Home > Embedded and Emergent: A Framework for Game Narrative Analysis

On day 5 of my work as an immigration inspector in Papers, Please a man enters my booth. The man—Pyotr Vostok—has all his papers in order. I stamp his passport clearing him for entry, and he continues, saying "Thank you so much! Please be kind to my wife, she is just after me" (Papers, Please). His wife Katya then enters the booth, who unlike her husband is missing an entry permit, which the rules require. When I interrogate her for it, she pleads with me: "Please, I beg you. They would not give me permit. I have no choice. I will be killed if I return to Antegria" (Papers, Please).

This brings up a number of considerations racing through my mind: What will happen if I don't let her through? Will she die, or is she manipulating me? If I approve her anyway, I'll receive a citation, which is five credits I can't afford to lose when my family is already struggling. Do I separate the couple? Do I risk my family's wellbeing for a stranger's claim I cannot verify?

This moment is difficult to categorize: Is the narrative in the scripted encounter itself, or in my choice and its consequences? Is it embedded in Pope's design, or does it emerge through my playing? Creator Lucas Pope designed this moral dilemma, but the story of my deliberation, my financial desperation shaping my decision, my interpretation of Katya's truthfulness, and my guilt or justification afterward emerge through my act of playing.

What's needed is an approach that examines both dimensions simultaneously and, crucially, how they interact. We must examine both embedded narrative (authored content within the game) and emergent narrative (story created through play). Different games distribute narrative weight differently across this spectrum—from Tetris, where narrative exists purely in the player's emergent experience of rising tension and failure, to Gone Home, which tells a authored story about a family but requires the player to enact discovery by exploring the house, to a balance of both in Papers, Please. Rather than seeing games as either authored stories or systemic experiences, we should understand them as existing on a spectrum between these poles, deploying different combinations of designed content and systemic possibility. This means analysis must look in two places at once: at what designers create and at what players generate through play.

Existing frameworks struggle with situations like these because they privilege one dimension over the other. A purely embedded analysis focuses on Pope's authored content, but this approach misses the personal moral story I create through play. Conversely, a purely emergent analysis examines my decision-making process and my systemic choices, but this ignores the crafted narrative context that gives those choices meaning. Without Pope's setup of Pyotr's validity establishing credibility, Katya's plea, and the financial pressure system my choices would be a mechanical optimization rather than the moral reckoning that it is.

Understanding how to look in both places requires first establishing a definition of narrative. Abbott distinguishes between two fundamental components: Story refers to the events themselves that occur in the narrative world, while narrative discourse refers to how those events are presented to an audience (Abbott 15). Abbott's framework works well for literary works, but it assumes a passive audience receiving a pre-constructed narrative. Games complicate this model because players can influence both the story (what events occur) and the discourse (how they unfold).

However, Abbott's vocabulary remains valuable. The story versus discourse distinction still exists in games, but we must ask: where is the narrative located? In Papers, Please, there is embedded story (the Arstotzkan border crisis, EZIC's conspiracy, Katya Vostok's plea) presented through embedded discourse (the inspection booth interface, daily shifts, document systems). But there is also an emergent story (my moral degradation, my specific choices about whom to admit) presented through discourse (the pacing I choose, where I direct my attention, how I structure my own experience). Abbott gives us the framework to understand narrative structure, but analyzing games requires recognizing that both story and discourse can be either authored by designers or generated by players. This expansion of Abbott's framework allows us to analyze narrative structure while accounting for interactivity, but it raises a fundamental question: What makes games different from traditional narratives in the first place?

Espen Aarseth provides language for what makes games fundamentally different from novels or films: They are "ergodic" texts that require "nontrivial effort" to traverse (Aarseth 1). Unlike reading a book where you simply turn pages, playing a game demands work—you must make choices, navigate spaces, solve problems. This effort is what separates interactive from passive media. However, Aarseth suggests that games must offer multiple paths (be "multicursal") to truly count as ergodic (Aarseth 6). This requirement is too narrow. Even games with largely linear paths like Gone Home, where you simply explore a house, involve meaningful ergodic effort through navigational choices, pacing decisions, and attentional focus. What matters is that the narrative must be enacted by the player, not that every choice branches the story. Games can be largely predetermined and still require the active traversal that defines them as games. The key is enactment, not branching.

Henry Jenkins reframes how we should think about game narratives, arguing that stories in games emerge from player interaction with designed environments rather than being directly told (Jenkins 10). Game designers act as "narrative architects" who build spaces and systems that enable stories to emerge (Jenkins 4). Jenkins identifies four qualities of game narrative: Evocative spaces that reference other stories, enacted stories where players perform narrative actions, embedded narratives conveyed through environmental storytelling, and emergent narratives that are generated through play (Jenkins). Jenkins' framework is valuable, particularly his distinction between embedded and emergent narrative. However, rather than treating these as distinct categories alongside evocative and enacted qualities, I argue that embedded and emergent function as two ends of a spectrum. Games deploy different combinations of these dimensions. Papers, Please contains heavily embedded content like scripted encounters and designed political context, alongside an emergent story created through my moral trajectory. Games can fall anywhere along this spectrum between fully authored and systemically generated narrative.

