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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9244143" data-attributes="member: 71699">What I was aiming to say there was kind of missed by you, which is no doubt on me for not finding better wording. To make another attempt, the goal of repositioning GM and centering players is not just so players can start doing GMing things. That won't fully satisfy the ambition, to see the game played by players as a game.What Edwards noticed, in a nutshell, was that story was not genuinely being played to find out. It was often being written and disclosed, and crucially, premises were not being resolved in the play of the protagonists. It took strong medicine to fix that. In doing so, to my observation Edwards somewhat wedded ludonarrative to one particular Western dramatic storytelling tradition.I've several times referenced the narratologist / ludologist rift. Key folk on the ludologist side of this rift were trained in narratology, but they struggled to see a way at the time to consistently preserve game while telling story. Among moves they tried were proposing an implied author, and perhaps in a way that pointed toward a part of the solution. Players are simultaneously authors and audience. Another move was just to say that maybe not all games should count as narrative, but some should... that's the position of post-classical narratology today so far as I understand it. TTRPGs are in the "should" category.I go a little further and say that games can be ludonarratives at moments and in some dimensions, without being ludonarratives at all moments in all dimensions. What makes the time we spend "playing" count overall as play, is some amount of genuinely ludic process. Play to find out what happens was an important thing to say about storytelling back then. For heavens sake, stop just telling or deciding story, and play it. Fortunately, other facets of play were in better shape. However, when I experience and observe actual play I can also see that they're not in ideal shape.It could lead to a long digression, but I see "story" as it is generally defined for story games as a sub-category of narrative. Certainly it is a sub-category of fiction. That's driven by "story" being so strongly wedded to the Western dramatic storytelling tradition. In neotrad I see an opportunity to insist that we play to find out our (wide definition) ludonarratives. There is a political aspect to this debate: who can lay claim to what ground? It's a fight, for sure, with ardent defenders of the status quo. The words are too general in their implications to be relaxed about. Although I do respect the arguments of those promoting the "term of art" angle, which seeks to de-escalate the stakes; I'm saying that the stakes can't be de-escalated, nothing could be more fundamental to games than playing to find out what happens.</blockquote>

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