Indeed, some games have done this. I think mainly of Quake III, which was basically designed really to be a multiplayer deathmatch game. The single-player was basically the same thing, only with AI controlled opponents instead of human players. That’s why, when Quake IV reintroduced narrative, it took its cues from Quake II, sort of pretending Quake III never happened (that’s right, Quake is the video game equivalent of Highlander).

… But anyway, reading up on the “simulationist” approach a bit, I realize that this does probably represent another sort of appeal that might not necessarily be equivalent to wanting a narrative. What really drove this home was idly browsing through the Mass Effect forums and stumbling upon a conversation about whether one of the potential love interests in the game is really what guys want women to be like.

Some comments indicate that people’s response to the character was very personal—they liked or disliked her based on what they’d want in a partner themselves. In contrast, my own reaction to that character depended very much on the type of protagonist I was trying to construct—one got along with her quite well, another kind of detested her. It was much more like characters into a story than like putting myself in a character.

The former, I suppose, is sort of a “simulationist” perspective, as opposed to a “narrativist” concern for plot, theme, and character coherence. (If I must be a stickler about my semi-rhyming terminology, I might make a distinction between “fantasy” and “story.”)

And I must sheepishly admit that while “gamist,” “narrativist,” and “simulationist” are terms I have heard (probably through Greg Costikyan), I am not very familiar with how they’ve been deployed in recent theory…

You are no doubt aware of the folks doing tabletop-RPG theory, and the proposed taxonomy of player expectations into “Gamist,” “Narrativist,” and “Simulationist”? (Note: anyone who is, please let’s not argue about those terms here…)

Aside from the fact that Choose Your Own Adventure™ is a trademarked series by Bantam, the term applies just fine and dandy to game stories that have branching narratives built into them, and applies especially well to those that have multiple branches (Mass Effect has many; Bioshock basically has two).

I don’t think it applies well to other sorts of narrative games, though. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is most certainly a “narrative game” in that it is very centrally about following a plot and seeking out clues from plot elements (including listening to conversations and reading through found documents), but there’s really only one path of events you can take through it if you want to survive and finish the game.

[Edited to add this paragraph for clarification...]

I guess if you’re going to group CoC: Dark Corners with more choose-your-own-adventure style games like Mass Effect into some category of “narrative games,” you’re focusing on how such games mix traditional cinematic spectatorship with varying degrees of player input. I think that element of spectatorship is shared by both kind of games, and is more relevant to the gameplay experience than some theorists have acknowledged.

I’m only half-kidding.

Yeah, that makes sense. This is kind of like the distinction that linguists/semioticians make between langue and parole—that is, the general, formal system of a language versus any one specific utterance in actual speech. I don’t know if anybody else is as much a theory nerd here as me, but I felt the need to point that out.

I think that you can design the “release” to encourage certain types of played “games” by the user. Some “releases” are more explicitly built to be played to resemble classic narrative structures, like a game that has action sequences punctuated by fairly linear cut scenes. If the cut scenes can be skipped in the process of playing through the game (or if narrative needs to be actively sought out, like with the Marathon terminals), I’d say storytelling was less of a priority in that release.

I don’t see the problem with the term ‘narrative’, although I am unaware of what baggage it might be carrying.

Narratologists have often argued that ‘narrative’ is the basic structure for how we think about the world. As a result, everything can be described as ‘narrative.’ Based on how some have interpreted this, Tetris could be described as a “narrative game” just as much as Mass Effect. I suppose a more vexing example, though, would be Pac-man—look, there are characters, there’s conflict, so why isn’t this a “narrative game”?

You could just say it’s further away from “narrative” on the spectrum of narrative games, I suppose, but I feel like it would be convenient to not even have to qualify it that much at all.

So it is perhaps a special case when the narrative itself is something you can interact with, as in Mass Effect and any game with branching storylines.

This is a very interesting point. Should I be asking not to come up with a name for narrative games, but to come up with a name for games that create the illusion of player control over narrative? Then again, the most interesting parts of Bioshock‘s narrative are the scenes you can’t control, in my opinion (but perhaps those are all the more relevant because you do have some control over how you treat the Little Sisters).

Perhaps it’s enough to at least make reference to the notion of player agency; in some games, it’s a big deal that you play through scenes you can’t win as opposed to just seeing them happen as cut scenes…