there's a lot of confusion in game design discourse around whether the player or the game is telling the story. early on there was a lot of "it must be the player, bc interactivity is _special_". then backlash led to the modern idea of "narrative design" https://twitter.com/catacalypto/status/1272644426842517505

i like to draw an even further distinction, where the "locus of narrative authority" for a particular game lies somewhere in a triangle between three points: game creators; game _systems_ (over which the creators' control is often incomplete, due to emergence), & players

in Dwarf Fortress, as discussed in the QT'd thread, both the systems & the players exercise an unusual amount of narrative authority. this tends to be true for simulation-driven games in general: simulation acts as a "living material" from which players shape their own stories

but DF is so complicated as to essentially be the Photoshop of playful storytelling tools: the deep menus, convoluted UI, & focus on high-detail simulation make it difficult to use for storytelling unless you're willing to put in a lot of time & effort to learn how it works

DF is a true "authorship-oriented" play experience: it embraces the idea of players as authors of the story, unlike "participation-oriented" play experiences (you embody a character in the world) or "readership-oriented" play experiences (you let the game tell you a story)

but it feels like game design practice is only just now coming around to the idea that authorship-oriented play experiences deserve to exist as a genre in their own right. they've been conflated with participation-oriented experiences for much of the history of digital games

as a result, there's a ton of design work yet to be done around lowering the barrier of entry to participation in authorship-play. how do we build DF-inspired experiences that grant access to the play-pleasures of authorship without all the associated menu complexity?

tabletop games are ahead of digital games on this front, bc tabletop designers realized the distinction between authorship & participation earlier. see eg Microscope, The Quiet Year, & @aaronareed's Archives of the Sky for examples of explicitly authorship-oriented TTRPGs

that's why a lot of my recent work has focused on closing the gap between simulation-driven digital games & authorship-oriented TTRPGs. see eg Why Are We Like This?, a sim-driven authorship game that borrows extensively from TTRPG storytelling mechanics https://twitter.com/maxkreminski/status/1243247010825654273

anyway… if you liked this thread, it’s largely a recapitulation of my Roguelike Celebration 2019 talk: https://twitter.com/maxkreminski/status/1187062184972390400

…with some terminology from an upcoming literature review paper that expands on the ideas here thrown in. stay tuned for more!