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[tortoiseandcrow]

I just watched these two videos about narrative and game mechanics, and I had some thoughts that might be worth putting to the indie design community.

Extra Credits - Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media?
Are Videogames About Their Mechanics? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

Now, watching them, I'm reminded of a lot of the really intense discussions that went on in the early-to-mid 2000s around pen and paper roleplaying games. The gist of the discussion was basically: do mechanics matter? Now, within the context of pen and paper roleplaying games at the time, the accepted wisdom was that the game mechanics were there to "simulate the world", acting as a sort of game physics, while the act of storytelling was the job of the Game Master and players. But eventually there was this concern about the disconnect between what you do to interact with the game, and the stories that you tell. The game rewarded you for behaving in one way, while telling a decent story together required an entirely different set of behaviours at the table. Dungeons and Dragons was the classic example: nearly all of its mechanics were focussed on standard dungeon crawl fare, while players were encouraged to simply "role play" over top. Simply put, there was no mechanical reason or support to tell stories, and as a result, the stories that people told often fell flat.

Eventually, a different design philosophy started to develop - that the rules of the game should directly reinforce the act of storytelling. A heist game should not simulate bullet physics, but should instead model the narrative structures of heist movies. We don't need to have a complicated combat system, but we do need a way to make things go horribly wrong in the third act. A game that interprets player success as avoiding harm would utterly fail at creating a tense and dramatic heist narrative, because those kinds of narratives are entirely predicated upon the characters failing horribly and getting themselves into even worse situations than before.

The really big realization that came with this is not just that mechanics are a way to interact with the game world (in RPGs, the shared imagined space), but that they also dictate how you are able to meaningfully interpret the world. If I have stats for Strength and Speed, I'm going to interpret the world through that lens. If I have stats for Self-Absorbtion and Generosity, I read the game world in an entirely different light. If all I have is a gun and a keycard, I'm going to see the world in terms of that gun and that keycard.

And so, I think that these videos touch on the periphery of the  phenomena, while missing its core. Its the fact that mechanics really do matter, in both RPGs and in computer games, that influences the kinds of stories that you are able to tell. In a game where the only meaningful interaction is to shoot things, you aren't really going to be able to tell a very sophisticated story, because any narrative that exists outside of the main action of the game (shooting things) is always going to be an auxillary part. There is no meaningful integration or interaction between what the player does and what the narrative is doing. In RPG theory, we'd call this "incoherent design", when what the game asks players to do does not line up with what the game is thematically about.

Incoherent design, I'd argue, is the source of much of the dissatisfaction with contemporary AAA games. We are asking for developers to deliver us more sophisticated narrative themes, while the current design models for mechanics cannot possibly accommodate those themes, and so the story gets shoehorned into quicktime events or cutscenes (or, at its most sophisticated, audio diaries and some environmental storytelling). Mechanics only distract from the narrative when the mechanics are themselves at odds with the narrative. Which is to say, for all their narrative simplicity, early shooters are far more coherently designed than most contemporary AAA games. They have no greater thematic depth than just "evil monsters are bad", and they don't need to, because their mechanics don't ask for anything more. Even Bioshock's lauded storyline, which only gets its power from acknowledging the player's lack of agency, is a thin (but very pretty) veneer applied over the gameplay mechanics.

Which means, I think, that truly "narrative design" requires a rethinking of the ways in which people interact with games, and a realization that there can be no one-size-fits-all base mechanic. A game that seriously intends to tackle the issues of the Atlantic slave trade cannot possibly have the same core mechanics as a game about investigating police corruption or a game about professional boxing or about being a Navy Seal. The loveable rogue should not also be the most prolific mass-murderer of all time.

As a related side note, I think that games will eventually have to make a choice about how they want to present a narrative. This kind of narrative approach to mechanics requires a very different way of thinking about how we tell stories in this medium, and may in fact preclude the existence of a scripted narrative. For a game to present a story in a linear fashion, with a script, you need mechanics best suited to that way of telling a story, and at its best you will probably end up with something like Kentucky Route Zero. Kentucky Route Zero is extraordinary, but makes no bones about its linearity, instead, like other linear media, allows its audience/participants to inflect the story with their interpretation. Because that's all the interactivity we have with a book, a movie, a television show. Even actors (a parallel which Kentucky Route Zero explicitly draws) can only influence the story by their delivery. This is fine! It is, I think, the best possible result for a linear narrative - that you become the actor in someone else's story. But I think someone designing an experience such as this would be better off acknowledging the limitations linearity (even branching linearity) places upon interactive media, and give up the pursuit of "player choice" as a defining feature. Linearity is a feature. It gives the author far more control over outcomes in order to make a specific point. Nobody complains about the lack of audience agency in movies, and with the exception of a few avant-garde works of literature, choose-your-own-adventure is generally kind of lacklustre.

