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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9242719" data-attributes="member: 70468">There’s a discussion in <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315854140_Design_Dynamics_Experience_DDE_An_Advancement_of_the_MDA_Framework_for_Game_Design" target="_blank">DDE paper</a> towards the end that’s worth reading. It’s similar to the discussion of “<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/games-as-story-machines.699578/" target="_blank">games as story machines</a>”.The “antagonist” are the dynamics that emerge to oppose what DDE calls the “player-subject”. As the paper describes it, narrative emerges from the unique journey the player-subject experiences while playing the game. This is what usually we would call an “emergent story” (a series of events that can be recounted as a story). The paper acknowledges design-in narratives because they are very common in video games, so it would be malpractice not to do so, but he’s not limiting the discussion to static antagonists.For example, a faction in Blades in the Dark has an agenda and a context in the setting. The GM is not supposed to use factions to tell a story. Factions are a source of problems and trouble for the PCs’ crew. As the players engage with the game, the GM creates clocks to track their progress towards some unwanted outcome for the players. These clocks also serve as a source of obstacles for the players because the players have to make decisions about which scores to pursue, and addressing a clock may require them to make sacrifices or trade-offs they may not otherwise want to make. In the paper’s parlance, factions are an antagonist.When an implemented design is played, thus creating Dynamics, the design loses its static character and becomes at least partly driven by its mechanics: it becomes an agent of its own rules. If the designer thinks of this agent as a character, as the Antagonist of the Player-Subject, that perspective allows to comprehend the experience of playing a game as a single narrative (Walk, 2016).That lines up with my experience with Blades in the Dark. When we talk about our group’s play, we talk about how we dealt with these various problems — antagonists that stood in the way of our crew’s success. They were not scripted to do that. We didn’t say, “okay, there’s going to be this arc where Beaker does this and that with the Silver Nails, and it culminates in a total takeover.” That dynamic was an emergent property of our play as the mechanics were put into motion and resolved according to their rules. The paper is discussing the need to think about how these dynamics will create a satisfying, emergent story. It’s advice to designers about creating a successful design.As there are certain expectations players have about narratives, good designers will anticipate those expectations when creating a narrative experience. If the Antagonist of a narrative does not fulfill that role, the narrative will be less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.The paper is addressing a general game design audience, but he is also addressing a gap in MDA, which does not incorporate narrative at all. It may be this is more obvious in the tabletop RPG space. Edwards takes it for granted in his <a href="http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Story Now essay</a> that tabletop RPGs will produce a series of events that when compiled into a transcript will (usually) look like a story. (And it’s arguable that a framework aspiring to encompass the whole design process needs to consider this regardless of how obvious it may be.)All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.</blockquote>

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