Ever since several games of the late '80s and early '90s made an issue of it, there's been a fair amount of talk in gaming circles about where the "story" is in gaming - what it is, how you make it, what you give up to do this, and so on. At one extreme there are the folks who emphatically deny that there is anything story-like at all about their games. Events unfold, tactics are applied to situation, and there may be an after-action report, but emphatically lacks any quality one might think of as literary. At another, there's the school that says that story is the only crucial thing, and which in extreme cases actively encouraged the GM to override players' preferences to whatever degree is necessary to make a fully constructed literary structure happen in play. (This is often attributed to Vampire, but in fact Vampire 1st edition clearly and strongly stated that preparations should yield to player invention and desire. The worst case I've seen with my own eyes was the GMing advice in Amber.)

Lately I've been thinking that "story" may be most productively treated as something outside the game as such. In play, things happen. A player or GM introduces an element into the scene, others respond to it, the mechanics governing the resolution of efforts apply, and then everyone deals with the updated situation. (More on the matter of response and mechanics in a bit.) This collection of inventions, introductions, responses, and resolutions is the raw material of the story of the game. The story itself actually happens in the minds of participants, then and later. As with both real life and entertainment of many sorts, you select and arrange the parts that interest you and give lower priority to the rest. Dull stuff just fades; depending on what sort of person you are, annoyances may as well, or they may loom large. Interesting bits loom large and get loving detail, and perhaps embellishment. The stuff in play is a pool of data, from which you extract information that adds up to the story you want to tell yourself or someone else.

I distinguished in the preceding paragraph between the intention of a participant to have their character do something (or to have some other part of the environment under their control ditto) and outcome of the intent. The evolving theory/theories at the Forge place a lot of weight on the matter of control, and set up a necessary tension between player control and the ability of the GM to maintain a planned narrative. The same thought occurs in other efforts at building a general theory of gaming. I've never been entirely persuaded by this, but only recently figured out that this is why. Apart from powers of outright fiat, all attempts to do things in the game are mediated by mechanics. There is a force outside the intention of the player or GM which modifies the attempt, and which limits the extent to which the desires of a participant are feasible at all.

Whenever the rules apply, there is no unmediated force of will active in the game. Assuming that the GM applies any mechanics to, for instance, NPCs' ability to search, evade, fight, and the like, to factors like weather and so on, this is true of the GM's plans just as much as it is of the wishes of any other player. The GM's preparations are in this sense not qualitatively different from whatever schemes players come up with before and during play - more elaborate, perhaps, but likewise subject to mediation through mechanics. And stats for NPC, environmental, and other factors constitute limits of their own for this purpose. Rather than adjudicating on the fly, you get bright lines of possibility and impossibility, but the basic principle is the same. Not everything you might wish for can happen, and some things you don't expect are pretty well guaranteed to happen. This is entirely as true of games which remove randomizers and spread around the power to make authoritative declarations as it of games with a strong element of randomness and which concentrate authoritative power in the GM's hands.

So a few terms for a new taxonomy.

An event in play is the combination of a participant's desire to have somthing happen and the mechanics applied to it to determine the extent to which that desire becomes achieved.

Plans include all the schemes that participants make: the in-character desires of PCs and NPCs to make things happen, the timeline a GM might prepare of what NPCs will do in the absence of PC intervention, and the like. All of these are subject to mechanics of some sort when they actually lead to events in play.

Mechanics contribute two crucial factors: expectation and surprise. The definition of what characters and outside forces can do lets participants build up a sense of what's reasonable to expect - what's likely, what's possible, the tradeoffs of risk and reward, and so on. I'm going to get a little hyperbolic and say that this amounts to sanity for the participants; total chaos would make any expectations irrelevant and consistency impossible. Games differ in how much and what sort of variation they like and what overall scale of power is available to characters and their world. They also differ in what sort of variation applies to character efforts: whether there's a consistent minimum and/or maximum result possible, how much things vary from the average result, how much outside forces can modify the return on a character's exertions, and so on. But all roleplaying games allow for things to gum up the works in translating character desire into action.

The experience of play, from the point of view of any given participant, is what you have in mind for your character plus all the stuff that happens to your character and everyone else. The observation of play for bystanders tosses out what's in your head, and just includes expressed desires and their resolution. After-the-fact observations might well include passed notes, whispers, and the like that folks didn't know about at the time, depending on how the game gets recorded.

The story is what part of the experience you invest with significance. No participant takes away precisely the same story, and the odds are good that you will change your own story of the game over time. No game can hand you a story, because no game lives in your head along with you. What a game may do is offer advice and mechanics which help you create more desires and outcomes of a sort you're interested in - goose the data pool, that is, so that you're more likely to have stuff you're interested in to tell a story about. But the events are not the story, nor are your plans the story.

You rightly observe that your ideas of story can be applied to other entertainment media. A movie is simply a sequences of images, sounds and dialogue. No member of the audience takes away precisely the same story - each member of the audience invests particular sequences with significance.

However, The Thing is about a group of men in the Arctic battling against an alien menace and Three Colours: Blue is about a woman reacting to losing her husband and child in a car crash. You might have multiple interpretations of the story, but there is still the core story embedded in the images and sounds of the film.

The limitations placed by the work itself - in this case the role playing session or session - upon the number and scope of different stories will mean that only one story will be told, but in multiple versions.

I dunno. I've listened to folks describe the same movie and come away with wildly different impressions. Obviously literary critics end up reading wildly different things out of the same manuscript on a regular basis, and the reinterpretation of existing data is a major part of every humanities discipline. And this is assuming that everyone is in fact drawing on the same pool of data - if they forget something, or mingle in other things, it's anyone's guess what may emerge.

I suppose what I was trying to reach towards is that there is a core story involved, even if there can be different interpretations of it. So I might say for example: "The story of Clueless is the same as that of Emma. Ditto similar comments about Romeo & Juliet and West Side Story." or Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Cruel Intentions.

Same story, retold, modernised, told with a different perspective. Beowulf and the John Gardner novel Grendel really hits on the change of persepctive issue.

'Story' is a fairly loose word and there are some definitions of story that are applicable to what happens in the session itself. I would hold that these are susceptible to in-game mechanics. Conversely there are aspects of 'story' that happen at other levels, and trying to attach mechanics would be fruitless.

Oh! Sure, if you define story loosely enough to cover modernization and remake and stuff, then I've got no disagreement. And I think there are some definite merits to doing so.

