Links: Narrative and Exposition, Exclusive Games, and Graphic Excellence in Games

So is a board game more of a board game when we're playing it? It must be. And that wholeness of feeling has everything to do with something intangible, because the rules are not physical objects contained within the game, but guidelines and actions we undertake at the prompting of the game's designers.

The same is true of narrative.

A narrative is a story, a deliberate string of events that somebody spoke about or wrote down or filmed. But it's also something we can't help but create all the time, because our brains are pattern-generating engines that filter our every experience along a conveyor belt of linear time, presented like multi-course feasts for the gluttonous protagonist we call the self. Every human suffers to varying degrees from apophenia, in which we see faces in trees or objects in clouds or signals in static. Which is why we can't help but sort things into narratives, whether we're talking about the fall of Rome or throwing a busted childhood toy into the garbage. These things are not "real". They're as imaginary as the idea that the Roman Empire had more in common with its Republican past than with its Merovingian successors. But just because they're not real doesn't mean they're not meaningful or don't approach truth. Almost the inverse, in fact. Things become meaningful because we assign them meaning.

But that's where many board games slip up. Because characters and flavor text and central struggles aren't narrative. They're exposition.