Totally agree. It's kind of shocking to read the latest version of Dream Askew and realize that I've read probably 20 other apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic games that don't directly say "here is the role the apocalypse plays in this fiction". Not, like, its fictional details, but its fictional function.  Why it's an apocalyptic game, what doors that opens and what doors it shuts.  

*Comes in gently banging a small tupperware box with a wooden spoon*

Mechanical tools are narrative tools.

Yeh sure if rulebooks specifically tell readers what themes their play should be embodying and what tropes they should play out in any given scene, then this will really help players create the narrative that the designer intended. But the structure of an encounter and how much a thing costs innately pushes players towards certain themes or tropes. If combat's in your game, then fighting is probly a good thing that players will be rewarded for actively seeking out. (Some games have combat without making it A Good Thing To Do. That's rare though.) So certain tropes and themes will innately come out of that, and others will be innately locked off. It's impossible to tell a story about how violence is never the answer when categorically it actually is the answer all of the time.

Games are the interactive medium. They speak the interactive language. The narrative emerges organically from play. It doesn't have to be tacked on.

So, basically every game comes with narrative guidance tools. I can't think of a single one that doesn't. (Otherwise I completely agree with everything being said in this thread and I'm eager to see where it goes.)

Mutants in the Night, a hack of Blades in the Dark, does something very interesting in this regard. The rulebook talks about the Facilitator using terms like zooming in and wide shots to paint a picture of each scene. 

For example when the crew is getting ready to execute a score, the Facilitator can use a wide shot to frame the building, the guards, the time of day, and then zoom in to show the characters approaching int he shadows. Then the Facilitator can hand off the camera to the players to let them know they are in control of what's happening next.

It's such a simple thing but I think it gives a familiar language to who is in control of the narrative and what is possible when you hand off and hold the camera. More and more, as I run games, I imagine them as television shows, something Blades in the Dark actively suggests you do as well. I use establishing shots and crane shots to look over the city to get a sense of what the mood is, to see current events play out. Also this sort of cinematic language gets people thinking about how scenes look between their characters, and what the NPCs look like. Are the character's listening to music? Can you hear crickets? Does this bad ass cyber ninja who is hunting you have their own musical theme that takes over the soundtrack?

Specifically calling out that there is a camera and a lens through which we view the events of the game is a great narrative mechanic, I find.

I dunno about you, but I just write people (sometimes human, usually not), with their own wants, needs, and assets. I don't think about shoehorning them into "character roles" or hitting "plot beats". I want to inhabit a character's mindset when playing, not sit outside it and check whether I'm hitting a checklist of tropes.

There's some really interesting dialogue being made here, and some perfectly valid critiques of the idea put forward which I deeply appreciate. I think its fair to say that some people go into GMing and games with very different ideas of what constitutes a "good game", a division I think we're all pretty familiar with. I'd argue that there's a lot of value to be found even by (for lack of a better term) simulationist designers and GMs by examining (and being given the tools to examine) what the fictional, emotional and narrative repercussions of the naturalistic character choices they make within the space they build for (or with) their players. Just as I think it serves even the most story-game, narrative driven person to be given, for lack of a better word, mechanical tools to create worlds with a degree of verisimilitude. 

To admit my own biases, I'm pretty obviously squarely on the Games as Story side of the discussion, and so a lot of my analysis comes from that. 

Regardless, thanks to everyone who posted some examples of games that do this sort of thing very very well. I really appreciate having more reading material on the list. Maybe we could post some more examples, maybe even a chunk of your favourite usage of narrative tools, to aid in the discussion? Here's a small snippet of one of my games (Americana, currently shooting for a June release date) from the Adversaries section. The game is in investigation game where you play as high schoolers, just for context.

"The Best Friend 

Strengths: Cute, Loyal to the End, Trustworthy, Always Got A Plan, Emotionally Switched On, Physically Strong
Weaknesses: Forgetful, Magically Useless, Rocky Home Life
You’ve known this person your whole life, and you’ve most likely spent more hours with them than your family. You trust this person more than you trust yourself, you love them like a sibling. Which is why they’re a problem.

The Best Friend may seem like an odd choice for an adversary, but think about it. Who’s going to be bugging you about where you were last night? Who’s going to be knocking on your door and asking your mom where you are? Who’s going to get really upset and hurt when you blow them off to investigate the sewers tonight?
The Best Friend is a perfect double-sided blade. They are someone the player’s character can trust and get help from, but they’re also emotionally invested in their friendship to a degree that can impact the character’s ability to conduct their investigations. They might even accidentally jeopardize it by prying too deeply or asking the wrong questions at the wrong time. They mean well, of course, they mean the best, but they’re working with half a deck and their best friend looks tired all the time, and why do they have a black eye? What’s going on?

