Environmental Storytelling

Communicating narrative, lore, and character through the design of the game world itself, objects, decay, placement, and visual detail, rather than text or cutscenes.

In games, this means

A ransacked room with a child's drawing and an overturned crib tells a story without a word of dialogue. In Dark Souls, item descriptions and world geometry carry more narrative weight than any cutscene. Environmental storytelling respects player intelligence and rewards exploration, but requires the player to opt in, which means it can be missed entirely.