[carrying out in reverse the work . . . perpetrated by the game object and its designers, using an interactive toolkit supplied by those same perpetrators]

I was reading 'Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play' again and this quote stuck out to me.

Consider narrative discovery games, which position the player as investigator ferreting out a narrative truth, "carrying out in reverse the work of falsification" perpetrated by the game object and its designers, using an interactive toolkit supplied by those same perpetrators. . . . All the narrative energy is tied up in answering these questions; all the ergodic friction comes from grinding against the systems that makes answering them a challenge.

In particular, putting the player in the position of carrying out in reverse the work . . . perpetrated by the game object and its designers, using an interactive toolkit supplied by those same perpetrators is so much the gameplay at which I'd like to point the finger (and kill).

One interpetation of 'kill gameplay' that I get often is that it's a call for more narrative in games, but this paper's perspective on narrative mirrors my own in some cases, enough to make clear that it is definitely not a call, at least not an unexamined call, for more narrative in games. Narrative -- in games or otherwise -- can also contain some of that poison, whatever it is.