I've got a web page which treats the Terry Gilliam/Bruce Willis film 12 Monkeys as if it were a time travel film. I get a lot of mail about it. Most of the people who write to me also treat it as a time travel film. They argue with me about details of my analysis--whether this movie demonstrates a fixed time theory, whether the woman on the plane has traveled from the future, whether the virus would have been released by Dr. Peters had Cole not traveled to the past, stuff like that. Some just thank me for explaining it so well. However, every once in a while I get a letter from someone who says that 12 Monkeys is not a time travel film. I've been told that it is actually:

• the delusions of James Cole, an inmate in an asylum in the late twentieth century;• the delusions of James Cole, a mentally unbalanced resident of an underground complex in the mid twenty-first century;• a retelling of ancient Egyptian mythology not intended to be understood as real at all but as a poetic presentation of the relationships between Egyptian deities--

Well, those are the ones that leap to mind. So it seems that it's possible for a million people to watch the same movie and not come away with the same basic story--but does this mean that 12 Monkeys is not a time travel story? Almost everyone who sees it believes that James Cole is traveling between the future and the present. Anyone who does not believe that will concede that he appears to be traveling between the future and the present, and will either argue that this is his delusion or that he doesn't exist and it's all a parable--which still leaves us with a time travel story, albeit one that is supposed to be understood as fictional even within its own frame. The story is about time travel, and people agree about the events presented far more than they disagree.

On the same site, I've recently added a page addressing the Tom Cruse film Minority Report. I address it initially as if it were a time travel film, and ultimately argue that it is not, that no one sees the future and no future information is transmitted to the past at any time. One of my site's regular readers heard that I was working on such a page and asked why I was wasting my time on a movie that had nothing to do with time; when he read the page, he understood. Yet some people think it's a time travel film, that the psychics see "the future". Perhaps in this case we've got a confusion because the film is a bit unclear about what is really happening, requiring the viewer to fill in a lot more gaps with his assumptions. That, though, suggests that the story is only partially told, and that the viewer must tell himself the story based on the pieces he's been presented.

So perhaps in many role playing games, we have a sequence of events that tell part of a story, and between the participants the gaps are filled either by exposition (the referee who ties the actions of his players into a story by creating the bits they don't know) or by individual reconstruction (the players who write character journals in which they tell stories that expand beyond what was obvious in play). Other games actually do tell complete stories, such that everyone who came away from the table would know the story that was told. They would all tell the same story. They certainly would do so in different words, but in the end each would recognize it as the same story.

As to perspective, well, that happens. Some years back as I passed through a yellow blinking light in a fifty mile per hour zone, the elderly woman at the stopsign on my left suddenly slammed her foot to the floor and, despite my best efforts to get out of her way, smashed my left rear corner, spun around, and destroyed her front end on the telephone pole that had been on my left and her left before we had entered the intersection. Her daughter, apparently in another car behind her, rushed over to see if she was alright, and as she got out of the car she said, "I don't know how that young man managed to hit me." The daughter said, "Yes, mom." Perhaps being inside the events demands that we see things from individual viewpoints; yet apart from the old woman and her daughter, it was clear to everyone else at that intersection that she had hit me.

I suppose, though, Bruce, that the question is,

what did you mean when you wrote: No participant takes away precisely the same story....

precisely the same story

"Precise" is a trouble-making word here, and I should use another. How about "substantial" agreement or something of the sort? I mean to suggest a spectrum from agreement as to major things that did or didn't happen in play and passing on to shading about which individual bits were significant, whether something was cool or just useful, and so on. I'm also thinking of the possibilities for divergent experience in LARP, PBM/PBEM, and other kinds of gaming where the basic experience differs significantly even though the characters are all in some meaningful sense in the same game.

Bruce Baugh wrote:
...What a game may do is offer advice and mechanics which help you create more desires and outcomes of a sort you're interested in - goose the data pool, that is, so that you're more likely to have stuff you're interested in to tell a story about. But the events are not the story, nor are your plans the story.

Bruce Baugh wrote: "Precise" is a trouble-making word here, and I should use another. How about "substantial" agreement or something of the sort? I mean to suggest a spectrum from agreement as to major things that did or didn't happen in play and passing on to shading about which individual bits were significant, whether something was cool or just useful, and so on. I'm also thinking of the possibilities for divergent experience in LARP, PBM/PBEM, and other kinds of gaming where the basic experience differs significantly even though the characters are all in some meaningful sense in the same game.

Which, from that angle puts the actual roleplaying session into the category of 'an experience' instead of 'a story'. You're not trying to create a piece of media, but a piece of life - how Simmy is that?

deadpanbob wrote: I think that this issue IS important, in so far as providing such mechanics give permission to the players and GM's to engage in a kind of power sharing, that in my opinion, provides an even richer data pool that increases the chances that the participants will all walk away with enough 'stuff' to consturct a good personal story from.

I'm curious to see you thoughts on this.

Zamiel wrote: "Simmy?" How is the recognition of the fact that a roleplaying game IS, in fact, an experience (composed of a series of experiences) "simmy?" That's a confusion of the medium for the message in the most egregious of ways, willfully and with malice aforethought.

The definition of Narrativism is that the player be allowed to make decisions that are pertinent to him, the player (not the character, neccessarily), in terms of emotionally compelling material. Thus, Narrativism points out precisely that "Story" by it's definition is metagame.

The difference, if any, between what you describe and Narrativism, is that with Narrativism, the story is created in-game, by concentrating on what makes a good story for the players moment by moment. Instead of looking back at play, and assembling the story from elements that were of interest, all the elements that occur are what would be assembled post play.

Now, that doesn't mean that all Narrativism creates all "story" all the time. Mixed in with play are Sim events. But what the player demanding Narrativism wants is the ability to be able to create story whenever they feel like it.

As a possible tangent, note that this does not in any way mean that a player has to be able to influence anything in the game besides their character. The "traditional" power split can remain for the most part in Narrativism. What cannot be controlled by the GM, however, are the answers to the relevant questions. The player must be free to choose any direction to go on any decision of moral weight to the character.

This is the area often reserved for the GM. The "right" to manipulate the environment in such a way as to be able to control the story. To promote Narrativism, the GM must nevr use this power to take away player control of such decisions.

Mike

Hi,

I think that some terms used in narratology and literary reception theory/phenomenology of reading could be useful. These are basic consepts that have been renamed a dozen times by various scholars. I hvae chosen the words arbitarily from the tradition and I know the concepts have other names for them also. By this post I am NOT saying that you use the word story in a wrong way. I just want to contribute by suggesting a clerarer terminology.

