owing to its heavy emphasis on mechanics trumping in-game narrative and its highly player-centric
Im going to use your post as an excuse to soapbox, and note that these things are not segregated. Mechanics
are the in-game narrative.
From a game design perspective, that is the entire point of having a system, and its what builds up all those little tropes that make up what is percieved by the player as the type of game the game is.
This is a part of what I get at when I talk about people being too obsessive and trying too hard to tell stories, because by doing so they start to separate the story from the game when thats the exact opposite of what you want to do when you intend to use games to tell stories.
At its worst, Id liken this to writing a book, but instead of an actual book you give them interspersed segments of a Wikipedia summary to read.
Has all the hallmarks of reading a book and conveys the story in a very easy to read way, but it isn't actually all that great an experience, even if the story itself might be.
More to the point though, its solving the issue of a novel being dense and obtuse to the detriment of the reader (a few Stephen King or GRRM novels come to mind) by getting rid of the novel and just giving the plot elements directly.
So coming out of the analogy, its an issue where we solve for bad and inefficient gameplay by getting rid of it and delivering the spoils directly instead, still to the detriment of the experience (and the terrible misuse of the medium), and by speaking of mechanics and narrative as though they're separate things, one is just feeding into that backwards design philosophy.
Only reason some kinds of games can get away with that (when they're actually designed well anyway), is because a lot of them are actually replacing the game with a different game medium, rather than dropping it outright.
Most don't recognize that thats whats happening though, but some do recognize that improv, storygames and TTRPGs aren't actually all the same thing, and the hybrids that exist between them are in their own category.
