ABSTRACT
One advantage of the situational approach to game design is that it allows us to put gameplay and story on the same footing. In order to understand how narrative play works, player first need to understand what sorts of constraints structure the narrative play space. The game's rules and our attitudes toward those rules form a system of constraints, and the playfulness of the situations that those constraints structure determines the overall quality of the game. The play that player experience when they engage with a story is similar to anticipatory gameplay. The notion of narrative play may seem at odds with the conventional wisdom about how stories work. Satisfying narrative play is not a matter of steering either the story itself or our interpretation of it in a particular direction, but rather of repeatedly encountering story beats that present us with interpretive moves that are challenging to choose between.
