What is narrative game design?

Narrative game design is the craft of building a game's story so that it works together with play: shaping plot, characters, and world while deciding how player choices and actions affect what unfolds. It sits between writing and game design. A narrative designer decides where branches happen, how dialogue trees work, when the story reacts to what the player did, and how to keep it coherent across many possible paths. That is different from a traditional author, because the reader can act, so the writing has to account for choice and consequence. For a branching story, narrative design mostly means mapping the structure before writing prose, so paths connect and pay off. A node-based builder makes that structural side visible while you plan.