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Option 1: You can treat this tread as an extension of our in-class discussion of Jenkins’ categories. In the 22 years since Jenkins first published his essay, do you think that his categories of “evocative spaces,” “enacting stories,” “embedded narratives,” and “emergent narratives” still exist as coherent techniques? Can you think of contemporary examples of themor, alternatively, contemporary examples that defy this categorizations? Option 2: Use this thread as a space to talk about your take-home play assignment. Each of these games can act as a concrete as examples of Jenkins’ category of embedded narratives. How did your specific game fit in with this category? Were their any other of Jenkins’ categories that you thought showed up in the game?Henry Jenkins categoriesevocative spaces, enacting stories, embedded narratives, and emergent narrativesstill exist as coherent techniques more than twenty years later, but they no longer function as cleanly separable categories. Instead, contemporary games tend to hybridize them, often within a single title, suggesting that Jenkins framework now works best as an analytical vocabulary rather than a strict taxonomy.

Evocative spaces remain especially durable. Jenkins argues that these spaces draw on players prior narrative knowledge and cultural memory rather than telling a story outright

Jenkins, Henry – Game Design as…

. Contemporary games like Elden Ring or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor rely heavily on this logic: the player enters worlds already saturated with genre expectations, mythic structures, or franchise lore. What has changed is scale and density. Modern evocative spaces are often vast open worlds designed less to set the mood for a linear experience and more to sustain prolonged inhabitation. The space itself becomes the primary narrative object.

Enacting stories also persist, but Jenkins notion of staging narrative events through movement across space has become more systematized. Action-adventure and RPG games frequently anchor story progression to spatial traversal, boss encounters, and set-piece moments that function as what Jenkins calls micronarratives. These moments are no longer just scripted spectacles; they are often adaptive, changing based on player build, prior choices, or difficulty scaling. This makes enactment feel less like performing a fixed story and more like participating in a flexible narrative grammar.

Embedded narratives may be where Jenkins framework feels most prescient. His description of games as memory palaces full of clues, artifacts, and environmental traces anticipates contemporary environmental storytelling almost perfectly

Jenkins, Henry – Game Design as…

. Games such as Outer Wilds or Control distribute narrative information spatially and nonlinearly, requiring players to actively reconstruct past events. What distinguishes modern examples is the expectation that players will miss content and still produce meaningful interpretations. Narrative coherence no longer depends on total comprehension.

Emergent narratives, however, push hardest against Jenkins original boundaries. While he frames them around systems like The Sims, contemporary multiplayer, sandbox, and live-service games generate stories that exist largely outside the game text itselfon social media, streaming platforms, and player communities. These narratives are not merely emergent from systems but socially co-authored. In this sense, they partially exceed Jenkins spatial model and suggest that narrative architecture now extends beyond the game world into networked cultural spaces.

Taken together, Jenkins categories still describe real design logics, but contemporary games increasingly blur them. Rather than choosing between evocative, embedded, enacted, or emergent storytelling, designers layer all four simultaneously. This hybridity doesnt invalidate Jenkins framework; it confirms his core claim that game designers are best understood not as storytellers in the traditional sense, but as narrative architectsdesigning spaces, systems, and affordances that make multiple kinds of stories possible at once.