The other option as it stands to me, is a more explicitly thematic approach to the emergent narratives of open-world games. If you want the game mechanics to line up with your theme, and you want to have player choice, I think that you have to essentially give up your script. Instead you need to approach it more like a structured improv session. You have a set of thematically appropriate mechanics (rules) that allow you to interact with the world in a specific way, and a game world that acts and responds to those interactions in a thematically appropriate way, setting up a loop that emergently produces a thematic experience. The narrative becomes co-extensive with what you do, kept coherent by theme. I think that Cart Life and Papers, Please are early proto-examples of this trend, though they still feel compelled to include a linear narrative of some sort. Survival games are successful in this regard because the mechanics so successfully evoke the desperation and precarity of survival narratives. You stitch together your own story out of those experiences because they are thematically coherent.

So, I put forward the following theses:

- Narrative in interactive media is about a sequence of thematically coherent experiences.

- A narratively focused game should, through teaching you the mechanics, also teach you how to experience the game's themes.

- Through playing the mechanics, the game should have you enact those themes.

- What you do = what the game is about.

- What you do = the story.

- Thematic design is not about what is fun to do being separate from the story, but is about using the game's core gameplay as the means by which the narrative occurs.

[rj]

i agree with most of this but i think i disagree regarding your quiet dismissal of "player choice" and "branching linearity" in narrative-driven script-written games; i think these are identical things?

designing around player choice need not require neutering your story; i think the go-to example here (which i've been using a lot lately) is the stanley parable; is the stanley parable just an extreme case of branching linearity? sure, but at that point i think it's reductive to claim that such "branching linearity" isn't directly connected to player choice.

regarding your last paragraph, mind, for what it's worth i'm approaching my design as a blend of the two philosophies you have here. the game world would be randomized, but the randomization isn't absolute; i'm writing all the dialogue and putting together all the individual parts, but certain permutations of those parts exist and different seeds for dialogue exist for every NPC, such that each playthrough is unique from a base level beyond the multiple paths. it's not quite emergent because i'm carefully curating each moment but it can feel emergent because of the variety.

i think that there is value to the "choose your own adventure" mentality; it's just too-oft not done well enough.

[hmm]

Yeah, thought a lot about this recently. I think I agree with you, and the idea that mechanics and everything else in a game should be thematically consistent.

If you're going to put a story in your game, with characters, make sure the player's actions, and their intentions line up well with the character's actions and intentions. But then, that starts to sound kind of manipulative - designing your game such that the player feels and thinks and does the things that you want them to.

Have to say, the idea of Theme is starting to irritate me a bit. I'd venture to say that it is more important to just create something to be enjoyed by other humans. Forcing a Theme can just come across as heavy handed, and unnatural, and a bit preachy. And no one likes preachy.

The real interesting thing about games - for me at least - is all the unintended consequences that arise from creating a complex living system and then giving it to people to play with. Like a mini universe. No need for themes, just people thinking and learning and exploring.

Ramble over. Sorry

[tortoiseandcrow]

I guess I dismiss branching linearity largely because there isn't that much new ground to be broken on that front. Increasing technical sophistication allows us to have more and more branching options, even in the AAA environment. Both Kentucky Route Zero and The Stanley Parable are wonderful examples of a kind of storytelling that is often done poorly because the mechanics that are introduced can distract from the core of the game, which is progressing through and interpreting a linear story. In Kentucky Route Zero, you get to make subtle inflections that make the game “yours”. In The Stanley Parable, you get to be delighted and surprised by unexpected outcomes. Its notable, however, that both games wear their constraints on their sleeves. They really demarcate where player agency beings and ends, and derive some of their power from that. The fact that some options are simply not available to you, or are co-opted, is actually a really powerful gesture in an interactive medium.