Story = a fictional (imaginary, pretended) world with a temporal dimension (events). The event-matter of the narrative. This includes also all the inner worlds of characters.

Discourse = the representation of the story. In a novel this is what is written on the pages. In a RPG this includes the in-game narrative discourse and in-character dialog and possibly stuff like maps and illustrations.

Concretization = the individual reading of a work of art (novel, RPG etc.). This is what the reader/player gets when he uses his imagination and interpretation to fill in the gaps of the discourse.

Some interesting debates:

Which is first story or discourse?
- No consensus here. I would say that if you are the author then story will come before discourse but if you are the reader then you contruct the story from the discourse.

What is the difference between story and concretization?
First of all concretization includes also other stuff than just the fictional event-matter. Concretization is the "meaning" of the text which emerges in the mind of the reader. Not just events and characters but interpretation also. (LoR is about hobbits and elves but it is also about courage and the nature of good and evil.)

It is also arguable that you cannot have story without concretization because concretization is automatic during the reading of the discourse. However it makes sense that you must have something to tell about before you can tell anything. Maybe it is best to associate the term story with player as author and concretization with player as reciever (reader).

Bruce Baugh wrote:
I suspect, though I do not feel deeply confident about saying this for sure yet, that when players and GM think about the story of the game as something about the game rather than something in the game, power-sharing of this sort becomes easier. When the GM realizes that neither the setting nor the plots and plans are the story, then there are fewer hang-ups there. Obviously this is not the only reason to favor power-sharing, since people discuss it for other reasons. QED. :) But it's one of the reasons I personally find it interesting and fun.

Johannes wrote:
Story = a fictional (imaginary, pretended) world with a temporal dimension (events). The event-matter of the narrative. This includes also all the inner worlds of characters.

Discourse = the representation of the story. In a novel this is what is written on the pages. In a RPG this includes the in-game narrative discourse and in-character dialog and possibly stuff like maps and illustrations.

Concretization = the individual reading of a work of art (novel, RPG etc.). This is what the reader/player gets when he uses his imagination and interpretation to fill in the gaps of the discourse.

To illustrate a point about the interpretation of events, I'd like to point folks at this way cool page about a checkerboard illusion - it shows how much of what we deal with is things we do to the world rather than properties of the world itself.

My personal feeling is that there's a big warning sign of trouble when folks feel that they ought not use words like "story". The gaming public at large will continue to do so, for one thing, and I want to talk to gamers at large about what it is we do when we game. Hence my efforts to use an absolute minimum of jargon, and to shape the usage of common words in directions that I think a lot of the folks I share a hobby with can grasp with minimal effort. There is, obviously, a place for far more specialized thinking and analysis - I'm drawing on rather jargon-laden work in history, literature, philosophy, and biology for this kind of thing. But I'm happiest in the role of synthesizer and popularizer.

That sounds fine. What would you suggest is the definition of Story that most RPG players will be able to grok best? What do they mean when they say story?

Mike

Bruce Baugh wrote: To illustrate a point about the interpretation of events, I'd like to point folks at this way cool page about a checkerboard illusion - it shows how much of what we deal with is things we do to the world rather than properties of the world itself.

Mike, I think that most gamers mean something very much like this when they talk about the story of a game:

Everything that happened that led up to an interesting climax - or led up to its absence, if the game fizzled - and any incidentals that strike the teller as interesting or cool or otherwise memorable. It usually includes however the game got started, even if those early events don't bear much on what happened later, and how the game ended, if it's not still going on.

I believe that to most "story-oriented" gamers Story is a chain of caused events that have significance from the PoV of their characters. (Here I use tha word Story in a more general sense than above trying to illustrate what people usually mean by it. )

Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan has a paraphrased it by saying that a change in the thruth values of the fictional world (an event) is plot-functional if and only if it causes a change in the thruth values of the inner world(s) of at least one character.

Here's an example that will clarify the modal jargon of Ryan:

1 GM describes that a leaf falls from a tree.
2 GM describes that a leaf falls from a tree and a PC realizes that she will also have to die some day - like the falling leaf.

See the difference? 1 is not plot-functional and 2 is. The events themselves are not enough to make a plot. It is usually up to each individual player to make a story out of the events. Events are produced collectively in discourse but they become a story in the private concretization. Prototypical GM regulates the discourse like a benevolent dictator but he rarely has power over the inner worlds of the chracters which rarely even directly surface in the discourse.

Games with lots of personal relations and social interaction offer themselves to plot-significance easily because social life is about the conflict, communication and change of inner worlds. That's why these games are felt to be more story-like. Dungeon crawling on the other hand rarely puts the inner worlds of the characters on the stake. Conflict is moslty external and physical. That's why hack n' slash is not felt to be story-like even if it usually involves lots of caused events.

Sorry for bringing in more jargon...

Johannes wrote: Games with lots of personal relations and social interaction offer themselves to plot-significance easily because social life is about the conflict, communication and change of inner worlds. That's why these games are felt to be more story-like. Dungeon crawling on the other hand rarely puts the inner worlds of the characters on the stake. Conflict is moslty external and physical. That's why hack n' slash is not felt to be story-like even if it usually involves lots of caused events.

In films, in the absence of a voice-over or similar device, you never get to see the inner worlds of the characters. At all. You see what the characters do, and how they react to things, but these are all external. Any assertion about the "inner life of film characters" is inference.

So the claim that events are plot-functional rests on inference of a change in the inner world of the character drawn from their actions, speech, facial expressions. Hence any event is plot-functional that we can argue is plot-functional. If that circularity is bad, it gets worse in gaming.

In role playing we get to say what is and isn't important to the inner lives of our characters. In author stance this is overt and explicit; in actor stance this is covert and implicit. Thus, whatever we assert is plot-functional is plot-functional.

I'm going to suggest that we're going down a blind alley making appeals to literary theory or cognitive theory, especially if we're pulling jargn in. For the taxonomy to be useful, it needs to be accessible.

Hello all,

Interesting thread. Some thoughts follow.

"Story" in roleplaying games is, due to the number of variables engaged, an emergent property. The players as characters all will have, of necessity, differing viewpoints on the story, much as multiple POV characters in a nove. However, the added dimensions include (1) the player viewpoint suspended over the character viewpoint, and (2) the dance of the various narrative voices and resolution mechanics in controlling the development of events. Every observer to the game will come away with a different take on the story. To the extent common perception of events create a narrative skeleton, you have a "core" story.

