Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase

[Cosi]

Of course it interests them. But their definitions of 'interesting' don't always sync up particularly well with the usual literary/dramatic criteria for what a 'good story' is. A slow-motion replay of an american football game may be captivating to the right audience, but it's reasonable to say the appeal is somewhat different from a teen romance novel or detective fiction.

Yes, different stories have different appeals. Mad Max Fury Road does not have the same appeal as Dilbert which does not have the same appeal as The Hobbit which does not have the same appeal as Romeo and Juliet which does not have the same appeal as a Sherlock Holmes collection. I literally do not understand what point you are trying to make.

Because it doesn't have to be "an interesting story", or a story at all, to be interesting to the people playing.

What kind of gaming are you trying to describe? What are you talking about when you say that something "isn't a story"? Do you mean a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl? Because I think that things like John Wick would indicate that "a bunch of fight scenes with the exact minimum amount of plot necessary to understand those fight scenes" totally qualifies as a story.

And that's what some of us have been saying for many pages now. At the point "collaborative storytelling" becomes "technically true" of all RPG gaming, it's also rendered almost meaningless -- and that it is also misleading along multiple fronts.

I think the problem you have is that you are misunderstanding what people mean when they describe RPGs as "collaborative storytelling". The point is to provide a term for the action of playing a RPG, so that we can better understand how to make RPGs good and enjoyable. For example, the collaborative storytelling perspective would suggest that part of making an effective RPG is providing a mechanism for synchronizing players' expectations about creatures and objects in the world so different people can make action declarations to interact with the same things in a coherent way.