Anyways, I don't want to denigrate this particular style of narrative design. It can be done really well, and I would love to see it done well more often – but the techniques seem to be pretty well established. Branching linearity is just linearity, but more so. So instead I would like to focus on how to think about designing games with an emergent narrative, which is something that I think is less well explored. Not a procedurally generated script, or a randomly generated storyline, but games that, through the course of playing them, leave you with a story at the end just because what you did in the game made sense as a story.

Its worth noting that, despite what bad English teachers might say, theme is not some big capital letter thing used as a club to show people that your narrative has a Point. Rather, theme is a valuable way of understanding the underlying structure of a given narrative. Talking about the thematic elements of a story tells you what is important to making it work as a story.

And yes, it is totally manipulative, and that's the point. Or rather, its about as manipulative as any other art medium that results in you feeling a certain way. Feeling devastated at the climax of a tragedy is absolutely emotional manipulation – it is also the sign of a well-made tragedy. We're lying to ourselves if we think that games don't manipulate people into thinking, feeling, or acting in specific ways in relation to the game space. In fact, we're worse off if we assume this isn't the case, because then we aren't thinking seriously about how to put these tools to use effectively. And if you don't think seriously about how your game mechanics result in certain behavioural patterns, then you'll likely default to the standard assumptions about what behaviours constitute gameplay.

That living universe you talk about doesn't just have physical rules, but also thematic rules. A game, like any narrative medium, has necessary limitations on what it considers to be important or not – you can't have a game about literally everything, just like you can't have a story about literally everything. Life isn't a story, because it doesn't have an underlying theme. Things just happen, sometimes for no reason. Conversely, things in a story happen because somebody made them happen. They have a purpose. In a game, the things that happen do so because of a system that someone designed, and your range of interactions compared to real life are astonishingly limited. So how you organize those things that your game considers to be meaningful, the ways in which you allow players to interact with them, the ways in which they respond - that reflects a set of perspectives about how ethics should work, about how society should be organized, about how people should be and how they should treat one another. Its these perspectives that organize together to form your theme.

The story designed “without theme” will then just reflect the default perspectives that come pre-packaged with your upbringing, your cultural background, your position in society, and the media you yourself consume. It will just reflect whatever the dominant perspectives of our culture are about a given thing, because that's just what is “in the air” (this is what people mean when they talk about “cultural narratives” - they are the underlying themes of the stories a society tells itself). What the game chooses to punish or reward, what behaviours it encourages through its mechanics, what behaviours are permitted or disallowed, those implicitly represent the perspectives you are building into your game. If a game puts me in front of a bunch of people with only a gun, and no other means of interacting with the world, that isn't just a game mechanic: that says something. This is further inflected by context, setting, etc. If I can shoot some people but not others, that says something else. If I can shoot anyone but the consequences are different, that says something else again. This is, in its most rudimentary form, a theme.

At its best, a theme drives creation, keeping it coherent and holding the story together so it all makes sense. At its worst, it is either a stick of obviousness to hit people with (hello English teacher), or the scrambled byproduct of the story. And that's because all stories have themes, whether you build them in intentionally or not. But if you don't understand your theme when you are approaching the construction of a narrative form, you'll end up with one anyways at the end, but it might not be the one that you want, or you might have a bunch of themes that don't play nicely together. That game where all I can do is shoot people may also try to tell me a tender story about love and redemption, but I really don't get much of a sense of that from the moment-to-moment actions of shooting people. Shooting people (with the themes of masculine power it conjures to mind) is more important, more meaningful to the act of playing the game than finding love and redemption.

So if you want to tell a story, understanding the perspectives you want that story to take on a thing is deciding what thematic engine you want to hook your narrative onto. A living universe with an underlying theme of loneliness is going to be very different from a living universe with an underlying theme of the excitement of adventure, or betrayal and redemption. Just thinking about those, you can sort of imagine how they'd be really different games, certainly in terms of how they would feel. What I'm suggesting is that feeling should be, as much as through art direction and level design, also be created by what you do as a player. And that what you do as a player is dictated by the game mechanics.

[Kytin]

I agree very strongly with just about everything you wrote, except for this bit.

So instead I would like to focus on how to think about designing games with an emergent narrative, which is something that I think is less well explored. Not a procedurally generated script, or a randomly generated storyline, but games that, through the course of playing them, leave you with a story at the end just because what you did in the game made sense as a story.