Depending on the transparency and maturity of the group, you can absolutely have access to internal character and player voice and motivation as part of the story development, but for these elements to become story, I think the group needs to be intentional or at least consciously aware regarding characterization and audience mode.

The dungeon-style game resembles a wargame more than a story per se. There's no intent to produce a try-fail cycle, little connection to character motives beyond loot-kill-steal, no emphasis on characters undergoing emotional or spiritual changes, no increase in stakes as events go forward. The characters remain static pieces except for their "will to power." Players in these games may look back and put the events into a retrospective narrative framework as they communicate their experiences to other people, but that's less about an in-game story and more about post hoc anecdotal interpretation.

So I suggest this emergent quality of "story" can be intentionally invoked via conscious play and mechanics optimized to facilitate that emergence. Further, I think it obvious that different layers and angles of story result from the viewpoint differences of character/player, GM/player, playerA/playerB. For story to exist contemporaneous with play, I would expect the group members to be aware of both an evolving structure and the significance of their decisions on that evolution, AND that the decisions and their outcome are significant to the PLAYERS and GM. Ron's jazz analogy evokes some parallels, with "melody" equating to what I've called "structure," "musician" equating to "player," and "instrument" equating to "character."

Getting deeper into definition, here is my somewhat lumpy suggestion: an RPG story is an emergent narrative structure resulting from a sequence of events holding significance to players AND characters, wherein escalating tension and character growth can be seen and intentionally evoked by players as events proceed toward a resolution of the significant conflicts raised during play.

Best,

Blake

I think it's extremely unwise to overlook the story possibilities in dungeon-crawling. Here are our heroes, who start off at 1st level with more determination than ability. These are heroes! Or at least they've got the potential to be. Here is a mysterious and threatening environment. Here are monsters. Bad monsters! And they get worse the further you go!

Drawing on Scott McCloud's notion of "iconic" characters from Understanding Comics, I'd say that this is a setup that is really, really easy for a lot of players to identify with and to derive satisfaction from. The characters are detailed in capability but not in (so to speak) their features, which makes it easy for players to write themselves into that equipment and those abilities. There's a reason that so many dungeon-crawlers speak of their experiences in the first person rather than the third when they're telling their frienda bout the game later - there really is an immediacy there.

To the extent that games support and encourage the development for more nuanced personalities, we actually make this particular kind of identification harder and have to compensate for it with other satisfactions. In the meantime, there they are having exciting times in exotic places and doing cool stuff, and I'd call that success in building stories. Simple, usually - though not always, there are some quite sophisticated plots in dungeon crawls these days, with room for moral ambiguity, significantly different outcomes in response to different character choices (not just happenstance of dice, actual IC choices), and so on - but engaging. And that matters to me, when I think about the story potential in gaming. I want folks to have that much fun, in more dimensions.

Blake Hutchins wrote: The dungeon-style game resembles a wargame more than a story per se. There's no intent to produce a try-fail cycle, little connection to character motives beyond loot-kill-steal, no emphasis on characters undergoing emotional or spiritual changes, no increase in stakes as events go forward. The characters remain static pieces except for their "will to power." Players in these games may look back and put the events into a retrospective narrative framework as they communicate their experiences to other people, but that's less about an in-game story and more about post hoc anecdotal interpretation.

Getting deeper into definition, here is my somewhat lumpy suggestion: an RPG story is an emergent narrative structure resulting from a sequence of events holding significance to players AND characters, wherein escalating tension and character growth can be seen and intentionally evoked by players as events proceed toward a resolution of the significant conflicts raised during play.

Zamiel,

the point I think Blake is trying to make, is that these events were not stories until they were told later (and you're agreeing this, as far as I can tell). They weren't stories as they happened, just events. They had story thrust upon them retroactively, when they were recounted.

It's the difference between a person relating an anecdote, and a person setting down to write a play that addresses a theme.

The writers of Saving Private Ryan might have set out to write a story that threw into sharp relief the question "What is one man's life worth?", they probably didn't run a tactical scenario and work out the probability of the main characters dying.

Both can produce the resulting tale, but only one aimed to do it from the start.

You can apply the same theory to a roleplaying session. You can have the events happening from the result of a tactical game or you can have the thematic question in mind at all times, grounded in the system and directing flow of play towards dealing with that question.


-Matt

Matt, writers like Peter Straub and film makers like Mike Leigh sit down with the intent to produce drama but without any firm sense of how things will go. And clearly, judging from their reception by readers and viewers, they succeed. Scripting is demonstrably not necessary for the achievement of rich and satisfying work. And I've been suggesting that in any event planned and crafted works don't have an innate "story" which trumps all other possible stories in them; every reader creates their own story in the act of reading or viewing, sharing some things with creative intent, adding others of their own. Zamiel has alluded to the extent to which all memory works this way, and the body of study about perceptual mechanisms is at this point very large and well-established. Nothing in the nature of the dungeon crawl makes it any less suitable fodder for storytelling than other types of gaming situations, as nearly as I can tell.

Like Zamiel, I think we're seeing personal preferences for some kinds of art conflated with thoughts abut what's possible or desirable overall.

Bruce and Zamiel (mostly Zamiel),

Let me offer a couple of points of clarification before I answer the "it's all story" argument.

1. I did not assert that dungeon crawls rule out story. Please parse exactly what I wrote. The players may imagine their characters to be heroes, but the prototypical dungeon crawl offers players tactical decisions to the exclusion of anything else. While these types of decisions can certainly be story-significant in the proper context, in the context of dungeon crawls, it is my contention they don't constitute "story." The players may indeed view their avatars as heroes and enjoy the personalized tactical challenges from gameplay, but I think story in this case is only created after the fact via telling and embellishing one's recollections of play to another person. This point is purely anecdotal: most of the conversations I've heard about this style of play are less about, "... and then Father Pincus realized his faith in Flurlangegghl was reawakened, which allowed him to BLAH," and more like, "...and then I made my saving throw against BLAH and got off my Wompous Blessing of Flurlangegghl...." I don't think the "post hoc story" distinction is unreasonable. It's like the difference between telling a story and telling someone what happened when you went to the store.

