Object-Oriented Conversations

Last year I wrote a couple of essays wrestling with the concept of Narrative in tabletop RPGs. In the first, I waddled through the delineation of diegetic and non-diegetic objects, eventually arriving at a weak thesis: Narrative is the synthesis of the Game State interacting with the Imagined Space in response to the actions of the Players (to include the GM) over time. I delineated between a few broad categories of game to postulate whether players acted in the Imagined Space to initiate changes in the Game State or vice versa. I'll return to this idea shortly! In the second, I proposed that Narrative in tabletop games is a historiographic process of fact creation, fact assembly, fact retrieval, and retrospective significance. In the third, I looked at the relationship between "table" structure and the types of narrative conflict that are or are not enabled by those play structures. These three meditations were useful stumbles into the theoryslop space because they inspired me to…