Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play (2)

[droqen]

Re: Jason Grinblat, Cat Manning, and Max Kreminski's
"Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play"
my 2nd read (1st read here)

[droqen]

i returned to this paper because my cool friend and sometimes-collaborator kelly described her experience with my recently-released game 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 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).

[droqen]

then, revisiting the paper, this quote leapt out at me screaming 'kill gameplay', an echo of what i have been feeling lately:

Consider 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?

In 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:

Discovering pieces of the narrative in different orders changes the texture of the protostory but in relatively undramatic ways.