Narrative Architect? What?! Story Architect? What?!
The games industry is setting jobs on fire, dumbo, not creating jobs! I’d argue, then, that this is the perfect time to look at how careers are structured because on the surface, there’s a lot of funnelling into the one path especially when it comes to worldbuilding – that is, once you hit a certain level, you’re forced to learn systems or go into people management.
And what if you don’t want that?
A long time ago, in a career far, far away…I used to be known as a Chief Evangelist. WTF is that? It sounds like you were on TV spouting lines from the Bible and setting up telethons to raise money for your cult church.
Not quite, but I did wave my arms around on conference stages a lot.
“Evangelism creates a human connection with buyers and consumers to technology way beyond typical content marketing means because there's a face and a name relaying the story, expressing the opinion, and ultimately influencing a decision.“
from the Forbes article – Why Every Company Needs a Chief Evangelist
Before people started calling themselves thought leaders and influencers, there were evangelists. We performed a particular connective role that sat between Marketing and Sales; we told stories at a higher level, sometimes disconnected from the company or product, simply to make everything more relatable. The distinction was important because thought leaders just talked shite all day long on LinkedIn, and influencers sold their opinion to whoever would pay the most. I’ve lost my train of thought, but the point I’m trying to make here is that this was a new role in an organisation created because it didn’t naturally fit anywhere else.
Oh yeah, and it was about storytelling.
Now I’m in the games industry, and I see the same problem between the Game Writer and the Narrative Designer – at some point, the two merge, and you rarely have any choice in the matter if you want to progress – you move from junior Writer through the ranks to senior, lead and then it becomes more technical and you’re down the Designer career path all the way to eventually become Director.
That’s where seniority means leading people, managing production, building and mentoring a team, and owning the creative culture of the department and takes you further and further away from, potentially, where you wanted to stay, which was knee-deep in storytelling.
In the current industry model, a Lead Narrative Designer is often expected to be the worldbuilder, the systems expert, and the people manager. That is a recipe for burnout in itself and still a career drift from potentially what you really wanted to do with your life and natural skills as much as the Director role is.
That’s when I started looking at other industries and thought about Architects, where, in the case of games, seniority meant deepening your structural and systemic expertise, owning frameworks rather than people, and becoming the authoritative specialist that everyone else’s work passes through.
At first, I wanted to make a strong case for the Narrative Architect – a role that sat between Lead Narrative Designer and Narrative Director because that jump felt too wide and also offered nothing more than piling on resource and project management responsibilities rather than offering deeper meaning to storytelling.
A Narrative Architect would be more akin to a Technical Narrative Designer, concerned with designing the systems that the story and world live in and supporting the lore, its logic and coherence. A Narrative Designer can write a great quest, but a Narrative Architect builds the framework that lets 50 designers write 500 quests without the game’s and the world’s logic breaking.
If I put it even more bluntly, the Narrative Designer tells the story, the Narrative Architect builds the engine that makes telling that story possible.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to the conclusion that even that was still funnelling people into a career path they might not want: there still needed to be more choice available for those who wanted to stick closer to the Writer career. And so, I decided to split the idea even further by thinking about the Story Architect.
A Story Architect would sit closer to the meaning of the world: the lore, history, tone, thematic rules, cultural logic, and the softer frameworks that make a world feel real, consistent and coherent. In that sense, they are the true worldbuilders and lore custodians, defining what the world is before anyone starts figuring out how to implement it.
A Story Architect could also tackle and prevent an issue such as Lore Displacement and Narrative Myopia (a topic for another time!)
A Narrative Architect then takes that and makes it work inside the game’s actual systems.
One is story-based, one is system-based.
Both are complementary but distinct.
The two roles are genuinely complementary and interdependent without being redundant. The Story Architect defines what must be true. The Narrative Architect builds the machinery that keeps it true.
And none have to fanny around with dealing with extraneous distractions.
The gap between what the story is and how the story works can be enormous, and the responsibility can fall between the cracks. Someone needs to own it, but it need not be one single person anymore.
It’s not a rebranding of existing roles, although it could absolutely mean a rethink about what those roles mean in practice. A brilliant worldbuilder shouldn’t have to become a manager to be valued at a senior level. Neither should a systems thinker.
And it could absolutely mean that for people who are gifted and excel in storytelling and designing the systems to bring them to life, they’re no longer railroaded into career options that take them away from that, but offer a chance to hone in and specialise even further and still be recognised as a senior professional.
Being an Architect gives you somewhere to go that doesn’t ask you to become something you’re not.
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