2. I am aware that some dungeon style adventures, particularly in recent years, have increased the complexity of the encounters and the "dungeon" setting, adding social or political dimensions to raise the stakes and move the context beyond loot-kill-steal. However, I think this kind of effort underlines my contention about the lack of satisifying story structure in the baseline dungeon crawl and shows the desire to embed more opportunities for "plot-based" character growth (as opposed to leveling up). I can sure see a lot of interesting story situations with some resemblance to dungeon crawls (confined environment, tactical threats resolved via combat and stealth) - and I've run some, as has probably anyone who has run a session of Shadowrun.

3. Some of my best friends are 3E fans and enjoy the hell out of dungeon crawl style play. More power to them. I also hear great things about Rune. I think some of these games produce in-game stories and some are little more than dressed up tactical exercises - which is fine, but the latter are not stories. The suggestion that I've argued no one should like dungeon crawls misreads my post very badly, and it boggles the heck out of me.

Now to the meat of the response:

First, I'm puzzled by the assertion that I must hate war stories. If I dislike dungeon crawls, and dungeon crawls focus on combat, then I must dislike any kind of story that features combat as a central experience, and therefore I must hate war stories, of which there are a plethora of excellent works in literature and film. This line of reasoning doesn't make sense. It assumes bias on my part and then expands that bias to reach a conclusion about works that no one would possibly confuse with the original idea. The corollary that dungeon crawls are equivalent kinds of stories to Saving Private Ryan seems like a stretch to me. By the same token, a game of Chess would qualify as a story under this thinking. Actually, any game that uses non-abstract pieces makes story with this definition. Even Poker would do so if the player imagines himself to be, say, an Old West gambler. I have to disagree and say this definition is overbroad in the extreme.

What this analysis tells me is that we have vastly different criteria on what makes a story. If "story" is generalized to be anything a person deems a story, then we can forget about crafting a common definition. A game of Diplomacy doesn't tell a story. One can, after the fact, tell a story about the game of Diplomacy one played, but that doesn't make the events of the game a story, at least not in my view. As a writer, I conceive of story as a sequence of events that presents a character in a setting with a problem to overcome, along with some significant stakes that depend on the outcome of the problem. The character attempts to address the problem, but meets with failure or complication. Eventually, the character comes to some insight about the problem and makes a final attempt that either succeeds or fails in the course of some kind of climactic confrontation. That final insight usually involves some kind of emotional or spiritual growth and a decision that flows from the resulting new perspective.

I've just described a prototypical story structure using a try-fail cycle. It doesn't map perfectly to roleplaying games because RP games have a decentralized structure compared to the typical story in literature or film, with many authors/directors/actors contributing to the whole. There are also issues about multiple perspective. Players (and I include GM here for this part of the discussion) are simultaneously creators and audience, most often interacting through the agency of their characters under the guidance of the rules and the social contract.

So my contention is that wargames don't produce story. The unit that holds out on the hill is a piece and thought of as a piece. There's no question about it being a character with its own agenda, there's no character growth, and to the extent there's a try-fail cycle, it's purely tactical. If you look at war stories in film, the actual themes and issues aren't about who wins or loses, especially in the historical context where we know damn well how it comes out. War stories - the great ones - offer commentary on the human spirit, about suffering, about courage, about moral choice, about barbarity, about hope, about faith, about love and tragedy and coming of age and duty and nationalism and - well, you get the idea. Sure, the uncertainty about major characters' survival is an important source of tension, especially when you see something like Das Boot or Enemy at the Gate. But films and stories like that don't move their characters around like pieces on the board. I can't imagine coming away from a game of Tactics II or Chess and saying, "What a great story." Wargames don't have characters; they have pieces. A player may affix personality to a piece, but that imaginative act doesn't make it a character, and it doesn't transform a wargame into a narrative. Nor does a wargame piece undergo "character growth." If I win a game of Chess, my surviving rook isn't a better rook for it. The rook made no decisions, and I'm not even close to identifying myself as the noble rook. Character growth is a lot more than "perceptual surprise," whatever that means.

But let's take a more specific example and look at Black Hawk Down. BHD was, in large part, a story about the limitations of modern military power, focusing on a force trapped in hostile territory and pitted against vastly superior numbers under confusing circumstances. It was about survival, and it was about leadership and the kinds of erroneous strategic assumptions that can cause incredible havoc. It was about cultural differences. It was about the difference between "elite" troops and the more "average" grunts. It was, you might say, very much about the fog of war. I'd call very little of it simplistic. In fact, it was a hideously complex situation from start to finish. And it turned out to be a hell of a story - because the original events in Somalia were compiled and written into a book, which was then made into a film, both of which presented it as a story, not a documentary.

So let's review the basic differences between wargame and story, at least on my level. Story has the components of plot, character, protagonist, antagonist, situation, problem, try-fail sequence, character growth, resolution as an outcome of growth. The character growth doesn't need to be profound, incidentally, and some stories focus on showing how the character doesn't grow - in my experience, these are almost all tragedies, because the reader/viewer gets to see how the character's growth would have made the story world a better place, had the character actually given in to change. Wargame has pieces, exclusively tactical decisions, the player controlling multiple pieces, a board/map, victory conditions, player v. player contest.

Another point to consider is that the discussions of roleplaying game and story strike me as being concerned with conscious creation or experience of "story" during play, not after play is done. Any RP experience can be retrofitted into a "story" if someone applies a broad enough definition, but that makes the whole story thing sort of pointless in the first place, doesn't it?

Finally some little disclaimers I shouldn't have to put out there, but will do for the sake of making sure this "bias" thing goes to its grave.

Disclaimer #1: Wargames are fine and good. Lots of people enjoy them. Lots of very sharp people. Ever looked at the rules for Squad Leader? I don't have the fortitude to absorb them; they frighten the bejeezsus out of me.

Disclaimer #2: Dungeon crawls are fine and good. As I wrote above, lots of my friends love 'em to death and subsequent resurrection.

Disclaimer #3: Stories are fine and good. Lots of folks like 'em.

Thanks for the discussion, folks.

Best,

Blake

Blake, when you say that you don't think of "war stories" as "stories", then I do read that as a matter of taste being reified.

Also, it's by no means true that dungeon crawls are purely tactical exercise. Ever since I started roleplaying at all, I've seen folks dealing with personality, alignment, and other matters besides optimized efficiency for combat and related tasks. Other games do a much better job of supporting it than D&D, but people have always done it, in varying degrees of regularity and reliability, and it looms large in a lot of gamers' stories about their games.

Blake Hutchins wrote: So my contention is that wargames don't produce story.

>I also think that you've stated one of the reasons why
>some prominent GO contributors insist that they are
>Narrativist (usually in addition to Simulationist) - they
>mistake DELIVERING a story to their players for
>CREATING a story WITH their players.

