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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9242790" data-attributes="member: 71699">I felt you were expecting me to mention the absence of narrative from MDA up thread, where I was focused on moves made in the imagination and accepted into the shared fiction. One story is the embedded story, created by the narrative designer; the other is the emergent story (or narrative journey) created by the sequence of challenges and other sensations emerging from the game dynamics (Grave, 2015). Emergence in games occurs when the rules of the game system define both the challenges and the tools players can use to solve these challenges – without pre-defining solutions. Emergence is thus usually supported by procedural generation or re-combination of game content, rules, and sometimes even whole levels. ... The emergent, unanticipated gameplay of such games creates a unique journey for the Player-Subject; it is only repeatable if someone repeated the exact same sequence of orders to the game system at exactly the same time – and in case of randomly generated procedural contents it may not be repeatable at all. As a result the Player-Subject perceives himself or herself as the hero of this emergent journey, which is inevitably understood as a narrative. Both the embedded story and the player narrative have their dramatic arcs; both have their emotional content and sequence. However, if the two journeys fail to connect, the entire experience suffers from a weak, inconsistent Antagonist and the game will not deliver its full potential to the Player-Subject. Probably both stories will even be perceived as weak if they might have been good stories when viewed separately. The authors think that it is here where most game stories fail. What narrative designers usually lack is not knowledge about storytelling or dramaturgy, but knowledge about the game’s emergent Antagonist.Is that the part you are thinking of? Walk, Barrett and Gorlich (the authors) say some very interesting things there, I agree. I like your examples and thoughts on BitD. In TTRPG, system does not exhaustively define the tools players can use, although in most cases it does its best to translate whatever they come up with into something orthodox.</blockquote>

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