The Culture: The Bros Accidentally Found Why Soup Aisle Sadsacks Say "Muh Narrative"

If you haven't read Fluid The Druid's post on Diffusion and Convergence, do that now.

In addition to being the missing puzzle piece that provides the language needed to explain how this Push-Pull Process works, and thus why it applies to all Tabletop Adventure Games such that it is a necessary component in defining them, there is something else that I put to all of you: this is what Narrative people mistake for Storytelling.

Let me explain.

In the professional writing world, specifically the Hollywood Screenwriting world, there is a lot of talk about Structure.

From the folks that turned Campbell's Monomyth into Save The Cat to the Story Grid folks and more, all of them independently talk in these terms.

There is a key difference: they cannot, as much as they say otherwise, let other people control the characters and have them pursue objectives independently. They have to write the entire process with a pre-determined result in mind; they start at the end and work their way back to the start, making characters say and do what is required to connect A to B.

That, fellow hobbyists, is railroading in Hobby Game terms- and that, you "RPGs are Storytelling" retards, is why "Muh Narrative" means "Muh Railroad/Muh Illusion Of Choice" every single time.

The author is required by his craft first and his paymasters second to pick Winners and Losers in the story's narrative. Wiser or more cunning ones will also pick what behaviors produce the Winning and which produces the Losing. This is antithetical to proper gameplay. It is also part-and-parcel to Conventional Play's paradigm as they insist that this is a storytelling medium.

"Pros really use this?"

Yeah, they do. Some even call it a Push-Pull process. Dig around the screenwriters on YouTube and you'll get to this sort of language eventually, starting with managing tension and then character development, plot advancement, etc. until you see whole films being analyzed in this manner.

That's why you get this Soup Aisle sadsack midwits thinking that this is a Narrative medium, especially after they heard idols like Wheadon or Wheaton or Gaiman talk like that and they ran with it. Mercer only made this worse.

Which is why the language matters. We have not only the means to explain how the hobby actually works, we also have the means to wreck this Narrative cancer for good.