[twic]

The thread linking the games Mr Lee praises is that they are, to a large extent, sandboxes. Yes, some of them have endings, but they get the player there by dumping them in a world and letting them do what they like.

Portal is the least sandboxy of the games mentioned (maybe apart from Tetris!), in that it has highly structured, intentionally designed levels with well-defined goals, but it still manages to give the player a huge amount of the responsibility for getting through them.

A weaker thread is procedural generation. Dwarf Fortress and Brogue have procedurally generated levels. Journey doesn't, but probably could have done. Portal doesn't, and i doubt could. Tetris kind of does. But that's a higher incidence of procedural generation than in the general population of games. Is there something about procedural generation that intrinsically puts narrative responsibility back in the hands of the player? That seems plausible; a game designer who gives up the power to shape levels explicitly gives up some power to shape stories explicitly. Think also about Civilisation and SimCity; the software is entirely story-free, but any given game of either of those is bursting with stories.

What tests of this hypothesis are coming down the pipe? No Man's Sky is the one that springs to mind.

[araes]

Thank you, I was going to say that one of the main reasons I play Civilization is for the often strange stories that can develop from the procedural content and simple sets of rules. "The rebel sons of nearby Valetta who embark on a hundred year campaign of foreign shores, sometimes dashed on fortunes rocks, but always rebuilding, and becoming the first people ever to experience firearms."

[lnanek2]

Diablo had procedural generation for most dungeons, but also narrative.