Re: Jason Grinblat, Cat Manning, and Max Kreminski's
"Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play (https://mkremins.github.io/publications/ReparativePlay_ICIDS2021.pdf)"
my 2nd read (1st read here (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=714))
i returned to this paper because my cool friend and sometimes-collaborator kelly (https://okaykellyk.com) described her experience with my recently-released game The End of Gameplay (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3120040/The_End_of_Gameplay/). kelly said "i found myself coming up with my own narrative??" and i realized that she would be interested in this paper, considering we've explored similar dynamics in our collaborative works, for example Q1: VOID (https://droqen.itch.io/q1-void) is a fictional videogame manual; the player must participate in "reparative play" to experience the game, since they can't 'interact' with the inaccessible object (in this case because it does not exist--but nonexistence is not the only circumstance in which we find that a playable game-object is inaccessible to us).
then, revisiting the paper, this quote leapt out at me screaming 'kill gameplay', an echo of what i have been feeling lately:
Quote from: p4Consider narrative discovery games, which position the player as investigator ferreting out a narrative truth, "carrying out in reverse the work of falsification" perpetrated by the game object and its designers, using an interactive toolkit supplied by those same perpetrators. . . . All the narrative energy is tied up in answering these questions; all the ergodic friction comes from grinding against the systems that makes answering them a challenge.
what does "ergodic" mean?
Quote from: WikipediaIn mathematics, ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system. . . will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense.
oh, i see, this makes sense of this section:
Quote from: p4 againDiscovering pieces of the narrative in different orders changes the texture of the protostory but in relatively undramatic ways.