Which is how I'd describe narratavist games.
This is why I pointed out that the phrase "emergent narrative" is not some idiosyncrasy; it has a specific meaning.
The story doesn't have to exist as a coherent narrative in the game's text to still be curated and enforced.
That, for the record, is also just a part and parcel aspect of all games. The moment you make your game "about" something, you're curating a specific set of possible narratives. That's where people into the OSR, and those that eventually boil the whole thing down to FKR, are coming from when they reject the need for any robust systems or theming of any kind.
When you get into narrativist games, these systems you can play with are leveraged for hyper focus, further narrowing the possibility space. And its necessary for those kinds of games, because they invariably collapse much of if not all of the gameplay out of the experience aside from the inherent improv game. Its why PBTA isn't a system.
The only thing they can do to sell themselves as X experience is to force the narrative beats of that experience.
An emergent experience doesn't work like that, however.
As far as I can tell, what you've done here is the following:
1) You've turned a proper noun (the specific, named concept of
Story Before coined by The Forge) and transmuted it into a common noun (
story before) that you're now coining for usage of a very general concept.
2) You're obliterating the distinguishing characteristics between that Forge-coined proper noun of
Story Before and your newly-minted common noun of
story before. Why I don't know, but it looks a lot like the only work it does is (a) confuse things and (b) bin basically everything into this newly-minted common noun of
story before. So far as I can tell, it makes the significantly distinguishing characteristics (in design, in play, in articulation of concepts) of all of the below...disappear:
* Participants opt into the play of a game with any kind of premise or any kind of setting, backstory, cosmology, etc.
* Players have systematized content authority over the elements that play orbits around so their PCs can collide with coherent opposition and vie for outcomes (thereby “finding out” who their characters are in the course of play). While this includes input on varying initial conditions of play, it does not prescribe outcomes (because that is anethema).
* Players have content authority over their character preconceptions and extreme (or total) ownership of their character arcs that materialize through play. This necessitates a level of prescriptive control over both initial conditions and outcomes (via social contract or via working in concert with their GM to script seminal content or player fiat via a systemitized, highly gameable currency economy whereby low stakes consequences are accepted for the means to ensure high stakes consequences never see play; varying forms of player-side railroading).
* Players have little to no actual content authority over initial conditions or whether/how play orbits around theme & premise embedded in their characters. The GM has control over initial conditions and all facets of setting and situation, adjudication/resolution mediation including rules, genre credibility tests, what constitutes player best practices and what is verboten.
...why would you want to do that (obliterate these distinctions)?
Not at all. You don't need a preconceived or meta plot to have a writers room. That's actually contradictory to both what the term refers to and what it implies in a colloquial sense.
You get into writers room dynamics when you position play as a story and then have players having to negotiate over the next game state. If you've ever played a narrativist game and had to stop and decide what move was gonna get invoked or how a given scene was gonna play out, you were in a writers room.
The writers room isn't about plotting, it's about telling a story. And that is a big difference.
I don't know where you're drawing
writers' room from colloquially or otherwise. But my best understanding of a
writers' room is that the participants have total control over all three of initial conditions, trajectory, and the outcomes of the story that they are collectively stewarding into existence. Whether this is democratized in some fashion or goes through some other means of collective action to get from initial conditions to finished product, its theirs...start to checkered flag...no countervailing forces of system nor colliding interests that must be resolved via extra-social means (so negotiation isn't sufficient to resolve the dispute...some intermediary in the form of a procedure or resolution process does the work of deciding "who gets what" or "how things resolve") to get in the way of their machinations...to exert pressure toward, and the generation of, dynamism.
Those are the dynamics of
writers' room as I understand them and that is how I use the term to convey distinction between that sort of design dynamic or social dynamic and how it generates a novel form of play (that is quite different from others).
Again, it seems a very bad idea indeed to mute or obfuscate the differences between the above and all the various forms of distinct authority distribution and content generation via participant input that happens in the TTRPG-sphere.