The thing is, I don't think you can tell a story that way. You most definitely set themes for your game by the mechanics it has, but themes are not a narrative.
Now, there are already games that don't have an explicit narrative. They just have their mechanics and the themes those mechanics produce. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind. However, the stories that come from playing Dwarf Fortress don't come from the game itself. They come from the players. It is the players of Dwarf Fortress that take the themes of that game (the biggest one being 'Defeat is Inevitable') and craft them into stories. That's fine for players that want to craft stories from prefabricated pieces (i.e. the themes of the game), but those who want to be told a story will be left unsatisfied.

The question you have to ask is who do you want to be the author of the story(s)? If it isn't you it will be the players... or there won't be a story at all.


EDIT: I should add that it is great to be able to talk to someone else that has taken the time to think about the thematic power of gameplay mechanics. It's not something that seems to be commonly understood.

[s0]

The thing is, I don't think you can tell a story that way. You most definitely set themes for your game by the mechanics it has, but themes are not a narrative.
Now, there are already games that don't have an explicit narrative. They just have their mechanics and the themes those mechanics produce. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind. However, the stories that come from playing Dwarf Fortress don't come from the game itself. They come from the players. It is the players of Dwarf Fortress that take the themes of that game (the biggest one being 'Defeat is Inevitable') and craft them into stories. That's fine for players that want to craft stories from prefabricated pieces (i.e. the themes of the game), but those who want to be told a story will be left unsatisfied.

i agree but i think it's a bit different: you just don't really experience an "emergent story" as a story, just like you don't experience your life as a story as you're living it. after action reports for dwarf fortress and other games work the same way memory works: you contextualize the events you've experienced in a way that forms a narrative.

games that rely on narrative, by their nature, HAVE to have little player agency imo.

[starsrift]

I wanted to thank you for your post, it was very thought provoking. My list of games to make just lengthened.

I don't necessarily agree with you that mechanics have to directly inform the narrative. Just to take an example, the television series House, MD, uses two principal mechanics in its stories.
#1: Most plot points are delivered while walking from place to place. Walking around the hospital is a central mechanic to the story, yet it's entirely immaterial except as a method to drive tension. It's just a visual vehicle.
#2: The entire mechanic of solving a medical case is never really the story, which is, of course, a discussion of how logic works and/or a human interest drama revolving around the central characters.
While perhaps you can argue that the second mechanic does inform the story, the first does not.

The issue of how to deliver the narrative in a game has been long-standing, and it's the reason why Half-Life was so acclaimed. Even so, we still seem to rely on - in many games - separating narrative from gameplay, and it is incoherent design.
Central to this issue is, I think, that exercising and playing mechanics satisfies our need for fun - which is the real reason players play - but narrative satisfies our need for purpose. And sometimes you can get away without purpose (Tetris, etc) and focus solely on fun, but that provides a shallow and I think ultimately unsatisfying experience.

I also look at something like Borderlands, which delivers most of it's plot via voice messages to the player while they're out killing things. Yet, I'm a good chunk of the way through Borderlands 2, and I honestly have no idea of the story. I was too busy aiming and shooting to receive the plot, and I even get confused when I stop and listen to the NPC talk about something I did do earlier. It could just be that Borderlands is singularly bad at delivering narrative, but it could also be that our brains - or maybe just my brain (and following the developer's rule of thumb that if you're that way, there's a bunch of other people that are the same...!) - isn't up to the task and processing mechanics and receiving narrative simultaneously. Well, I like taking my time and having turn-based games anyway.

It is a problem.

[Alec S.]

I think a very important thing when thinking about game design is to divorce the concept of "story" from that of "narrative".  I guess in this context, I would use the word narrative in the same way you might use it to describe a news station.  Two news stations could present the same stories, but tell them in ways that present different narratives.

To put it another way, the story of a game of chess might be two sides fight, a rook and a bishop from one side chase the king into a group of its own pawns, trapping it and ending the game.

The narrative of the game of chess is a fight between two sides, where pieces can be destroyed but not created, and sometimes you have to sacrifice pieces for more valuable pieces, and you have to coordinate your efforts between multiple pieces to get checkmate.  Even in games where the individual situations are extremely emergent, certain things are possible, certain things are impossible, and certain things are more beneficial to the player than others, and this is where I would say the narrative of a game lies.


Games don't have emergent narrative, they have emergent story, and each story is an aspect of the overall narrative.


