Glad you found it of use! It’s funny you should ask this question now, as Brand and I have recently been playing some games that challenge that idea. A good fictional example of what you’re referring to (I think) would be Robert E. Howard’s Conan series: a series of short stories that don’t establish a continuous story arc, don’t necessarily stack chronologically – yes?

I’d say that in these kind of games, the difference isn’t actually in the overall amount of context, it’s in the linearity of the context, which provides different kinds of input to the amount of challenge of the game has in terms of continuity, realism and versimilitude.

So in the Conan example, we don’t gather linear context from a continual arc of story, but because we inherit ideas and experiences from the barbarian’s past adventures, we have a contextual milieu from which to comment on, or highlight certain aspects of this story.

A game I have been running for Brand works on a similar kind of idea – each episode I run for him is a short story. The game is centered around a situation rather than a character, any current episode centers on a PC in that situation. His PC might be a protagonist in only one short story, or he might be a protagonist in ten, but there is no plan for how many there will be, and the next short story will not pick up where the last one left off.

We custom designed this game for play between the two of us and it’s built to feed his story socket first and foremost. The freedom of the non-linear context of this game allows us to put two short stories together that don’t follow chronologically, but do contextually position with each other thematically. More meaning is brought to last episode from the episode we play today and vice versa, both in comparison and in contrast.

Also, despite the fact that his PC changes frequently, NPC’s often reoccur in different stories and are contextually revealed through interaction with the different PC’s. This feeds my desire to immersively GM by adding context and depth to the characters I will play over time, while allowing Brand to pursue the thematics of the game through the tools he can leverage in the eyes of new PC’s.

As a side note, to the challenge point I made above: playing with non-linear context in games can really provide focused challenge to different kinds of socket players where that is a desirable thing: a character socket player might find it fun to play non-linearly as a way of illustrating the source or backstory of territory already explored in game, or (if they like high game context, low positional context) revealing new emotional ground in the freedom that there will be time and space to explore the “why” later. Setting socket players might enjoy the challenge of maintaining a sense of versimilitude over the course of non-linear context play. Aesthetic socket folks might love to break the continuity of the game and create absence of context intentionally to support some surrealist or dadaist goal.

I think this is a very useful post. (I mean it has direct practical use for me, I think.) Thank you!

To reply to your last comment: what about forgetting (or “forgetting”) things? If you define campaign play so that your previous adventures will have a meaning in your following ones, than it’s obvious/tautology to say campaigns gather more context over time. If campaign is something like fillers in a series (so no real connection between episodes), than it gathers only player context (as he already knows where do the GM live).