A couple sort of related things bounce back out of the black box of my brain.

First — there’s this idea of what feels like a meaningful choice. If enough calculation creates one objectively right answer, it isn’t a choice. If the options are completely arbitrary, without enough information to distinguish them, it isn’t a choice. Choice lives where there’s a sense of real difference, but not the clear-cut calculation. RPGs and board games both thrive on choice, but deal with the realm of possible choices in very different ways.

Second — As If was talking a bit back about stories and master narratives, and how satisfying stories generally have recognized and accepted master narratives appear as though they were natural and obvious emergent properties.

But different groups of people accept different master narratives, and seeing an unrecognized or rejected master narrative emerge can be really jarring to the experience of a story. This hits me whenever I play most murder hobo games — I find it hard to ignore that I’m sucking measurable self-improvement from turning people into corpses.

Third — Vincent Baker talks about the “shared imagined space” in RPGs and wargames, for which I’m going to substitute board games. In an rpg, things that only exist in the minds of the players affect the possible outcomes in direct and often concrete ways. Board games, in contrast, may use the physical bits to inform the fiction of what’s happening, but try really hard not to let the hard represented bits be affected by anything that’s not represented that way, going so far as to make the murky process of choice only matter as it expresses itself in a few predetermined ways.

I think these are all tied into a single coherent idea that is central to what you’re talking about here, but which I do not have sufficiently grasp of to express directly.