Which is why the concept of Ludonarrative dissonance can exist.  The narrative of the mechanics can be directly opposed to the narrative of the story.

[hmm]

And yes, it is totally manipulative, and that's the point. Or rather, its about as manipulative as any other art medium that results in you feeling a certain way.

I don't think you feeling something means that an artist has manipulated you. Its a question of intent and authenticity. If I say something to express myself, and it changes something in you, its not manipulative. If I choose my words to cause that same outcome, then I'm being manipulative. In the process, I become less authentic. Its the difference between a painting and propaganda.

The story designed “without theme” will then just reflect the default perspectives that come pre-packaged with your upbringing, your cultural background, your position in society, and the media you yourself consume

I feel like this is actually the point of designing without theme. Your output becomes a more authentic expression of yourself and what you value.

Theme can exist in your output, for sure, as something that emerges. I look back at some of the little games I made, and I can see some ideas and themes in there. But the game would probably be less interesting if I'd tried to put those themes in there. And harder to make!

Just some thoughts.

[rj]

And yes, it is totally manipulative, and that's the point. Or rather, its about as manipulative as any other art medium that results in you feeling a certain way.

I don't think you feeling something means that an artist has manipulated you. Its a question of intent and authenticity. If I say something to express myself, and it changes something in you, its not manipulative. If I choose my words to cause that same outcome, then I'm being manipulative. In the process, I become less authentic. Its the difference between a painting and propaganda.

you literally just said that all art that attempts to provoke any sense of feeling in the viewer is on par with propaganda

not to mention that "painting" being at odds with "propaganda" ignores the fact that plenty of paintings during ww2 (and lots of other periods, but that's the big'un) were propaganda

good art is usually manipulative. the degree of subtlety that manipulation takes and/or that effectiveness might change (and effective and subtle audience manipulation is a sign of excellent art) but if your goal is to get the audience to basically feel nothing then why are you bothering

87

[hmm]

Don't want to take this too far off topic, but I'd disagree that good art is usually manipulative. It is an interesting debate though; the degree to which art manipulates its audience.

Painting was a poor choice of words. As was propaganda.  And so I will eat those words.

Personally, I enjoy the idea that a game/painting/book/movie can have many different meanings for many different people. I'm a fan of someone creating something that they think has value, and then giving it to others to play with and interpret and read into. To limit the game experience in order to keep it consistent with a theme seems like it could close off these possibilities.

[rj]

Personally, I enjoy the idea that a game/painting/book/movie can have many different meanings for many different people. I'm a fan of someone creating something that they think has value, and then giving it to others to play with and interpret and read into. To limit the game experience in order to keep it consistent with a theme seems like it could close off these possibilities.

see, i think that it's silly to assume that theme and manipulation are somehow at odds with multiple interpretations.

example: it's ludicrous to assume that american psycho is not a manipulative film; it frequently fucks with the audience by way of chronological uncertainty, an unreliable narrator, and events that are tailored to provoke reactions from people (oft ones of shock)

yet the film is interpreted in so many different ways. not only are there people who hate it and people who love it, there are arguments that the film's a reaction to male heroes, arguments that the film is a reaction to growing violent imagery in the world, arguments that it's about corporate ennui. all of these things are not at odds with the fact that the film definitely has a specific theme (which can probably be best boiled down to "confusion" or "the confrontation of the id")

putting a theme in your work doesn't exclude it from being interpretable and does not make it shallow. there's no instance where consciously having no theme is a better decision than having a theme. you're not "limiting" a game experience by keeping it consistent with a theme, you're making your game cohere; incoherency is the worst problem any art can have.*


*warioware is not an incoherent game, by the by. it coheres by the very value of its aesthetic being as "kitchen sink" as it is. it's also thematic, as every single character, story, etc, boils down to "making the best of inevitable failure" in the classic sense. these are characters that fail constantly at what they love and what they do but they try hard to make the best of what they do, and the game always threatens immediate failure every few seconds.


80

[hmm]

Yeah, good point. Coherency is key (see my earlier post), and probably impossible without a theme to cohere to in the first place.

I'll shut up now.

Long live theme.

[tortoiseandcrow]

Seems like there are two running threads in the discussion so far – the first being the precise nature of the relationship between mechanics and a player's experience of a narrative (noting Alec's comment and using the term advisedly), and the second being the somewhat more theoretical problem of how narrative comes to exist at all.

