A magician’s job and a narrative designer’s job are more similar than you might think. Both are in the business of making people invest in something that isn’t entirely real. Both rely on attention, assumption, and a carefully constructed experience to pull it off. And both, when they’re working at their best, leave the audience not feeling tricked — but delighted.
When I came across this video from Wired of magician David Kwong breaking down what he calls the 7 Principles of Illusion, I found myself nodding along for reasons that had nothing to do with card tricks.
Mind The Gap
…your brain is a liar. There’s so much information in the world your brain cannot handle it all. So in order to function it takes shortcuts, it makes assumptions…
Imagine sitting down at a campfire in an RPG. An NPC mentions, almost offhand, that the old king’s war changed everything in this region — that the villages to the north were never rebuilt, that certain families never recovered, that nobody trusts the roads after dark because of what was left behind. You never see the war. You never play through it. It happened before you arrived. But suddenly the world feels like it existed before you got there, like you stepped into something already in motion.
That’s Mind the Gap in narrative design. You don’t have to build everything — you have to build enough that the player’s imagination fills the rest. Give them the edges of something and let their brain draw the shape. The gap isn’t a hole in your story. It’s an invitation.
Write The Script
…because I wanted you to believe, I used specific language to convey that…
There’s probably not a more direct parallel to narrative design in this entire list. Everything a player knows about the world — the stakes, the history, the relationships, the danger — comes through language. A line of dialogue. A journal entry. A piece of environmental text. We use specific words to make players feel specific things, to make them believe that what they’re about to do matters.
Back at that campfire, your companion leans in and tells you that the person you’re looking for was last seen heading toward the ruins to the north — the ones nobody goes near anymore. That single sentence establishes a destination, a history, a warning, and a reason to keep moving. None of it required a cutscene. All of it required the right words in the right order.
Load Up
Load up is a magician’s term for doing all the prep work ahead of time.
This is where most of the invisible work in narrative design lives. Load up is everything you design before the player gets there — the payoff waiting at the end of the breadcrumb trail, the scene that’s already written for when they arrive, the branching outcomes prepared for whichever choice they make.
The campfire scene exists because someone decided what would happen at the ruins before a single player ever walked toward them. What’s there? What’s the danger? What does finding it — or failing to find it — mean for the story? Load up is the preparation that makes spontaneity possible. The player feels like they’re discovering something. You built the discovery in advance.
Design Free Choice
…even though you think you picked your choice freely, it was your only choice. If you as the audience member believe that you are in control, that you are dictating how the trick goes, you will buy into the illusion more.
This is where the wordsmith acrobatics really shine. Players want to feel like their choices matter — and good narrative design makes them feel exactly that, even when the outcome is already determined.
Dialog trees are the most visible example. When your companion at the campfire finishes their warning, you might be given three ways to respond — skeptical, eager, or cautious. Each response gets a different reaction. Each one lets you express something about who your character is. And then you all get up and head toward the ruins anyway. The destination was never in question. The journey there felt like yours.
Employ The Familiar
…I play into your brain’s need to respond to patterns. We employ the familiar. I showed you the first few choices and from there you extrapolated that your choice made a difference.
Narrative design is frequently working with what players bring to the table — their genre expectations, their pattern recognition, their desire to be the kind of character they want to be. When you give a player a skeptical dialogue option and they take it, they start building a story in their head about who their character is. Pragmatic. Cautious. Doesn’t trust easily. That character might only exist in three lines of dialogue, but in the player’s mind they’ve written a whole backstory.
This is one of the most powerful tools available to a narrative designer — letting the player’s imagination do the heavy lifting. The game provides the suggestion. The player provides the meaning.
Conjure An Out
…magicians always have a backup plan.
Players will find ways to not play the game the way you planned. Some will ignore the campfire entirely and head straight for the ruins without any context. Some will get distracted and forget what they were doing. Some will come back to the mission three hours later and have no idea what they were supposed to be looking for.
Conjuring an out in narrative design means building in the reminders, the redirects, the gentle nudges back toward the story. A companion who mentions the ruins again when you walk past a certain point. A journal entry that restates the goal. A lone figure on the road who seems to be heading in the same direction and has a reason to tell you why. The backup plan isn’t a failure of design — it’s an acknowledgment that players are unpredictable, and good narrative accounts for that.
Control The Frame
And there is one more principle of illusion, a magician’s best friend, misdirection. We call it control the frame. It’s like a film director’s frame — pointing you to where they want your attention.
Players only ever receive the information you choose to give them. If you want something to feel mysterious, you withhold. If you want something to feel urgent, you reinforce it from multiple directions. If you want a character to feel trustworthy, you frame them in warmth and familiarity before the betrayal lands.
The campfire scene works because of what’s in it — but also because of what isn’t. You don’t mention everything about the ruins. You don’t explain exactly what happened there. You point the camera at the parts of the story you want the player thinking about, and you let everything else exist in shadow until the moment you need it.
The best magic tricks don’t leave audiences feeling fooled. They leave them feeling like they witnessed something — even knowing, somewhere in the back of their mind, that there’s an explanation they’re not seeing. The best narrative design works the same way. Players know they’re in a game. They know choices are limited, worlds are constructed, stories are authored. And when it all comes together, none of that matters — because the experience was real even if the world wasn’t. That’s the trick. And unlike a magician, you don’t have to keep the secret. You just have to make it worth believing.