GDC 2006.

The title is twenty years old. The craft is much older. The original tabletop role-playing movement: James M. Ward, E. Gary Gygax Jr., Kimber Eastland (a game designer and playwright who authored many supplements and adventure modules for TSR), and their generation: was practicing world-building and story-system design decades before the games industry had a word for the job. They built worlds a table of strangers could inhabit together, and wrote the rules that let a story emerge from play rather than being narrated at it, long before anyone called that work narrative design.

Dinehart absorbed the craft from their work as a child, the way other kids absorbed novels. Years later, the relationship turned professional: he contracted and worked directly alongside Ward, Gygax Jr., and Eastland, the childhood influence closing the loop into collaboration.

Call them, generously and without exclusivity, among the first narrative designers: practitioners of the craft before the craft had a name. They were not alone in this. Interactive fiction writers of the same decades, working in prose rather than dice, were solving parallel problems in participatory story. Tabletop RPG design is simply the craft’s deepest root for this author, lived, personal, and formative, not the only one.

Narrative design, as it would come to be practiced, is what happened when that RPG world-craft met transmedia theory.

The games industry in 2006 was having an identity crisis about story. On one side: the belief that games were fundamentally about mechanics, and narrative was a luxury, nice to have, not essential. On the other: a growing recognition that the most memorable games were the ones where story and play were inseparable. But there was no vocabulary for the work that made this integration happen. No title. No discipline. No professional identity.

The transmedia side of that equation traces to Detroit, 2002. Dinehart was teaching at the College for Creative Studies at the time when he found Packer and Jordan’s anthology Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, a collection tracing the lineage of immersive, total-artwork media back to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. One chapter stopped him: Scott Fisher’s account of his VR and dataspace research at NASA Ames. It was compelling enough that Dinehart applied to the new Interactive Media program Fisher was building at USC’s School of Cinema-Television. The anthology tracing the immersive lineage back to Wagner’s total artwork is, quite literally, what pulled him into it.

Years later, Dinehart was completing that MFA at what had by then become the USC School of Cinematic Arts, studying under transmedia scholar Marsha Kinder and Scott Fisher himself. His work at USC had been focused on the intersection of dramatic theory and interactive systems, the question of how classical storytelling principles could be adapted, not just applied, to participatory media.

At GDC that spring, in conversation with developers, designers, and writers who were all grappling with the same unnamed problem, the discussion began. The need for a dedicated story-systems role was clear. Initially, the working title was Narrative Director.

But over the weeks that followed, the title was refined. By May 2006, the team had settled on Narrative Designer: designer, not director. The distinction was deliberate: this was not a role about commanding a vision from above. It was about designing systems from within. The word “designer” placed the work where it belonged, in the architecture of the experience itself.

It was not a marketing invention. It was a recognition. The work already existed. It simply lacked a name.

Shortly after GDC, Dinehart joined THQ/Relic Entertainment as the first person in the games industry to hold the professional title of Narrative Designer. The studio was developing Company of Heroes, an RTS that would go on to become one of the most acclaimed strategy games ever made.

The role was new. There was no precedent, no existing job description, no established workflow. Everything had to be built from first principles:

• How does a narrative designer integrate with a game design team?
• What authority does the role have over mechanical decisions?
• How do you document narrative systems (not just narrative content)?
• What does the deliverable look like?
• How do you measure success?

These questions, and their answers, worked out in practice over months of development, became the foundation of the discipline.

Commentary: What This Document Reveals

Reading this twenty years later, several things stand out. First: the breadth. This is not a writing role. It spans lore, world building, quest design, scripting, cinematics, voice direction, sound design, community strategy, and cross-media content rollout. The original vision for narrative design was always integration across the entire production, not a content silo.

Second: the emphasis on collaboration. The word “collaborate” appears five times. “Work with” appears four more. This was never conceived as a solo role. It was conceived as a bridge: the person who connects art, design, engineering, audio, and writing into a coherent narrative whole.

Third: the requirement for both creative and technical fluency. “Scripting game logic.” “Using game editors and scripting systems.” “Understanding of the theory of game design including the use of sound, animation, graphics and special effects software.” The narrative designer was never meant to be someone who only writes. They were meant to build.

What the document could not have anticipated: the scale of the discipline’s expansion into themed entertainment, VR, AI, conversational design, and interactive media beyond games. The original description was written for game development. The discipline outgrew its origin, but the core principles held.

What Changed Since