I've always had difficulty with the (mis?)intrepretation of Narativist=story-focused and others=NOT story-focused, because I can see even the most, say, Simulationist (by conventional evaluation) game as story-focused.

I'm thinking WAY back, to my junior high school wargaming days, before we ordered the D&D box out of the back of S&T or The General or whatever it was. And for me (*not* all wargame players I knew then or have known since would agree), the BEST thing about wargames was when there was a cool story that "happened" while playing. Like, the one and only unit that could possibly stop the infantry assault happened to be the one unit you hadn't done anything with that turn. I thought this was so cool I'd actually work on making such things happen, even if it wasn't neccessarily the best game strategy - always use the same group of combat engineers in an assault, so that they got "veteran" status and I could call 'em the "Fightin' 52nd" or whatever, and now they're more likely to "happen" into a good story situation (desperate assualt on the enemy fortification - SUCCESFUL assualt preferred, both in story and gamist terms here :smile: - though if you fail, you might end up with a "Charge of the Light Brigade" story, which was cool too).

Call that an Author stance, but tightly restricted, and we LIKED it that way . . . but I wander.

In addition to explaining why I got hooked on D&D and play far more RPGs than wargames in the years since, I think this might relate to the relationship between simulation/rules and story that Ron alludes to. Somehow, it was IMPORTANT that the unit was just the same as any other at the start - it got no special treatment, except maybe the (entirely within the rules) decisions I made regarding it. The goal is the story, but if you get there without going through (in this case) a rigorous simulation, the story doesn't feel as . . authentic? good? right?

Hello Bruce,

Where in the name of heaven have I said war stories aren't stories? Unless you mean the kind of "war stories" when one person tells another about his game, as opposed to the Black Hawk Down style of story. If that's what you're saying I'm saying, then yeah, I have a narrower definition of story than you do for purposes of this discussion - but remember, we were talking about creating story in roleplaying games. Suddenly it's about anything someone casts as a story.

If I understand you correctly, a "war story" about a game of Parcheesi or softball would qualify as a bona fide story. Maybe I'm on the wrong foot here. If everything put into a narrative framework after the fact becomes a story, then the definition of story in the first place becomes a species of tautology, doesn't it? Sort of like saying "everything is art." The philosopher in me says, "Cool." The lawyer in me says, "Hey, that's useless for purposes of arriving at anything concrete on this thread." Storytelling can be a much broader activity than roleplaying games, of course. I recognize that. When you take things out of the context of RPGs or writing short stories, novels, or screenplays, I would call a fish story or a war story a "story." I've read plenty of vignettes, for that matter, and I don't think they're stories either.

It looks as though some of us are applying a very broad definition of story whereas others are using a narrower definition. I don't see that as reification; that's a term that applies equally well to the tastes of the broad definition camp.

And I guess I'm now outright baffled at the continuing assertions that I'm opposed to dungeon crawls. I don't disagree with you about dungeon crawls permitting non-combat dimensions - but that's not how they're designed. If your contention is that there are groups who make great stories and have marvelous roleplaying experiences with dungeon crawl playing, then... OK. I'm not ruling that out, and I'm not saying it's better or worse play than the approach I take in my games. I think the thrust of the rules, however, drives toward wargaming and a persistent tactical stance. Groups that produce non-tactical play under those circumstances, are, in my opinion, engaged in GNS drift (not to open another can of worms, but there it is).

However, if your assertion is essentially, "Hell, any group can take whatever rules there are, good, bad, or ugly, and produce functional, satisfying play with story," then it looks like you're ultimately saying system doesn't matter. I may be way off on this, but that's what it looks like.

I'll amend some of my assertion about wargames, as Gordon's post reminded me of White Bear, Red Moon and Nomad Gods, the old Glorantha board games. Those produced a bit more of a story feel while we played, because all the pieces on the board were integrated into a mythology that was laid out in detail in the rulebook. So you didn't just conjure a fire spirit, you allied with Oakfed or Pole Star, and your tribe, whether it was the Sable Deer or the Morokanth, had some kind of story behind it. I still don't think of those games as stories, but I can certainly remember grafting a much richer context onto my pieces.

In the end, guys, we may have to agree to disagree about the scope of the definition of story. As Gordon said, the term can be pretty slippery.

Best,

Blake

Zamiel wrote:

Yes, but doesn't that then directly point to this as, not only a false, but unduly pejorative stance as regards "dungeon crawling?"
---snip---
After all, traditionally, crawling dungeons is done for the express purpose of creating truth-value changes in the world. My character gains a new toy. My character gains a level. My character kills the monster. My character stops the Big Bad. All of these are very completely and directly changes in the truth-values in a character's experience and PoV. In fact, that change in innate status is why people pursue them.

Blake, I'm saying that rules simply don't tell the whole story about how people actually do play roleplayng games. I'm saying that in my experience, professional and personal, characterization and considerations not well addressed at all in the rules do in fact loom large in many D&D campaigns. Likewise with Rifts and other games where the overwhelming focus of the rules is matters of tactical efficiency. (I'd also say that in many cases, games which give substantial space to personality, genre, and the like end up being played with minimal characterization and lots of what amounts to wargaming.)

It's good when rules support things the designers are interested in, and good when designers try things I want to play, he said with total objectivity. :) But we can't just look at the rules to assess how games work in practice, and my concern as a designer and writer is in what people actually do and why they do it. This is particularly true in cases where I find what the rules detail not very interesting; I have to make extra effort to overcome my own prejudices.

I should restate some of those prejudices here. I find the GNS and related taxonomy profoundly uninteresting - it doesn't seem to correspond to anything I care about very much as a player or author or designer. I also find it very much unnecessarily heavy in jargon. In posts like the one at the start of this thread, I am quite deliberately out to assemble a collection of obsrevations that do correspond with what I see about how gamers at large play and what I find of personal and professonal concern, and to do so with an absolute bare minimum of jargon. "Can I persuade people to accept these terms?" is a perennial concern of mine, since just as I write my games to be played, I do my theorizing to get used as widely as possible. I am in this sense very much a populist.

(Someone can point out that the theorizing I'm dismissing does lead to games I praise and like. It's true, too. Nor do I have a good answer beyond the true but not terribly helpful insight that inspiration turns up in the darnedest places. I also hedge my bets in part by identifying what I consider my own conceptual blind spots, and distinguishing between "what I find of value to me" and "what I assert is of any value to anyone".)