With regard to the first. We seem to more or less be agreed that there is a direct relationship between mechanics and narrative, either by reinforcing the game's thematic content or by working against it. But I think we can probably do a bit more work teasing out the relationship between the two by looking more closely at ludonarrative dissonance (brilliant term, thank you Alec). Like, why and at what point do mechanics and narrative become entangled (with whatever level of functionality), and at what point do they start acting separately?

So, to take the example of House, imagined now as an interactive game. If you are the player, driving your House character around, I don't know if I would call “walking” the primary mechanic. A mechanic is not so much a mode of delivery, but a point of interaction between the player and the game. There might be a lot of walking scenes, but it seems like walking is more the context than the interaction. From an authorial standpoint, we need a way to deliver information while making a scene change (hospitals are fast-paced environments), so we're going to have the game punctuated by walking and talking as we move from place to place. But from the perspective of the imaginary player in control of House, their interaction is less likely to be about the act of walking, or where to walk to, and more likely to be the conversation that occurs while walking. And, being House, the appropriate ways to interact in conversation would be to make insightful enquiries into the situation, make cutting enquiries into people's personal lives, and generally be a dick. If the game instead asked you to be in charge of walking while it gave you some canned dialogue to listen to, that would be an inappropriate mechanic. It wouldn't be House: Brilliant But Asshole Doctor, it would be House: Walking Simulator (or perhaps more amusingly, House: QWOP Edition).

In our game, House: Brilliant But Asshole Doctor, I'd argue that we need to have the things we do in the game to not just have purpose, but to have meaning. But some games seem to have plenty of purpose for doing things, yet have no need for meaning. In Tetris, I move the shapes around because the rules of the game are such that if I arrange them in a certain way, I get points, and getting more points means I win. Succeeding and developing skill at Tetris might ultimately feel hollow because the skill isn't that rewarding to develop, so perhaps chess might be a more robust example. Or bridge. Or Spelunky. Where Tetris works more like a gambling reward loop and is not likely to leave one feeling amazing after spending a day at it, chess is for many people its own reward. All of the moves you make have a purpose, which is hopefully positioning yourself in order to best your opponent. The reward of purposeful activity is that you gain skill, you get better, you exercise new faculties, you gain community. Same thing with Spelunky – we get better, and when we play with others we get to be amused with our failures together. We play it simply because it is enjoyable to develop and exercise skill, and to fail in amusing ways with others. But aside from the social and personal value we assign to these activities, and how good they feel to perform (an excellently played chess strategy feels amazing), they don't have any meaning that we can string together into a story. We could totally imagine chess as a story of two warring kingdoms and make squeaky tiny-person voices as the pieces interact, but the game makes absolutely no provisions for that sort of behaviour. It is literally superfluous to the game.

So perhaps we might think of it this way: we do things in a game because the rules work together to make those activities purposeful. Rooking (is that the right term?) your king is a purposeful activity, because it might put your king in a more defensible position. Any rule that isn't purposeful doesn't get used, or drags the game down making it less fun. But this doesn't have anything to do with story.

Story sneaks in when at some fuzzy point the sequence of events have not only a purpose from the player's perspective, but a meaning that connects them together within the game-space itself. House is being bitchy to the patient because he is hung over and they are wasting his time, not just because when I click this button, I as the player get +3 bitchiness points (which we will assume is for some reason advantageous in the rules of House: Brilliant But Asshole Doctor).

Which I think brings us to the second thread. I agree with C.A. Silbereisen, that memory works by organizing events into a story whose narrative we can make sense of. Life doesn't have a theme, but that doesn't stop cultures from inventing them (or societal structures that actively produce them). If a sequence of events can be interpreted as being related or causal to one another in a meaningful way within their own context, we can tell them as a story. But a narrative is the framework within which a story is given meaning. A story is a sequence of events (he said this, then she said that, and then he did this), but a narrative is the interpretive framework which makes those events make sense with relation to one another, and allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about people and the world from those events.

Working quietly underneath all of this is theme, which organizes the kinds of events that can happen, the kinds of sequences they result in, and influencing the kinds of judgements we make about the story – ultimately working to keep them as coherent as possible. Broadly speaking, everything you experience can be understood as a narrative. It just depends on what themes you use to organize it. Bringing your own interpretation to a narrative is, in many ways, applying your own set of personal themes. If the themes of the narrative line up with your own, or communicate in interesting ways, you'll probably agree with it, or at least find it interesting to think about. If the themes are antagonistic to your own, you'll reject the basic premise of the narrative.