Janet Murray identifies four properties that define digital media. Games are procedural, meaning they use rule-based systems that generate outcomes; spatial, meaning they create navigable environments; participatory, meaning they respond to user input; and encyclopedic, meaning they can store and retrieve vast amounts of information (Murray 71). These affordances explain what the medium makes possible—games can simulate cause and effect through rules, create explorable worlds, respond dynamically to player actions, and contain extensive databases of content. These affordances are tools in a toolkit. Not every game must emphasize all four equally. Papers, Please relies heavily on procedural systems as its rules create moral dilemmas, and participatory input because your decisions matter, but offers minimal spatial navigation—you never leave the booth. Gone Home emphasizes spatial exploration but has limited procedural complexity. Games selectively deploy these affordances based on their narrative goals. This selective use doesn't represent failure to utilize the medium "properly," but rather demonstrates the medium's flexibility.

Counter to Aarseth's suggestion that games must be multicursal to be truly ergodic, I argue that games need not feature critical branching choices to qualify as games; even low-intensity ergodicity—navigational choices, pacing decisions, attentional focus in games like Gone Home—constitutes meaningful interaction. The medium's affordances that Murray identifies create a toolkit that designers deploy selectively, not a checklist of requirements. What unifies these diverse experiences is that narrative must be enacted by the player (even if predetermined) rather than passively received, and analysis must account for both designed content and experiential generation as well as their interplay. Games exist on a spectrum based on how they distribute narrative weight between embedded and emergent poles. What unifies these diverse experiences is that narrative must be enacted by the player rather than passively received, and analysis must examine both what designers create and what players generate, as well as how these dimensions interact to create meaning.

Applying this framework to Papers, Please requires examining both dimensions of its narrative. Beginning with the embedded narrative—the content Lucas Pope authored and designed into the game–which is substantial. Pope created the political context of Arstotzka: A fictional communist state emerging from war, sealed behind closed borders, governed by an authoritarian regime obsessed with documentation and control. He designed your family situation: A wife, son, uncle, and mother-in-law dependent on your income, with heating costs rising and illness threatening. He scripted recurring encounters: The mysterious EZIC organization offering money for rule-breaking, the persistent Jorji Costava whose papers are never quite right, and the government inspectors who test your compliance. He built the documentary evidence system itself with rules that change daily, new requirements that pile up, and stamps and citations that structure your work.

Using Abbott's framework, we can identify both story and discourse. The story includes the events of the Arstotzkan border crisis, the EZIC conspiracy attempting to overthrow the regime, your family's financial and health struggles, and the individual encounters at your booth. The discourse is how Pope presents these events: Through the daily shift structure, through the documents you inspect, through the reports you receive each evening showing your family's deteriorating condition.

The Vostok couple demonstrates how Pope embeds narrative content. When Pyotr approaches with valid papers and asks you to "be kind to my wife," Pope establishes credibility—this man followed the rules. When Katya appears without an entry permit and pleads "I will be killed if I return to Antegria," Pope provides specific information: She's Antegrian (a neighboring country), she claims persecution, she couldn't obtain proper documentation. Her desperation is visible in her dialogue's phrasing. The game has embedded this moment's narrative content through character dialogue, document discrepancies, and relationship dynamics (they're married, they'll be separated if you deny one). This connects to Jenkins' concept of "embedded" narrative, which are pre-written story elements placed within the game world for players to discover. The Vostoks' story exists whether or not you engage with it deeply; it's authored content waiting to be encountered.

Examining Papers, Please's embedded narrative reveals Pope's intentional thematic and political content. The game critiques bureaucratic systems that reduce humans to documents, showing how ordinary people become complicit in authoritarian control through their daily work. It explores how economic desperation erodes moral principles through the end-of-day reports that constantly remind you that your family suffers when you follow your conscience. Character arcs like Jorji Costava, whose persistent attempts to enter despite wrong papers shift from comic to sympathetic, and the EZIC operative's recruitment demonstrate Pope's careful narrative construction. The game's political commentary about borders, documentation as control, and how fascism infiltrates everyday life if deliberately designed into its embedded content.

