Max's thread on tools that encourage reflection gets at an important facet of what I'm coming to understand emergent narrative to be: a cracking open and reification of the creative process.
Arguments against emergent narrative point to storytelling's holism, how stories must be conceived, arranged, and paced in proper ways to cohere meaningfully.
But there's also a lot of narrative meaning to uncover through working with the materials themselves, through storyFORMING.
Emergent narrative emerges through the paired sieves of system and interpreter. It's formed, like all stories, but the emphasis is on the forming. Storyforming is messier than storytelling: there are mixed meanings, walkbacks, the pace is bungled. It's a story in live edit.
But editing is narrative. It's a tour through the possibility space the story lives in, through the access corridors and backrooms, where the mechanisms of coherence are working. Reflection is one of the operations available here.
I can't find a concise definition but there are parallels here with Eve Sedgwick's concept of reparative reading (thanks to @catacalypto for pointing this out a while ago).
The point summed up: emergent narrative is like an interactive tour through the story factory and is its own modality of storytelling. By putting you in the writers' room, it illuminates new sectors of the meaning space that the story itself is articulating.
Realizing I bungled something from my drafts wrt storytelling's holism, which is a perspective I'm in partial agreement with. The point of the thread was to argue that it's not the whole story.
The holistic story isn't the wholistic story
you might say
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Hey, my friend @RachelFellman's first fantasy novel, The Breath of the Sun, came out today! I want to tell you a bit about it.
Rachel is the long-time friend of my partner Mielle. She's utterly brilliant, so even though I hadn't read any of her fiction, I had high expectations.
And... she blew them away. The novel is so stunningly good.
It's Wednesday afternoon, you know what that means
Time to eat exactly one bagel and add representative democracy to procedurally generated salt kraken villages
ELECT👏THE👏CHILDREN👏
Two important points about this village's civic history:
One of their monuments reads: "The villagers of Hawar laid offerings at the feet of Babokobam, legendary barkbiter, in exchange for enlightenment about the council."
btw these all come by way of our lovely tile artist Sam, who doesn't use twitter. I just gotta get that out because I can't have people thinking I'm this talented.
I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery.
I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored.
Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.
I am the procgen map admirer. These are my favorite map generators and the folks who create them.
👇THREAD👇
To start with, you can't talk about map generation and not mention @redblobgames. His HTML5 generator is the gold standard.
The quantization of the map into hexes. The beautiful terrain iconography. They partition the gestalt into something explorable in discrete steps, one story at a time.