(There's a side note to be made here about unthinkingly coding the dominant cultural themes of our society into a narrative, and how that can be problematic because many of those themes are strongly antagonistic to how certain segments of our population understand and experience the world. The reiteration of this antagonism on the part of the dominant cultural themes leads to these segments being excluded from participating fully in society, and in many cases can lead to very real impacts on their day-to-day lives.)

If story + theme = narrative, then I think the question that follows from this, as far as game design goes, is how might one design game mechanics which allow the player to produce a sequence of events that are intelligible as a story with a coherent thematic organization? Because if you have that, then I think that the player's natural tendency to understand experiences in terms of a narrative will take you the rest of the way. I think Dwarf Fortress is an excellent touchstone for this direction, but represents the beginning of new avenues for interactive narrative media, rather than an end point.

[Kytin]

I'm not sure I can agree agree with your 'story + theme = narrative' equation, but that's an instinctive reaction rather than a reasoned one. I'll see if I can figure out what my subconscious is telling me and give a proper response later.

That said, if you consider Dwarf Fortress to be the beginning of a new way of designing stories, then you should probably take a look at RimWorld.

[starsrift]

I think a very important thing when thinking about game design is to divorce the concept of "story" from that of "narrative".  I guess in this context, I would use the word narrative in the same way you might use it to describe a news station.  Two news stations could present the same stories, but tell them in ways that present different narratives.

To put it another way, the story of a game of chess might be two sides fight, a rook and a bishop from one side chase the king into a group of its own pawns, trapping it and ending the game.

The narrative of the game of chess is a fight between two sides, where pieces can be destroyed but not created, and sometimes you have to sacrifice pieces for more valuable pieces, and you have to coordinate your efforts between multiple pieces to get checkmate.  Even in games where the individual situations are extremely emergent, certain things are possible, certain things are impossible, and certain things are more beneficial to the player than others, and this is where I would say the narrative of a game lies.

This may be a useful hair to split, especially in talking about open-world games instead of story-driven titles, but you've already confused the hairs you're splitting. In your first paragraph, you presented the term 'story' as the facts of a case, and the 'narrative' as the personalized/opinionated view of the facts as presented by the news stations.
In your second two paragraphs to reiterate your comparison, you've presented the 'narrative' of chess as the facts of what happens, and the 'story' as what happens in one game according to one person's view.

Until you resolve this confusion of terms that you want to specialize, I'm a little wary of reinforcing your discretion.

So, to take the example of House, imagined now as an interactive game...it seems like walking is more the context than the interaction.

That's a lovely evolution. I don't know that I agree with it as an argument - given the repurposed premise - but it's certainly valid.
Of course, in Half-Life, walking (or not, or shootan) is the interaction when receiving story elements. Which, of course, is why I brought up House, MD and the Walk and Talk film technique, then later mentioned HL - because Half-Life is directly relevant to the early 00's you referenced in your OP, and it's often considered a "good" way of delivering story - at least as opposed to the previously (and still) common cut-scene method. We're still left with the fact that how to deliver story/narrative in games is troublesome, and of course, directly related to mechanics.

I don't agree that there is a direct relationship between mechanics and narrative, but I think perhaps there should be. Or at least, such as in more traditional CRPG's (Japanese and Western), the mechanics reinforce the theme(Goblin genocide is an acceptable incident on the way to stop the ancient evil from returning, even if the game isn't about you committing the goblin genocide).

If story + theme = narrative, then I think the question that follows from this, as far as game design goes, is how might one design game mechanics which allow the player to produce a sequence of events that are intelligible as a story with a coherent thematic organization? Because if you have that, then I think that the player's natural tendency to understand experiences in terms of a narrative will take you the rest of the way. I think Dwarf Fortress is an excellent touchstone for this direction, but represents the beginning of new avenues for interactive narrative media, rather than an end point.

The Sims?
Handing the story to the player to create instead of from the game to experience is one way to avoid worrying about having to deliver the story. The issue of player agency and development effort required continues to be linked, and while you can thought experiment on this line for a while, you can really only go so far.

