For me, thinking of games as rules based systems is limiting. But for other designers it might be enabling. Since everybody is so obsessed with these system and I dislike most games that they make, I figured perhaps I should try to do something else. But feel free to think that what I’m trying to do is exactly the same. Maybe it is. It feels different to me. It’s what inspires me. That’s enough.

If everything is everything, then a story is indeed a system. And a toothbrush is a shoe.

You didn’t address my proposition that stories are systems. I don’t mean language. I mean that the form of a story, the archetypes present within a story, the moral relationships that are the motivic material for story (the whole reason for telling the story) compose one large and ancient system. They can exist without language, or images, or sound, or with all of those things, but they cannot exist without the system of story. But neither could anything else that we know of and can relate to one another, since the system of story is in itself a means of communicating experience. You speak alot about ethics, without ever venturing into the obvious contradiction of ethics being a progressive, evolving system. The games that you condemn as “unethical” are representative of ethics that were quite acceptable in certain cultures, at certain times, our own present not withstanding. Chauvinism, imperialism, survival and prejudice are very much alive and well for certain members of our society today, and were even more so in the past. Those are systems that you may not agree with, but compassion, fairness, and honesty are no less systems of behavior and perception (and more importantly systems of expectation for how others should behave and perceive), just because you think they are worthy of perpetuating.

Everything is a multi-dimensional experience. Nothing can be reduced to one thing (unless everything is one thing :). Nothing can be distilled. FORM is EXPRESSION, because without form there is no expression. You can easily see how that statement can be reversed. This has become a discussion about dualities because we’ve made it that. And there you have another system, Mr. Memes, that we all fall pray to. But without that system this conversation would never have taken place. Art is an outgrowth of our tendency for separation and dualism. As is all of our behavior. What makes us human, if not our ability to distinguish by way of inventing distinguishable qualities and seeing those qualities in everything around us. And yet we’re surprised when another human being, with this same capacity for invention, chooses to distinguish using utterly different qualities. Even though it’s our shared humanity that perceives such differences.

An interesting discussion in the comments as well but I think I’ll stay out of it. Too much talk and too little application for me. ;)

In my experience, the system of rules is generally not as stimulating to the imagination as the way things look and sound.

See, by my definition of “system” the audio and visuals and haptics are part of the system. A system without these is invisible, unknowable and most importantly non-interactive. The player’s presence is at the heart of it, its raison d’etre. So I think we actually agree, our definitions just differ.

I think I’ve come to this definition because, when I’m designing something, wherever it fits on the continuum of the intellectual, the visceral and the emotional, it would be foolish for me to discount the parts of the system the player interacts with directly - the sound, images, the input interface, etc. Separating these out and defining them rigorously against each other is where a lot of game designs, modern and old, go wrong.

Systems can be used in expressive ways. In fact, we need systems to express ourselves in a way that other people can understand. But game systems allow only for very limited expression, in my opinion. Their range is very small. They only allow for expressing a few things. Your chess player may be able to recognize his opponent by his style of playing, but can they learn anything form it about how he feels about his father or what the smell of camellia’s reminds him of?

What interactive storytelling can potentially do is give that expressivity an additional narrative resonance - in addition to their role in the system, they’re a character in a story.

Interactive stories need systems as a basis but they are not limited by them. Their only limitation would be the player’s imagination.

I would describe it as, “the system succeeds in stimulating the player’s imagination”. The rules conjure a larger image. Out of something logical and physical comes something emotional. Transcendence is a quality of many high expressions of an art form.