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my other esoteric ttrpg take for the night: i don& #39;t really think it& #39;s accurate to describe playing a game (including storygames) as & #39;telling a story& #39;. why? well, it doesn& #39;t actually look anything like what telling a story looks like in any other context
the social, experiential, playful processes at work seem to me to be very different. when i& #39;m telling a story, i& #39;m doing different things, making decisions for different reasons, feeling different things, responding to different inputs than i am when i& #39;m playing a game.
i know this because i& #39;ve both told a lot of stories and played a lot of games. and those two things couldn& #39;t feel further apart (for me, anyway).
having said that, i think storytelling is a thing that happens *within* games, but i& #39;m not sure it& #39;s the primary activity. it seems to me that it& #39;s something like a mode of play—one of many that we use and move between, often fluidly, while playing games.
sometimes i& #39;m telling a story—say, narrating a series of events—but other times i& #39;m watching a performance or I& #39;m having fun problem-solving or i& #39;m shooting the shit with my friends or i& #39;m experiencing the internal world of a character or any one of a thousand other things
admittedly, the idea that a game is about telling a story is a useful explanatory tool or heuristic for new players, but i think it can also be limiting. i think writers, designers and players can all benefit from a recognition that there are various modes of play.
this is one of my favourite things about the Belonging Outside Belonging framework developed by @lackingceremony and @ben_rosenbaum: it explicitly articulates different modes of play (idle dreaming and scenes) and gives guidance on how/when to navigate moving between them.
a lot of games kind of reflexively gesture towards the existence of multiple modes of play, but i think there& #39;s value in being more actively aware of them and integrating that into our design/play/discourse.
