In the narrative as a formal system chapter of Film Art: An Introduction, Bordwell and Thompson (1997) explore and deconstruct the principles of narrative construction. One main principle covered is the distinction between story and plot.
The set of all events in a narrative, both the ones explicitly presented and those the viewer infers, comprises the story…(where as) The term plot is used to describe everything visibly and audibly present in the film before us…Story and plot overlap in one respect and diverge in others. The plot explicitly presents certain story events, so these events are common to both domains. The story goes beyond the plot in suggesting some… The plot story distinction affects all three aspects of narrative: causality, space and time.
Bordwell and Thompson go on to explore how the use of story and plot in a narrative can create mystery.
Any film’s plot can withhold causes and thus arouse our curiosity… We shall see that the plot of Citizen Kane delays revealing what causes the hero to say “Rosebud” on his deathbed.
And in terms of creating suspense, depending on how wide the range of story information given to the audience in the plot, different effects can be created.
As Alfred Hitchcock pointed out, a degree of unrestricted narration helps build suspense:
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised… Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it… In these conditions this innocuous conversation becomes fascinating.
Whilst the first example extends to interactive narratives when attempting to create mystery, the later is less effective in creating suspense. This is due to the fact that within films, the audience take no active control of the characters and therefore suspense can be created through our helplessness to aid them. Yet in interactive narratives, such as computer games, our ability to control characters removes the possibility in a producer to create suspense in this way.