project before a deadline. Seeing how these games use narrative to teach made me more confident that learning and storytelling can be seamlessly woven together.

Read more about my developing project here: [The Quest Log: Gaming for Learning & Fun: Designing Final Cut: A Media Lab Story – Bringing Learning into Narrative]