Best Friends are great to put unexpectedly with a Crew or at a Hang, they can be waiting for player characters when they get home, asking piercing questions. They can be great at school too, trying to get the character’s attention while the player is chasing up a lead or spying on someone. "

What I tried to do here with the Best Friend was provide a kind of simple explanation of what role that character archetype often takes in high school investigation stories, and suggest places and times for the reader to use that archetype, identifying common tropes and their purpose without being too overt about it. I'm not sure I've 100% succeeded here, but this is a small bit of what I'm talking about when I suggest including this sort of thing in your game.

Something I realized in writing this out is that there is one area of narrative tools we are really good at - plot hooks! Every game I've ever read is full of plot hooks and little evocative story beats.

Oh and shout out to King Crackers who has explained the idea just beautifully and with more patience than I think I'd have been able to muster

there's a really cool thing Blades in the Dark does where it hits you with the punchy setting description of "You’re in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood." but then immediately follows it up with an explanation of why that is:

The point of all this is to create a pressure-cooker environment for our criminal escapades. Traveling outside the lightning barrier is a very bad idea, so it’s impractical to “leave town and wait for the heat to die down” after you pull off a score. Everything the players choose to do has consequences for their characters and shifts the balance of power around in the city—driving the action for a sandbox style of roleplaying game.

i think this is really sharp, and it's a good example of what Blades is trying to do, which in some ways is to present the most elegant tabletop version of an open-world video game. the city's big and stuff goes down without you, but you're playing in a limited space and can't leave. it's why factions happen for the most part without player input, and it feels right for the kinds of story Blades is willing to tell.

more generally, i think one of the things that makes this difficult is that it's such a tough thing to implement story beats because it feels like it'll end up constraining creativity. i'm fine laying down gear because i'm confident if people want start calling my sparkshot guns like, boltspitters or something, they'll just do it and won't feel like they're playing the game wrong, but if i tell them "your story should integrate these tropes and these themes," they'll feel constrained by those beats? and i think the emergent narrative structure of play can be more interesting than the structure of a conventionally-told story, and i worry that sending people in aiming to capture those story beats might stifle creativity or limit people.

I can certainly get behind the idea of narrative guidance, but the less focused an experience you're trying to create, the more counter-productive this can be. I'm skeptical that every game does have a platonic session. Or rather, that every game is well understood through the lens of having a platonic session, or better designed by a designer who uses that framework. There's more than one way to guide players, and I think a lot of games that don't draw the shape of a platonic session or an otherwise refined narrative guideline for players do instead draw a very detailed picture of how to use the mechanics as narrative tools on a scene-by-scene and session-by-session level.

A game of Apocalypse World or Spire probably isn't a good candidate for the platonic session lens; these are games that wrap narrative into mechanical minutiae and crowbar flavor into crevices of the system and the voice of the text and then hand players the power to obliterate anything resembling a consistent narrative structure with each new ability selected in character creation--Spire much more so than Apocalypse World, but they're both in that general direction. Games like these often have quite a bit of text dedicated to helping players use those chaotic systems effectively not by steering the session into a particular shape, but by steering the participants in the conversation into a particular frame of mind. This is by no means incompatible with what you seem to be after, I'm just not sure it's quite the same thing, either, and it doesn't seem to be an issue of missing material to me.

I can't speak to anyone else's creative process, but both as a GM and a designer, I find it very helpful to proceed with a looser sense of purpose in mind. I make the game I want to make that does what I want it to do, but when I get down to the more difficult work of testing and refining I'm not worried about a platonic session, I'm worried about providing others tools that do interesting things. I think most games lack clearer narrative guidance not just because some of them need more but because a lot of them don't. If the goal is for players to tell a very particular story, naturally it makes sense to guide players along that path very strongly. But that just isn't the goal of many, many games.

You know, the idea of explicating the narrative elements at work in depth is something I've never considered. I like to list the themes, I like to have those themes and motifs resonate throughout the text, and I like to have mechanics that create the desired narrative structure. The idea of including bits that say "and you do this thing because it'll create this effect" is not something I've ever really thought about. Part of me thinks it's like explaining how a magic trick or a joke works, that in providing that autopsy, you kill the spontaneity and the life of the narrative.

And yet, there's been plenty of examples in this thread of why I'm wrong! It's definitely something I'll need to be more considerate about in the future.