alt Hacker News> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.
That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava!
I think we can all imagine what he wanted to build even if he failed to come close to building it. He wanted to make a story machine where you could play the game and converse with the characters in a free flowing way yet still have the game provide a setting and conflict. Imagine talking to characters in the holodeck on Star Trek. Ideally where, over the course of the game, the dialog and interactions are designed in real time within the constraints of the setting. And, the way you treat characters influences how they react. Be a dick to the bartender, all his connections are harder to get consessions from. Be nice to one romantic partner, get snubbed by another, etc... And not just by canned responses. Tell one character a piece of info and it gets leaked to their closest contacts who then change their behavior/dialog based on this new knowledge.
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I'm glad you're trying to explain the difference.
I've been in too many conversations where this topic comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and every example they give is basically a branching story with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well that's just too pie-in-the-sky.
These conversations remind me a lot of Paul Graham's Blub Paradox: "Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub." Current SotA narrative games are good enough for most gamers, because all they've played are branching story games.
That describes Dwarf Fortress. I guess you don't have an text interface to talk to people but that feels like a no true Scotsman requirement.
The difference is that Dwarf Fortress is not fully opaque to the player. You see a large part of the world so can see the consequences of your actions. And that is what makes it fun.
An opaque world simulator is frustrating and tedious. Eventually someone just min-maxes a way to break it which makes it just a tedious cookie clicker. That's why D&D has a game master that modifies the world's design to align with the players so that everyone has a good time. That is the key difference. An illusion of rigid structure, which requires some actual structure, with opaque flexibility. A simulator is not a fun game. A world where god cheats to make you have more fun time is a fun game. A pre-defined narrative or narrative tress is one such cheat, but not the only one.