@Raph Koster: Thanks for the response. I had to write the post in fits and starts in between getting stuff done on my paying job, so in addition to trying to make it make sense I was trying to be careful not to misrepresent your positions. I could only work from what I saw in those two posts, since it's been a while since I've read the blog with any regularity, and A Theory of Fun is still on my to-read list!

I'm still a little wary of thinking of game mechanics and narrative as separate layers, even in terms of "skeleton and flesh." It's for the same reason that I don't like thinking of narrative and game mechanics as parallel media. Even if you acknowledge that you need both to make a complete experience, it reinforces the idea that they're separate disciplines that don't feed off of and feed into each other except at the surface level.

I definitely agree that the core of the gameplay in the LEC adventure games was figuring out how the storyteller's mind works, and figuring out the context and logic (or lack of logic) of the game world. Day of the Tentacle in particular had puzzles that only made sense once you completely embraced the logic of Warner Brothers cartoons. I like the description of that as the core gameplay of those games, and the recognition that that's a system in itself.

But I don't think that's quite what I was trying to get at. For all I know, it might be impossible. I've only "seen" it happen when helping in the design of puzzle-heavy SCUMM style games, so it's entirely possible my perception of the design process was just perceived as "figure out what the designer is thinking" to players.

But the kind of narrative-as-gameplay that I'm trying to describe is different from a metagame of figuring out what the designer had in mind, because it ideally wouldn't require that constant mode-switching between what the player's character is doing and what the player himself is doing (trying to get into the mindset of a writer's room somewhere in California).

That's essentially why I say Portal comes closest to what I'm talking about, because it seamlessly combined the story with the game -- Chell is stuck in a series of puzzle rooms trying to find a way out, and so is the player. You quickly forget that you're interacting in a layer "above" the story, and you drop down into the world of the game. It didn't take long before I stopped thinking of the puzzles as designed by Valve and actually started to accept Aperture Science as the creator of everything around me. So of course, when the game opened up to let me peek behind the walls and see actual story development in a puzzle game, it was one of those transcendent completely-immersive moments.

It never really asked you to do anything with the narrative, though, and that's the area that has a ton of potential.

I haven't explained it well, but when I talk about the developer walking through the game and then encouraging the player to duplicate his steps, I'm not looking to turn that process into a metagame. It's more a concession to the fact that games can't -- and shouldn't! -- allow the player to take a story in any direction she wants. Both because it'd be prohibitively expensive if not impossible, and because it will inevitably result in some non-interesting directions. It's more a process of editing the experience down to the most interesting parts, obviously similar to how a film editor chooses shots and scenes, but also similar to how a game designer constrains choices to prevent AP.

Ideally, the player doesn't identify that as the gameplay at all, since the process is so seamless and reactive that the player isn't even aware he's being guided. Instead, the gameplay is that of creating a narrative, just as if I were writing a story from scratch and simultaneously seeing that story come to life around me. If there's any mode-switching, it's between higher-level strategy and lower-level interaction. Games get the lower-level interaction right all the time (kill a bunch of bad guys), but almost always keep the higher-level strategy (go to the top of the cathedral in Arkham City) to themselves.

At the moment, though, the idea might still be too vague to be useful. I think I'd need to come up with a concrete example to make it clearer what I'm talking about, and to see if it's actually as novel a concept as I believe it is.

Finally, I was really happy to read your description of "systemic problems" above; I couldn't agree more with what you wrote. (And it's awesome to see it described where an FPS and Tetris are the same phenomenon, differing only in scale!) Assuming I've understood you correctly, it's exactly the thing I was hoping to accomplish with season 3 of the Sam & Max games. Introducing Max's psychic powers was intended to give you a finite set of predictable tools to apply to an indefinite series of narrative-driven problems. Basically, to combine the "powers" of a platformer with the higher-level storytelling of an adventure game. I think it ended up working to varying degrees of success (and didn't come into play at all in the last episode, unfortunately), but the intent was sound!