In the spring of 2006, finishing an MFA at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, I found myself in a conversation at GDC about a gap nobody had named yet. Studios had writers. Studios had designers. Nobody held the seam between them. Story got bolted onto systems after the systems were locked, which is a bit like hiring a composer after the film is cut.
The role needed a title before it could exist on an org chart. My first pass was "Narrative Director," which sounded right until I said it out loud enough times to hear the problem. A director tells people what to do. What the role actually required was someone who designed the systems a story could live inside: dialogue trees, level pacing, UI copy, the rules governing when a player learns what. That's design work, not direction. By May of that year the title had settled: Narrative Designer. Designer, not director. The distinction was the whole point.
I took the role myself at Relic Entertainment, on Company of Heroes, becoming the first person to hold it professionally in the industry. It could have stayed a one-studio experiment. Instead it spread. Within a few years the title was on job postings at Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, BioWare, CD Projekt Red. Two decades later it's standard enough that most people who hold it have no idea a conversation at a conference is where it started.
What's held up, twenty years on, is that the definition never depended on genre. I've done this work on a real-time war game, on a physics-based mobile game about launching birds at pigs, on a horror shooter, on a Vault management sim that has been downloaded well over a hundred million times. Those have almost nothing in common on the surface. What they share is the actual job: designing the systems that let a story emerge from play, rather than writing a story and hoping the systems don't get in its way.
That's still the job. It's the same job whether the medium is a game engine, a theme park attraction, a tabletop rulebook, or a novel built from multiple points of view. The title changed what people expected from the work. The work itself was always about the same thing: story as architecture, not decoration.