“For one, lots of the current generation of indie hotness is built with a strong ‘setup is play’ aesthetic. It literally does not matter what the GM is bringing, we’re all gonna bring it together and then play. Pitching a scenario makes that impossible of course, and then I get frowny. Where’s my investment? Waah.”

My earliest gaming as a tweenager was one-on-one–me as the player, playing a primary PC and his series of sidekicks, and their hirelings, dealing with homemade modules run by my best friend. My friend would get into elves, and then I’d be dealing with trying to rescue my captured wizard sidekick from a giant hollow tree woodelf community. Or he’d watch Captain Blood and get into pirates and I’d be trying to pay back a trumped up debt by hiring on to a crew of buccaneers. It was fun, and super formative to me. But when he lost interest in gaming and I ended up the regular DM for a group of guys in high school, the paradigm didn’t hold up. The group didn’t give a shit about my worldbuilding. They’d slaughter town guards for fun, burglarize townspeople, create cornball characters, pull multiple times from a Deck of Many Things until their character was wrecked, and then just make up a new character.
Looking back on it, I think game systems sometimes defeat player investment–when your rolls in play undermine your concept and vision for your character, that pretty much does it. But if the system doesn’t defeat player investment, then I think investment is a choice. I chose to submit myself to my friend’s world as a tweenager. I’m certain he fudged to keep my primary character from dying, and I’m certain he fudged to kill and capture my various sidekicks. So in that regard the “system” didn’t defeat my investment. And the goofballs I gamed with in high school chose not to be invested.
My designing lately–The Clay That Woke, and Traverser too–are inspired by my tweenage and teenage gaming. They eschew the ‘setup is play’ paradigm. Their systems are designed to not defeat investment. They give the worldbuilding over to the gamemaster. I hope under those circumstances that players can choose to invest.