One reason I have a large interest in this thread because I'm currently trying to put together a game with an emergent, procedural story - yet directed - and the real thorny problem is putting together the... dictionary(?) of actions and possible consequences and reasons why the particulars of a story/narrative emerge is actually pretty fcking hard. I've been going back to analyze the design of The Sims repeatedly, especially the later titles that are less RNG-sourced. I don't know if I'll drop the project in a little bit because of the complexity required, or start out with the easy micro story structure and then build out to the macro that's the big fcking bear.
We also need more threads like this to converse ludology.

[Alec S.]

I think a very important thing when thinking about game design is to divorce the concept of "story" from that of "narrative".  I guess in this context, I would use the word narrative in the same way you might use it to describe a news station.  Two news stations could present the same stories, but tell them in ways that present different narratives.

To put it another way, the story of a game of chess might be two sides fight, a rook and a bishop from one side chase the king into a group of its own pawns, trapping it and ending the game.

The narrative of the game of chess is a fight between two sides, where pieces can be destroyed but not created, and sometimes you have to sacrifice pieces for more valuable pieces, and you have to coordinate your efforts between multiple pieces to get checkmate.  Even in games where the individual situations are extremely emergent, certain things are possible, certain things are impossible, and certain things are more beneficial to the player than others, and this is where I would say the narrative of a game lies.

This may be a useful hair to split, especially in talking about open-world games instead of story-driven titles, but you've already confused the hairs you're splitting. In your first paragraph, you presented the term 'story' as the facts of a case, and the 'narrative' as the personalized/opinionated view of the facts as presented by the news stations.
In your second two paragraphs to reiterate your comparison, you've presented the 'narrative' of chess as the facts of what happens, and the 'story' as what happens in one game according to one person's view.

Until you resolve this confusion of terms that you want to specialize, I'm a little wary of reinforcing your discretion.

My point is that there are certain qualities that are present in Chess by nature of its ruleset, and that these qualities make up the narrative.  The narrative isn't the facts of what happens, but the facts of what can and cant happen, and the implications of a well-played game (ie. what actions are incentivized and dis-incentivized by the rules).  Even if an entire game progresses without a player sacrificing one piece in exchange for another piece, that is still something that is incentivized by the rules, and thus is always present as an option.  Losing rather than gaining pieces over the course of the game is something that is present in every game of chess (the absolute best you could do is not lose a single piece during the game, although that itself is rare.  There's no way to end the game with more pieces than you started with).  So, again, the narrative is the possibility space of the game filtered through the actions which are treated as beneficial or detrimental to success by the rules of the game.  So it could be said that Chess is a game about loss of life in war, because that it an explicit part of the rules.  And it can also be said that Chess is about protecting your King, because that is implicitly beneficial in the rules.

[starsrift]

Someone's confusing something, and I'm not sure if it's me or you, Alec.
Like I said, I think it could be useful to split a hair between story and narrative.

To define without example, for the purposes of this conversation:
'Story' is the personalized experience someone has or tells
'Narrative' is the facts or elements from which the story is drawn
?

This is what you suggest in your chess example.
You seem to suggest the reverse in your radio example. Or perhaps I'm reading it wrong. Am I reading it wrong (I'm confused?) or did you confuse yourself?
It doesn't make a terrible amount of sense if I'm interpreting it wrong. Two different news stations present the same personalized tale, from different originating facts or elements?

Perhaps I have trouble with the counterintuitive nature of your use of 'narrative', which is dictionary-wise, a noun form of the root 'narrate' - which is to tell a story or add commentary to a thing, implicitly requiring a subject noun, whereas the term 'story' does not.

Where's Eres when you actually need him.

[Alec S.]

It's the other way around.  The story is the facts, the narrative is the thematic progression behind the facts.

For example, a news station might present a story (the facts) but deliver it in such a way that it plays into a narrative that they're constructing (say, the idea that the country is going down the toilet, or that one political party is to blame for what's happening). 

I guess to put it another way, story is the facts, and narrative is the point of view.  In news, the facts occur, and then the point of view gets added.  In a novel, the facts and the point of view are created at the same time.  In games, I would argue, the point of view precedes the actual events.  The narrative precedes the story.  The narrative/point-of-view being put forward by a game exists within the rulesets, and and the stories/facts that come out of that ruleset are aspects of that narrative/point-of-view.

[starsrift]

I like it.