Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Skarr
If you’re playing your game as a strategy/tactics/loot/shopping simulator, […]
If your example is the only “story” you’re looking for, that’s fine. But, many of us are more interested with how the characters react, and interact, before, during and after.
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Now you're going beyond the question what is narrative, and you're going into which kinds of narrative you like and which you don't. If you accept whswhs's definition of narrative — and I think it's overly broad, covering anything you can possibly say with words — then you must accept that "I go to the store. I trip a robber. He bashes his head and is arrested. The end." is just as much a narrative as a complex, structured plot with interleaved characters, heroic archetypes, and what have you. How detailed you make it is irrelevant. What the object of the game is, whether it's to retrieve treasure or to follow the lives of a group of flawed, angsty anti-heroes through all their ups and downs, is irrelevant. By this definition, to be storytelling, to be narrative, it just has to have words that describe what happens.