Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase

[Aliquid]

The necessity of maintaining a shared "secondary reality" and mental gamespace between those involved in the game, does not in and of itself make for "storytelling". Communication must occur or there is no game. Presenting that as being an automatic act of storytelling is nothing less than an assertion that all communication is supposedly storytelling.

But it isn't all communication. Even during an RPG, plenty of communication isn't storytelling... such as discussing rule mechanics.

AND it comes across as a "gotcha", a cheap rhetorical trick, whereby those who are decidedly NOT engaged in storytelling are told "well you can't play without communicating, so you're doing story no matter what".

I'm really sorry that you have encountered these story Nazis... that seem to insist that storytelling should be the motivation and purpose of playing an RPG. I think they are idiots and wrong.

There is no hidden agenda behind my saying that "technically you are telling a story when you play an RPG, even if that isn't why you are playing"... I'm just making a logical statement based on the meaning of a word. The only reason I argue this is because you are saying that my logic is wrong... I don't care about stories or about the phrase "collaborative storytelling", I'm just defending my logic.