Survival games like Subnautica, The Forest, and The Long Dark have top-down, writer-led stories, but it's a genre where players can just as easily tell their own ground-up stories by setting their own goals. As Tanya X. Short, captain of Kitfox Games (publisher of the Steam edition of Dwarf Fortress) puts it, "The traditional capital-s 'Story' is the authored kind, right? The designers are trying to have this plot or these events happen to tell their traditional narrative, but the player story often eclipses that."
Tanya X. Short, Raphael van Lierop, and Giada Zavarise will be among the panelists discussing "Survival Story-telling" at LudoNarraCon, an online festival about narrative in games that runs from May 4–8 this year.
