Gamewhereas

Gamewhereas is a coined term in game studies that describes a proposed narrative mechanic in which a game's worldstate unfolds through conditional statements introduced by the word whereas. The term is not widely adopted in mainstream design; it appears mainly in academic discussions, design tutorials, and experimental projects as a thought experiment about integrating formal language structures into gameplay.

In a game implementing gamewhereas, encounters begin with a set of whereas clauses that outline provisional conditions, duties, or intents and the outcomes desired by the narrator or world. Players choose actions that resolve these conditions, producing new clauses and shifting the ongoing narrative contract. The gameplay thus resembles drafting a living document in which each move changes both the story and the set of future clauses. The interface often emphasizes textual presentation, with clauses displayed as parts of a formalized narrative or contract, and actions framed as ways to fulfill, modify, or contest those clauses.

Design considerations for gamewhereas include balancing clarity with syntactic complexity, ensuring that the evolving contract remains readable, and maintaining player agency within a formally constrained system. Designers may use procedural generation, branching clause trees, or natural language processing to maintain coherence as the clause network expands. This approach is often explored as an educational tool for teaching logic, rhetoric, or legal-style reasoning, as well as an experimental art form that investigates how language structures shape player choice and meaning.

Compared with interactive fiction or branching narrative games, gamewhereas foregrounds contract-like language and conditional causality, inviting reflection on how words govern action.