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Narrative mechanic is a mechanic that is primarily concerned with, well, narrative. Not world simulation, not game balance, narrative. That's, more or less, it.

I adore Fate. While there are many other games I would consider before it, Fate has a unique feature that no other system has: aspects can be anything. Including completely non-diegetic abstractions, that I find to be the best use of aspects by far. If you use aspects to describe who the...

I do think there's a lot of value in explicitly empowering the GM to create deliberately. Not as a reaction to whatever players are saying, not as a simulation of a world, but as a deliberate act of creation. Here's a cool story I want to tell, a combat gauntlet I've designed, whatever. It's not...

I bought myself a beer yesterday.

My first advice would be: there's only so much GM can do. Horror is everyone's job, and if the players don't actively want to be scared, they won't be.

I really enjoyed playing Witchcraft, but I must admit I played in the "GM handles all the rules and I've never even opened the rulebook" mode, so I can't exactly say if I enjoyed it because of the system or because of the GM.

Similarly to other labels like "roguelike" or "thrash metal" or, say, "PbtA", I'd say the best qualifier would be: does the author classify their game as OSR? If yes, it is. If not, it isn't. Otherwise, just like with Berlin Interpretation of roguelikes, you risk codifying extraneous bull###t...

Since I spotted vidyagame talk, here's a classic unpopular opinion: I want shorter games with worse graphics that are made by people who are paid more to work less. Aside from the working conditions, graphical fidelity is in itself, bad for videogames. From the obvious: now, because everything...

I mostly just decide. I tend to run short-ish campaigns, 4-8 sessions, so it's not that big of a commitment. That said, the decision is extra simple for me because I mostly run my own games, so there's not many options to pick.

I would go a step further and say that a heavy dose of metagaming is required for a decent game.

Cool! This "What is Fun?" is a question you have to answer! To yourself. I'd be glad to continue on your example, but I don't know enough about strategy games to not stumble into something I didn't mean on accident. For this, I apologize. Of FPS games, I know a lot. There are things that I (at...

Eh, there are rubicons that can't be crossed back. Characters aren't really people. They are vessels for emotions, first and foremost. Artificial constructs. Making them retread previous ground while retaining continuity cheapens the turning point (that is already cheapened by the lack of...

Another one: essence/cyberpsychosis/whatever are stupid ideas that don't make sense in Cyberpunk. Not even mentioning problematic implications (I have half of my body surgically constructed, am I less of a human?), it removes a ship of Theseus paradox that is important to cyberpunk as a genre...

My unpopular opinion would be: almost every game that features supernatural/sci-fi elements would be straight up better without them. Cowboys, spies, detectives or peaky blinders don't need magic to be interesting, and existence of supernatural only drives attention away from what makes them click.

There are two different things that I mistakenly lumped together in the OP: I have trouble caring about my own characters until I have played them (or maybe with them?) enough to figure out who they are through play; but at that point, there are lots of missed opportunities for things that I...

Also games can be replayed in pursuit of perfection. I've recently started playing Sifu and beaten the game the same day I bought it. But I'm still playing it, grinding for a no deaths at all of the levels. And then I'll probably start grinding no-death run of a full game... I can't see why...

I agree with @clearstream, to think about it in terms of published fiction is to wander astray. Better venues would be other games (especially not cinematic single-player ones), but I also find a dance metaphor to be both pretty close and far enough to both convey the point and don't lose the...

Adding to the "great works of fiction" examples, I've just watched Ralph Bakshi's "Heavy Traffic", and, just like his previous "Fritz the Cat" it is more or less a collection of vaguely connected vignettes. I loved both, and will continue to comb through Bakshi's filmography. Also "Sin City"...

Well, if by "never been a big seller" you mean "formula for all the most succesful videogames" from arcade era coin-guzzlers to modern day giants like Call of Duty and League of Legends... Regardless. Whether "most people" like it or not is completely irrelevant. When someone talks about their...