My dog is a setting, character, and plot. So are we. Your map isn't reality. Stop demanding I disprove your beliefs as obviously false. You can project your stubborn understanding onto everything. You can stop doing that. Me making you stop is a waste of both of our time. Open your mind and quit banging on the drum of "Story Now, Story Always, Story Only!"
I think this is a fair point and it is why I say you CAN describe in game events as "story" but you do not have to. Basically everyone here is dealing with different models for understanding what is going on at the table, but models are just that, a framework for talking about something, they are not the thing itself.
Like HowandWhy points out, I am not a story, you are not a story. Nor are we narratives. Even the events of my morning do not equate to a narrative. Right now, in my kitchen there are characters, location and "plot" (in the sense of things occurring). But there isn't a narrative. A narrative is constructed by a mind to relate what is going on. However it isn't the only way to talk about it. Narrative is one of many modes available.
Or look at history. The events of the past are not themselves stories or narratives, historians construct narratives after the fact based on evidence that includes primary accounts. But narrative is not the only way to deal with history. Not all history books employ narrative. Narrative is one way of writing about history, a fine and entertaining way, but there is also the analytical approach for example. These are just frameworks though, methods of understanding, they are not the events of history themselves. A sandbox player often looks at the events in a game, the way a historian might look at the events of history. They don't view the events themselves as stories, they view them as events and after the fact a story or narrative can be constructed.
Again, I get what people mean when they equate "dragon attacks village" with plot or story. And I use those words my self in every day conversation but there is a difference between that very broad usage of the word story and the more specific usage of of narrative. I think once you start equivocating on that broad usage to mean something much more specific like "narrative" or say literature with themes, etc, in order to show that games should do X or Y, or that GMs should do X or Y, you are getting into the territory of sophistry. If you conceive of games as stories that is great, and that doesn't detract from them being RPGs. However that doesn't mean everyone has to see them that way. And this is important because as we saw earlier the leap was made from "dragon attacking village is a story" to good sandboxes should tell good stories (and the example given of finding one's sister because it was part of the background the player had given is one most sandbox players would reject as a good sandbox). And I think the problem boils down to ideas about narrative control. They are being conceived of way too broadly here. If narrative control simply means "power" then it is so broad it has no meaning at all. That isn't what gamers mean when they use the term. No one thinks they have narrative control simply because they attacked the goblin. But more importantly if the player attacking the goblin is simply doing so because that was his honest response to the situation, and not some attempt to direct the "story" in a particular direction, then he isn't trying to assert narrative control through his character. That isn't his aim or purpose. He is not thinking of the game in terms of story.
Keep in mind the tables could just as easily be flipped. One could talk about all RPGs as simulation if one wanted to (simulation of reality, simulation of genre physics, simulation of story structure, etc). This would be just as easy to do as talking about RPGs strictly as story because it is a model with categories and models with categories can be overlaid on anything if you insist on them. But I think doing so would be counter productive, because even though I can conceive of all RPGs as trying to simulate something, I don't think people who play narrative RPGs for example regard themselves as doing that. These are just ways talking about things in reality, they are not reality itself. When we forget that and start imposing ideas of play on people, what are we doing except promoting another onetrueway approach?