The emergent narrative of Papers, Please exists nowhere in the game's code. It's the story you create through playing: the moral arc you trace across thirty-one days, the decisions that define who you become in Arstotzka, the personal meaning you construct from Pope's systems. When Katya Vostok pleads for entry, the emergent narrative begins in your deliberation: Do you believe her claim about being killed? Can you afford the five-credit citation? What kind of person are you willing to become? The game doesn't script these thoughts, instead they emerge from your engagement with the situation. Your decision generates different narrative trajectories. Approve Katya, and you've defined yourself as someone who risks personal cost for compassion (or perhaps someone susceptible to manipulation). Deny her, and you've enacted the regime's priorities over human sympathy. Deny both despite Pyotr's valid papers, and you've tried to keep the couple together, but still doomed them. Each choice creates a different story about who you are. Crucially, your choice carries different meanings depending on the situation you've created through previous play. If you're financially stable, approving Katya is a moral choice you can afford. If you're desperate from earlier citations, the same approval becomes a sacrifice that might mean your son doesn't get medicine. This is what Murray's procedural affordance enables: The rule system creates dynamic consequences that compound across time, making each choice resonate differently.

The emergent narrative extends beyond individual moments to create character arcs spanning the full game. Perhaps the Vostoks represent a turning point: "Day 5 was when I realized I couldn't save everyone. After that, I became harder." Or: "I approved Katya despite the cost, and that's when I became a resistance figure rather than a bureaucrat." These narratives exist only in your experience, and no two players trace identical moral trajectories. This is what Jenkins means by "emergent" narrative: Stories generated through play rather than authored in advance (Jenkins 13). You might play as strict enforcer, compassionate rule-breaker, or pragmatic calculator where each approach generates a different emergent narrative shaped by your pacing, attention, and interpretive choices. The power of Papers, Please lies in how these dimensions interact. The embedded narrative creates conditions for emergence. Pope's design of the Vostok encounter engineers a situation where your choices gain weight. Katya's missing permit removes ambiguity about rule-following. Her claim about being killed introduces uncertainty you cannot resolve. Pyotr's valid papers establish his credibility while simultaneously exposing how arbitrary the documentary system is. The citation penalty connects to your family through end-of-day reports. Without this scaffolding, your decision would lack moral weight. Every embedded element creates pressure points where choices generate personal narrative.

Conversely, your emergent choices recontextualize the embedded content. Approve Katya, and the evening's report showing your son's illness becomes a story about compassion's cost. Deny her, and the same report becomes a story about complicity: You chose your family over a stranger's life. The embedded content is identical, but your choices determine what story it tells. This extends to the game's political critique. Strict rule-following creates a narrative about ordinary people becoming instruments of oppression. Constant rule-breaking makes it about resistance and its limits. Pragmatic compromise makes it about moral complexity and impossible choices. Pope designed the critique, but you determine its expression.

The interplay is clearest in how the game handles complicity. The embedded narrative creates sympathy by establishing that you didn't choose this job, you need it to survive, and you're following orders. But the emergent narrative makes you actively complicit as you physically stamp each passport, you choose which documents to scrutinize, you decide who enters. You can't claim "the game made me do it" because you enacted each choice, but you also can't ignore Pope's systemic pressures. The meaning exists in this tension between embedded and emergent dimensions. The embedded content creates potential meaning; the emergent experience actualizes it; their interaction generates the game's thematic power.

This framework provides what existing frameworks cannot: A method for examining game narratives that accounts for both what designers create and what players generate, as well as how these dimensions work together. By extending Abbott's vocabulary to recognize that both story and discourse can be embedded or emergent, challenging Aarseth's requirement for multicursal branching, positioning Jenkins' embedded and emergent qualities as poles of a spectrum rather than categories, and refining Murray's affordances as a selective toolkit, this framework validates the full range of game experiences while providing a means of analysis.

Papers, Please demonstrates why this approach matters. The Vostok encounter cannot be understood through embedded analysis alone—we would miss your deliberation, your financial context, your moral trajectory. It cannot be understood through emergent analysis alone—we would miss how Pope's design gives your choices meaning. Only by examining both dimensions simultaneously, and understanding how they interact, can we grasp how the game creates its political and emotional impact. The embedded content engineers moral pressure points; the emergent experience actualizes personal complicity; their interplay generates meaning that neither dimension could produce independently.

This framework works across the spectrum of game experiences. For heavily embedded games like Gone Home, it explains why enactment matters even in linear narratives—the discourse of walking through the house, choosing what to examine, constructing understanding from fragments is emergent even when the story is authored. For balanced games like Papers, Please, it reveals how embedded and emergent narratives amplify each other. For emergence-focused games like Tetris, it clarifies that the narrative exists in your experience of play even without authored content.

What unifies these diverse experiences is the requirement for player enactment. Whether heavily authored or systemically generated, game narratives remain incomplete until played. The discourse must be performed, not just received. This is what makes games narratively distinct from media like film, TV, or novels—not ergodicity alone, not interactivity alone, but the productive tension between embedded and emergent storytelling. This embedded/emergent framework gives us the tools to examine this tension, to understand where narrative is located in games, and to validate the medium's capacity for creating meaning through the interplay of design and play.