There seems to be people out in cyberspace that think the Narrative
Designer position in games is simply a mislabeled writer. This
assumption is entirely false. While writing is a practice that is integral to interactive narrative
design, developing interactive narrative systems is something that is
clearly beyond the scope of a writer by any definition. It is like the
craft of cinematography in film, in that interactive narrative systems
are the conduit through which written content is delivered to the VUP. 
Via a sort of synesthesia in which narremes presented as audio, visual,
and gameplay stimuli are cognitively ingested by the VUP rendering a
legible narrative. The quality of the narrative rendered will vary on
the quality of the story as written, and the success of the narrative
delivery systems. Which, again like the best cinematography, is
transparent to it’s participatory audience.

Interactive Narrative Design is a craft which has it’s roots in the philosophy outlined in Richard Wagner’s essay The Artwork of the Future, Pen-and-paper Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons, and the experimental works of groups like the Labyrinth Project. Wagner’s ideas began the revolutionary
idea of removing the “fourth wall” and involving the audience
in the play. I ask you to again look at that sentence, but to think of the word play
as a signifier for interacting with video games rather than a sequence
of stage craft. Play is the method by which the audience is invited to
participate and author within an interactive storyspace or video game.
Therein the audience member becomes a player, or actor, in the video
game or play.

“Thus the spectator
transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and
aural faculties…forgets the confines of the auditorium and lives and
breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it [the participatory
audience] as life itself and on the stage which seems the wide expanse
of the whole World.” Wagner [3] Building from this
legacy video games are now the newest territory for the experimental
craft of Interactive Narrative Design, or the future art, to spread it wings. Now is the time of the Gesamtkunstwerk
[Total Artwork] which Wagner so elegantly described, that future
artwork is modern video games. While I’m sure that term will die when
another better signifier emerges, the story of video games lives and
breaths through Interactive Narrative Design, the blended craft of
fiction and play design which is surely producing one of the most
innovative Arts of the digital age.

1. Lev Manovich. Database as symbolic Form. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2001.
2. Stephen Dinehart, Defining Narrative Design, The Narrative Design Exploratorium 2008
3. Richard Wager, The Artwork of the Future 1849