Johannes wrote: The point is that some event structures are more productive in provoking a change in inner worlds than others. The second point is that we feel some constructs to be more story-like than others and this theory is very good at explaining why.

Very vigorous nods of agreement and shouts of "What he said!", with pointing at John's post there. "What kind of story is this?" is a crucially important question, and "What kind of story do I want?" can take the game off in a mess o' different directions.

Hi Bruce,

We're in complete agreement about the statement that rules do not cover all the personality and characteristic aspects of play - the whole messy and wonderful human dimension - and that these aspects absolutely loom large in how a game unfolds. Likewise we agree enthusiastically on John's last comment about "what kind of story are you trying to emulate?" - which, incidentally, may also reconcile our use of different definitions of "story."

I find the GNS theory a useful diagnostic tool, but I certainly don't expect it to work for everyone, and I don't need or seek any agreement on its validity from anyone. If it's not your cuppa, that's fine by me.

Thanks for the responses. I've enjoyed the exchange. Most salutary to scrub the rust off the gray matter.

Best,

Blake

Bruce,

I recognize that you're not particularly invested nor interested in many of the specific theories presented here on the Forge (GNS, stances, etc.)

So, it's with that respect (and respect to you and your obviously though-out opinions), and with the acknowledgement that I'm far, far from the resident expert on these that I offer up my comments.

Blake, I'm saying that rules simply don't tell the whole story about how people actually do play roleplayng games. I'm saying that in my experience, professional and personal, characterization and considerations not well addressed at all in the rules do in fact loom large in many D&D campaigns. Likewise with Rifts and other games where the overwhelming focus of the rules is matters of tactical efficiency. (I'd also say that in many cases, games which give substantial space to personality, genre, and the like end up being played with minimal characterization and lots of what amounts to wargaming.)

Very vigorous nods of agreement and shouts of "What he said!", with pointing at John's post there. "What kind of story is this?" is a crucially important question, and "What kind of story do I want?" can take the game off in a mess o' different directions.

Matt, this post should be saved and enshrined somewhere.

Matt, I don't want to get snarky about this. I fear it'll come off sounding worse than I intend it - it would sound better even on the phone, let alone in person, where you could get the context for it. That said...

Yes, I do think I'm better informed about what gamers at large are up to. I was very fortunate to connect with the amateur press scene literally the same time I bought my first RPG, back in 1977, and I've been doing this professionally for most of a decade. I have the benefit of feedback from my own customers and also of public and private exchanges with other folks in the business and with intelligent observers outside da biz (the occasional academic studying the field, and so on). I can draw on sales data, the accounts of good retailers, convention-related data, and whole mess of personal interactions. I try never to claim more certainty than I have, but I do believe that I have more grist for the mill than most people commenting on games.

If it were up to it me, a lot of the information that is now private would be public. I wish a lot more retailers, distributors, and publishers followed the practice of discussing their sales in public. Simply doing that would upset a lot of assumptions as radically as the arrival of SoundScan data did for the record business - there are games nobody outside their communities of players thinks much of which sell very well, and there are highly touted games which are rapidly converging with the upper end of PDF sales despite all the noise. I also wish there were more good analytical studies of what gamers say when given the opportunity to have their say for a careful recover. However, there it is; some data's locked up and some is just scattered.

(Note that I do not claim to have a better understanding of all parts of gaming. There are areas from d20 publishing to, well, here, that I'm very much unfamiliar with. I know some things, guess some, and have no clue about some. Sometimes I'm happy even to know in general terms what it is I don't know.)

I will never say that the fact that an approach is unpopular means it's bad. I mean, two of my favorite RPGs ever are Everway and Over The Edge, just for starters. But I have personal benchmarks for what constitutes a viable audience, and I do have the missionary zeal to improve the masses' gaming. I like working, therefore, with popular setups and pushing them in various directions, getting the chance to introduce a whole mess of folks to unfamiliar concepts and (if I do it right) make it cool for them. This is certainly not the only way or reason to work. It's what I do, and it strongly influences what kinds of analysis I find interesting or useful.

Bruce, first off, you're not being snarky at all, nevermind that I purport to be a thick-skinned fellow.

I went back a read, and re-read your posts (and other) in this thread, really giving this some serious thought. My reply follows after I quote you from an earlier post below. I know I'm going to miss about 18 points, but hopefully we can keep discussing and walk away with something learned from one another.

The gaming public at large will continue to do so, for one thing, and I want to talk to gamers at large about what it is we do when we game.

Bruce, I'd like to offer up another observation that helps explain where I'm coming from. In this discussion, I'm starting to see a conflict emerge between the "industry" and the "hobby." I see the hobby -- the thing that is "gaming" -- as a large thing. Within that large thing is nestled another thing that is the "industry."

Now, I've been on lost of email lists and d-groups in which people deeply involved in the industry decry any notion that the hobby is anything but an industry. They become offended when people seem to belittle their profession as "just a hobby" and also become incensed that the industry doesn't deliver to them a livable wage.

To which my reply is that no one deserves a paycheck (and, of course, you Bruce have not voiced this complaint here or elsewhere to my knowledge.). If you can earn one in an industry related to a hobby you love, great. But that industry, that thing that delivers your paycheck is not all of the thing that is the hobby.

What I'm getting at is this, Bruce. You're interested in the majority of gamers, by which I think you mean the bulk of the hobby that pays for product on which you work. You're interested in examining the hobby, sure, but you're also strongly interested in bettering and improving the industry. It is your paycheck first, your hobby second. Heck, it might even be your hobby first, your paycheck second. Regardless, to me it is my hobby first, and my paycheck not a whit.

I think this is the nature of some of our disconnect. I'm passionately interested in this hobby, and I've observed you are, too. You're presumably passionate about the industry, as well, and I am passionately disinterested for a whole range of reasons (not the least having dipped my toe in those cold, cold waters). I consider my games, which I do indeed sell, as a hobby, one that on occasion pays for itself. I couldn't care less what industry folks think about that consideration, and I don't care much even what friends here at the Forge think about it. It is what it is.

Bruce,

Just a little big picture, which you may already see, but here I go.

