my other esoteric ttrpg take for the night: i don't really think it's accurate to describe playing a game (including storygames) as 'telling a story'. why? well, it doesn'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'm telling a story, i'm doing different things, making decisions for different reasons, feeling different things, responding to different inputs than i am when i'm playing a game.

i know this because i've both told a lot of stories and played a lot of games. and those two things couldn't feel further apart (for me, anyway).

having said that, i think storytelling is a thing that happens *within* games, but i'm not sure it's the primary activity. it seems to me that it's something like a mode of play—one of many that we use and move between, often fluidly, while playing games.

sometimes i'm telling a story—say, narrating a series of events—but other times i'm watching a performance or I'm having fun problem-solving or i'm shooting the shit with my friends or i'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's value in being more actively aware of them and integrating that into our design/play/discourse.

anyway, i'm going to sleep now but i'm probably going to write a book about this some day