The core divide here is about what's important.
Is technical pedantry about individual words important -- or are understanding and clarity important?
Again, by engaging in technical pedantry regarding the individual words "collaborative", "story", and "telling", and then stitching the broadest meanings possible together, once can create a way for "collaborative storytelling" to be a broad enough to technically apply to most gaming. Yay for you, I guess.
However, the meaning is by that point so broad and so open that it tells you NOTHING about what's actually going on internally or at the table for a significant segment of RPG players. It tells you NOTHING about WHY they game, NOTHING about HOW they game, and NOTHING about what they experience and enjoy at the gaming table.
There's a critical question right there at that yawning divide between "telling a story" and "events occur that a story could be told about" that the ultra-broad meaning of "collaborative storytelling" completely ignores, and that the "story happens no matter what" argument completely ignores. There's a huge difference between sitting down to play an RPG without "story" in mind, and sitting down to play an RPG with the deliberate intent of "telling a story", and conflating the two is deliberately dismissing a portion of the gaming community as either non-existent, or too stupid to understand their own motives and enjoyment.
This if further compounded by multiple issues, both within and without.
First, the use of "collaborative storytelling" outside the gaming community to reference things that are not RPGs at all. Story circles, collaborative fiction workshops, improv, etc, all are referred to at times as "collaborative storytelling". We already struggle in RPG discussions with the way that some people try to conflate RPGs with these other activities as if RPGs are identical to those activities (see also, fiction writing, wargames, and other similar but distinct activities).
Second, the close similarity to "storygames" or "storytelling games" -- which occupy a somewhat overlapping but not identical space to RPGs -- ends up causing conflation and confusion within the gaming community.
Third, there's the baggage -- and it goes back to before The Forge, even. Way way back, it starts with someone asserting that the only good way to game is to focus on "the needs of the story".
http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/...ry_bad_rep.htm
"Originally r.g.f.a was a typical advocacy group on Usenet where someone could scream that RuneQuest was better than D&D and get immediate foes claiming the reverse. In short, it was a dumping ground for flamewars. This changed however as the group membership abandoned exchanges about which game was better instead talking about characteristics of gaming itself. Rec.games.frp.Advocacy in effect became the first noticeable RPG Theory group online.
Into this enter one David Berkman (one of the authors of Theatrix). Berkman advocated a style of play based around 'what was good for the story', not what the mindless dice or needs of simulation would call for. 'Advocated' as in 'this is the best way, any other way is stupid' type of advocating.
This was unacceptable to other members of the forum, those who based their gaming upon the desire to recreate a internally consistent game world that would allow deep immersion role-play. In such a campaign, even examining the 'plot', let alone altering it in the name of ‘improvement', was an ice cold bath dumped upon their life passion."
But The Forge cranked it up to 11, and tried to snap off the dial.
https://refereeingandreflection.word...ing-the-forge/
If you don't understand why this is such a contentious issue and why the problems inherent in calling it all "collaborative storytelling" will never be explained away via pedantic definitions and postmodernist lingusitics wankery, you really need to read and understand the history covered by those two linked articles.
The core matter here is that other people don't game for the same reasons you do, other people don't game the same way that you do, and other people don't have the same experience when game that you do -- and calling it all "collaborative storytelling" is inevitably and unavoidably ignoring those differences.
You do not get to tell other people why they game, how they game, what the do and do not enjoy about gaming, or how they experience gaming -- and when you call what all RPG players do "collaborative storytelling", that is exactly what is happening.
Re: Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase
