I've been seeing a lot of games lately that are heavily structured around very specific arrangements of scenes. First you have a Dramatic Scene, then a Fighting scene, then an Intermission scene, then back to a Dramatic Scene...
Ok, so obviously I'm not singling out any particular game with that really bad dramatization of the structure, but you get the picture. I've commented somewhat lightly on this in the past with Burning Empires, which I think was my first exposure to this sort of structured play (that was... ten years ago, more or less??), and since then I had mostly seen it in Japanese RPGs, which admittedly appear to be mostly translated and introduced to American game markets by Storygamers, so perhaps some selection bias.
But I'm seeing it more, and at last I think I have better grasp on why this irritates me so much.
Its regressive.
This is one of those 'big' innovations in game design that the story-games crowd loves to pull, but its not an innovation at all. Its not a 'new thing' its a step back, an old, largely forgotten thing... not unlike the barter-gift economy that is supposed to replace money in Eclipse Phase. Good job wiping out thousands of years of social development in the name of progress!
This isn't so drastic as all that, but perhaps I should start at the beginning.
Games, as you probably know, evolved from Wargames, from the players of said Wargames, to whit EGG and Dave Arneson and co. looking at their armies with their cool hero-leaders and deciding to explore 'what if I just had this one dude and how did he get his cool sword'... and the very first iteration was very true to its wargaming roots. I'm not familiar with Chainmail itself, but I know it is more wargame than RPG, and I can assume that it had a strict turn structure like a wargame.
By the time we get to D&D, and in what appears to be parallel development, Traveller, RPGs were absolutely not Wargames. Turns structure combat, almost by necessity, but play virtually no other role in teh game.
And it worked. It works still. One of the fundamental appeals of this sort of 'open' game design is that it allows you to... oh god, I'm going to use an ideologically corrupted word... Immerse yourself in the world. You might expect to delve into dungeons, but you know... if you don't and you still have fun, that's actually cool too.
Like a vast number of gamers, I was introduced to D&D via the mechanism of a Tavern, an old guy in a hooded cloak, and a short trip to a cave that turned out to be the entrance to a dungeon. Its a cliche, but like so many players, I lived it long before i knew it was a cliche. But no where in the rules did it say I needed to visit the old guy in teh tavern to get the dungeon quest. THat's video game logic, which RPGs never needed, because they ran with human imagination as the primarly operating system.
I have had many game sessions, as a player and more rarely as a GM, where 'nothing happened', and yet the group had fun. I recall joining a game and one of the very first sessions we just hung out in town, in one of the PC's monastery, doing shopping and chilling 'in character'. A bit weird, I suppose, certainly not an ideal game session, but no one was upset. More recently, in my first 5e game, shortly after leaving the dungeon the rest of the session was spent hiring a donkey cart to go back and retrieve a cool looking statue I'd seen there. Half the party decided to join in, while the other half did.. stuff.. in town. No one was upset or bored, and these were players who had only just moved on from pure League style play and were still getting their traditional gamer legs.
Now, a defense of rigidly structured scene 'play' was that you can DO all of that with the rigidly structured scenes. Maybe the statue recovery is a 'downtime scene' (EP 2e actually has that, the only scene structure in the entire game, I belive...).
And sure, you CAN do stuff like that with a highly structured format... but why should you have to 'make it work'?
My point is that this 'innovation' is first, a return to the wargaming structure that was abandoned for good reasons when the game became 'roleplaying' instead of 'warplaying'.
And second that it amounts to forcing the GM and the Group to adopt a play style that is probably artificial for them. THe more coded into the rules this play style is, the less flexible the game is by nature. It trying to force 'advice' into 'laws', and that sucks on general principle.
Structuring everything into scenes, and having a schedule for the scenes to follow, isn't necessarily a bad idea in and off itself. There are many groups and many GMs that can benefit from having a format to follow. Its training wheels for them, and some people really do benefit from having training wheels. But when you force everyone to use the training wheels they become an obstacle, in some cases for the actual game itself, and I think increasingly that experienced players and groups will start avoiding games that force (with rules) this structure on them, simply because it increasingly gets in the way, but maybe I'm being optimistic.
THe most interesting element of all of this, to me, is that to design a game where every single moment of play is structured and codified, where every possible action must be accounted for in a flow chart of action, rather than simply allowing players to interact freely and organically with open ended tools, must actually be harder to design. It provides an additonal point of failure in the design, an additional way for the game to go wrong. It is extra work for no real return other than the twisted satisfaction of controlling how complete anonymous strangers play your game.