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This is a bit of a counterweight to the observation that the freedom of play problematizes narrative pacing. Sometimes you actively want your 'reader' to put the book down and take some time to muse on what they've read. Gameplay can help here.

To get unhinged with it: maybe all fiction-based affect is the 'sound' produced by plucking the modeled facts of a mental simulation into vibration; gameplay fidgeting is one frequency band

the overall flow of your movement through game states (not necessarily physical spaces) has a huge connection to how you connect to the world or how it invites you to learn. there is an entire field of architecture here which is largely swallowed by consumer ideas like "genre" and "lore".

Old school JRPGs of the SNES era are a master class in this principle

This is what I've been trying to study for a bit now. The gameplay can be the message you want someone thinking over and exploring. You want them exploring grief and loss, put them in a gameplay loop about loss. Building the message by just letting someone wander in it for a while.

I think that's right but a little different — narrative that is enacted in the ritual of a certain play loop. To me 'fidgeting' implies an unrelation between the specifics of the gameplay and the narrative

I often generalize this is as a problem of cognitive load in most games -- you're so taken up with playing the game and physically manipulating it that there's no room to think or marinate in the story/experience. Most other art has some frame or distance to allow this

That said, I think this is a reason videogames lodge in the memory more than other art -- they are pure lived experience and can be neatly saved to disk, less tangled up in other processes

Agreed! Having richly detailed settings for players to poke around in and somewhat limiting their ability to fast travel so they’re moving through the spaces — And even having areas that don’t really *do* anything, all these things give players room to fiddle and breathe while their brains marinate.

thanks for this thought, I need to marinate on some of my favorite games as experiences (and that's a distinct and more venerated category of games to me than mechanically superior games played for hundreds of hours) there are games I've played only once that still stick like glue, interrogating!

I should add that when I think narrative I am often explicitly thinking experience and not literal narrative in the sense of text or speech or plot, I don't parse narrative like that for games

I'm not super familiar with the term "affect space", could you clarify how it's being used here?

Yeah, absolutely. Realizing something like this a few years ago really changed my feelings on a certain style of mechanically simple but aesthetically lush JRPG, which I spent years stupidly dismissing. To paraphrase a recent episode of Side Story, sometimes it’s good to be in the gloop.

[nodding] i also liked Dungeon Encounters

This is sort of the opposite of what I mean! Dungeon Encounters IS mechanically interesting to me, but I am not very moved by the moment to moment combat design of, for instance, the Dragon Quest series. But that is Fine! I’m there for the aesthetic melange.

I think this can be really difficult from the other direction too — if you are making a jrpg, it can be hard to sit there looking at just the numbers and believe that anyone would want to engage with a system so simple, so why not add more layers of complexity?

When a survival crafter gets its maintenance loops right, IMO this is exactly why they hit. Advancing the narrative means finding it in an open world, which means being comfortable enough to explore, and comfort is an entirely player-driven status.