Why do so many people want to write stories?

It’s important. Instead of dividing things into fiction and non-fiction, it makes more sense to divide them into what contains drama and what doesn’t.

I identify two key approaches to describing the world – game design and dramaturgy. Dramaturgy is part of game design because if dramaturgy only describes a sequential change of states, which is rare in real life, then game design includes the fundamental concept of the game loop, which reflects our attempts to overcome the next obstacle.

In shorter formats like books, films, and storytelling in general, dramaturgy eliminates the game loop. This is due to the short consumption cycle – possibly a one-time, a few hours long event, like a multi-act play or a long movie, or a novel at most. An intermediate format is a TV series, where the flow of drama is slowed down by saturating it with details.

A game can theoretically be endless, where 99% of the consumption time is not spent on the story, but on the game loop, and this is, of course, much closer to life. In life, we mostly make many cycles of attempts before advancing to the next level.

So why do so many people want to create dramas or games, even the most primitive ones? In my opinion, only writing or game design that includes both drama and a game loop can provide the deepest insights into the nature of humans and reality. The very concept of “I,” “self,” is just a variation of the numerous plots we go through. Sooner or later, any writer or game designer who thinks in terms of drama and game loops comes to this understanding of reality.

This rabbit hole leads to the most thrilling mysteries of the universe, and undoubtedly, touching upon these insights is one of the most potent drugs. This feeling is familiar to creators, scientists, engineers, and indeed anyone who has hit a wall and doesn’t know how to break through it.

However, only writers can delve deeper than anyone else. For instance, AI can create a text that resembles a story or play because any drama always has a structure. However, if AI writes on behalf of a person, that individual gains no insights and cannot incorporate those insights into the text.

Thus, while AI can write texts, the very process of creating texts with AI becomes useless, because writing boils down to a search for questions that reveal something to us. AI can be useful when you need to create an explanation or clarify the logic of what’s happening.

However, drama, and even more so, games, do not aim to explain and spell things out. The goal of drama or a game is to create a stream of triggers, where explanations are born in the reader’s own mind. Drama or a game is more like a set of clues, hints, designed to make the search for answers or the overcoming of obstacles more challenging.