Unlike novels, theatre or film, games featuring ruse, trust, and betrayal offer up unscripted moments of play in fictional worlds that communicate ideas (in these cases, ideas about betrayal). Instead of recounting these kinds of betrayals through pre-designed narrated stories, games of ruse, trust, and betrayal incentivize their players – and consequently their avatars– to betray each other within the confines of a game space. I suggest that there is an emergent fiction crafted by the game designer. The players in these specific games of ruse, trust and betrayal (henceforth RTBs) create a fiction in an altogether different way than authors do. They pursue goals at the behest of a designer, following that designer’s rules, and procedurally generate a fiction in parallel. To demonstrate this argumentation, I will go over three rules that game designers have historically put in place to procedurally generate betrayal.
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