Different media have different ways to tell stories – at least the media that tell stories. A story unfolds differently if it is told in opera or book or play or movie or tv series or comic book or etc.

In games, the story can be conveyed by the setting: the images on a game board or in a rule book, the names of characters and places, the cutscenes in a video game, etc. But stories can also be conveyed by the game system itself, the mechanics of play.

This is discussed, in the context of video games by Mark Brown (The Last Guardian and the Language of Games) and Extra Credits (Narrative Mechanics - How Missile Command Tells a Story). The same discussion is harder to find for board games because of the search interference from storytelling games.

Recently, I started reading Romeo and/or Juliet. In this choose-your-own-adventure book, you can play as one or both of the two star-crossed lover poster-children. As with any choose-your-own-adventure book, you play as follows:

This mechanic is very simple. And there is a lot of text to put the story in anyway. As a result, the main vector of story in a choose-your-own-adventure book, is the text told between each choice. Nonetheless, Romeo and/or Juliet does include mechanics-supported story.

If you decide to begin play as Juliet, you receive a short introduction: who is Juliet, what’s a Montague, this sort of things. After this short introduction you start the story proper in your room, waking up in the morning, your mother coming to tell you something. And for a dozen or so sections of text, you only have one choice: “Yes mom.”

This purely mechanical device conveys the relationship between Juliet and her parents. It shows the expectations put on Juliet. It shows Juliet’s fulfilment of these expectations. It shows how important and transformative the upcoming events are going to be.