My arguments tend to be composed of many premises. This makes them long, and when my blogs get long, I find them annoying. So, I will here type out a premise, that other arguments can reference with a brief link, rather than with a self-irritating digression.
Here is the definition of the word ‘story’ on wiktionary:
An account of real or fictional events.
Here’s Merriam-Webster:
an account of incidents or events
What is not mentioned is, for example:
- conflict
- character arcs
- three act structure
Stories are accounts, aka records, of events. That is all. Arcs, acts, conflicts etc. are specific arrangements and orderings of events. However there no necessity that stories be ordered in these ways. There are other options.
The reason then that all TTRPGs are storygames, is that literally all TTRPGs involve people sitting together and relating events in an order. Therefore, the question we should ask about games is not whether one style of event-ordering is a story or not. The questions that will get us more useful information are:
- what is the order of events at the table;
- who chose this order, and;
- why?