Sometimes terms are used in discussion here absent of their clarifiers, sometimes because their clarifiers haven't been satisfactorily (is that a word?) defined yet. You can see from this thread how Story is defined by some more narrowly than you think is functional. That's because there is story (as you would define it - a replaying of important events in a pleasing order) which happens in roleplaying no matter what and could be considered outside of GNS. Then there is Story, which based on context almost always means Narrativist story (play that actually creates a fictional narrative front, in addition to any story that can be crafted out of the events later). Then you have a couple things that are not so clearly defined, Sim Story (what I took out of your definition, indentified as Sim by focusing on story in that manner) and Gamist Story (my definition would be the first person, non-character seperation - "I killed the blah, then I found the blah").

It reminds me a lot of Premise, which when stated without a clarifier almost always refers to Narrative Premise, even though Premise isn't unique to Narrativism (like Story). Why I think this happens is because there isn't a lot of point to discussing Premise or Story in a general sense, everybody agrees it happens.

So...When someone says VtM is incoherent because it doesn't actually promote story, they mean it doesn't promote the narrow definition of Narrativist Story (when it creates Sim Story just fine, and is actually a rather coherent Sim Game).

And...When The Impossible Thing is impossible it's because the narrow Narrativist definition of story is read into the text.

I hope this makes sense. When you take say, Gordon's, definition of story instead of yours and plug it into the VtM and Impossible Thing discussions maybe you can see what PoV some people took to the discussion. You do not under any circumstances have to agree with it, but it might make a little sense why the arguement existed in the first place.

Umm . . . is it just me, or is this thread REALLY meandering? Matt, I'm not sure why you think Bruce would "ignore the games Forge calls Narrativist" - I see no evidence that he is doing or would do such a thing. In fact, I've seen him explictly say elsewhere that he LIKES those games, thinks more people should check 'em out, and etc. - he just doesn't care for the label.

And - I guess a shared understanding of where folks are at regarding the industry/hobby as a whole is a good thing, as it can/does inform the rest of a person's thinking. I doubt we'll find a right answer, though. For what it's worth, I have MAJOR respect for the way Matt is thinking about this, but I can totally understand what Bruce is saying, too.

I would like to see a little more exploration of the ideas/language Bruce proposed in his initial post - frankly, I haven't been able to figure out the uses/implications of his structure yet. I'll re-read and see if something goes "a-ha!", but a return to that topic by others would also be cool by me :-)

Gordon

Gordon C. Landis wrote: Umm . . . is it just me, or is this thread REALLY meandering? Matt, I'm not sure why you think Bruce would "ignore the games Forge calls Narrativist" - I see no evidence that he is doing or would do such a thing. In fact, I've seen him explictly say elsewhere that he LIKES those games, thinks more people should check 'em out, and etc. - he just doesn't care for the label.

And - I guess a shared understanding of where folks are at regarding the industry/hobby as a whole is a good thing, as it can/does inform the rest of a person's thinking. I doubt we'll find a right answer, though. For what it's worth, I have MAJOR respect for the way Matt is thinking about this, but I can totally understand what Bruce is saying, too.

I would like to see a little more exploration of the ideas/language Bruce proposed in his initial post - frankly, I haven't been able to figure out the uses/implications of his structure yet. I'll re-read and see if something goes "a-ha!", but a return to that topic by others would also be cool by me :-)

Gordon

Matt,

So . . . you think Bruce's stuff doesn't cover Story Now, you see Bruce defending that by saying Story Now ain't important to most gamers, and you counter-claim "I disagree about how Bruce is characterizing most gamers." Am I understanding that right?

And Bruce - is "Story Now ain't important to most gamers" a fair statement of your claim?

In any case, my recommendation is - let's talk about resolving Bruce's story and Story Now, or just agree to disagree about whether Story Now matters. A "most gamers" converstation is, best as I can tell, doomed to failure - or at the very least, deserves treatment as a seperate issue.

Gordon

EDIT - added "Matt," to the top - don't know what happened to it the first time . . .

I strongly echo Gordon's point. The difference between my position and Bruce's seems very clearly to fall on the "Story Now" distinction.

Best,

Blake

First of all, I should note that I personally love "story now" games, and have ever since encountering efforts at them back in the late '70s.

Because they're so far outside the mainstream of gaming as a business, a lot of gamers have never encountered them. So their reactions vary, a lot. If I had to take a stab at an overall reaction, I'd say it tends to be something like "Cool! But can it sustain itself for a campaign as long as I want, and is there enough meat here for the level of detail I like?" But that's...really, really haphazardly guessed, with very little foundation.

The distinction between market and hobby is well-taken. Like I said, this is my job as well as my entertainment, and I'm looking for ways to diversify and strengthen what happens in the retail environment. If I ever act like this is the only goal worth having, I hereby authorize one assault by two full divisions of clown ninja. Particularly since I think that the existing retail customer base in at least partly doomed, and want a lot to spread gaming-related stuff into other audiences. Nonetheless, it's very true that commercial concerns are intimately woven together with matters of personal taste and aesthetics for me, and anyone's free to regard what I say as irrelevant to that degree.

(That is, by the way, not a sneer. What I have to say is irrelevant to some discussions.)

Note that the semi-definition I'm using of story at the start of this thread is not incompatible with mechanics aimed specifically at building the story as such in play. There's still a distinction between the events of play and their meaning to the participants, and since "story" does fit this latter and does apply regardless of the extent to which the mechanics do or do not have story concerns in mind, I feel comfortable keeping mine for the moment.

It's a fair cop!

Thanks for a pleasant and productive e-mail exchange, Matt. Now I have to figure out how best to write up some of the stuff we covered there.

Bruce Baugh wrote: Note that the semi-definition I'm using of story at the start of this thread is not incompatible with mechanics aimed specifically at building the story as such in play. There's still a distinction between the events of play and their meaning to the participants, and since "story" does fit this latter and does apply regardless of the extent to which the mechanics do or do not have story concerns in mind, I feel comfortable keeping mine for the moment.

Absolutely. I'm very much trying to think of a taxonomy that can encompass the whole range of styles of play I've encountered. Obviously that means working on quite a large canvas.

Bruce,

I think Story was abandoned as a functional term because of competing definitions. If people cannot agree on a broad definition that applies to all their personal definitions you can't really use the term effectively in discussion. I think your general definition solves that problem, for me anyway.

You might want to relook at Chapter 1 of the GNS Essay, specifically the definition of Premise that is addressed there. I think the plan is to start referring to this as Creative Agenda, because the word Premise is so important to Nar (don't quote me on this part). Using your definition of Story, a player's Creative Agenda will have a major influence on what they look back on and deem interesting enough to include in their Story, and their Exploration priorities should be the dominate elements in the Story.

Just a thought.