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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9037369" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Can? Yes. To what degree? Rather a big one! It's why games like Shadowrun, Masks, and V:tM/W:tA exist. They are quite literally all, to one degree or another, emulating some kind of story environment (specifically: cyberpunk and transhumanism; Teen Titans-style supers; and Anne Rice-style "what measure is a monster?" romances, though Werewolf is more about eco-activism/terrorism and self-inflicted societal collapse.)Why? The key to making it work is to do at least one of the following:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make the gameplay actually about facing climactic problems, so there is no such thing as a player choice which does not face them (unless, of course, they simply choose not to play.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Bake the underlying thematic concepts you want to examine into the mechanics, so that by engaging with them, you are necessarily producing some kind of narrative, and whatever conclusion results is part of the exploration.</li> </ul>The former is "Story Now," or what I call "Values & Issues." Gameplay functions by establishing the things the character (and by extension, player) Values, what things they really don't want to give up or part with, and then putting those things on the line with Issues that have to be resolved. Sooner or later, something has to give--and that's where the climax for that scene occurs. Perhaps it's the agonizing decision to give up some other value instead of the thing currently at Issue. Perhaps they take a risk and succeed, and thus get what they want; or they take a risk and fail, and pay a price. Regardless, the gameplay occurs in the process of generating and resolving climactic moments.The latter is "genre sim," or what I call "Conceit & Emulation" (not for nothin that that second word is there!) With C&E, it doesn't really matter whether the conclusion is satisfying in and of itself, for exactly the same reason that there are many extremely effective stories that have no clean, satisfying conclusion but are still excellent literature. Because the point of C&E isn't to come out feeling like, "Yeah, that was a really nicely wrapped-up story!" It's to explore something through play--to start from a concept, a premise, a theme, and find out what results from the clash of that concept/premise/theme and the personality of the characters involved. In that sense, it's a lot like Shakespearean tragedy; Romeo and Juliet spoils its own ending in line six, for God's sake, and the conclusion is, "Romeo kills himself mere seconds before Juliet wakes up, and then she kills herself in response, and then their families show up and reconcile in their grief." That's not satisfying at all! And yet the story is timeless, almost literally; R&J is a medieval retelling of a myth where the oldest known written version is from Ovid, but he was almost certainly retelling an etiological myth from Babylon, and artistic depictions indicate it was at least a couple centuries older.There's no need to take player agency away. You just have to make "climax and resolution," or "theme and (thematic) exploration," be the tools by which gameplay occurs. Then, as long as you do in fact actually engage in play, some kind of story is inevitable! Dungeon World does the former; Vampire: the Masquerade does the latter; Masks does both.</blockquote>

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