Cory Doctorow's recent essay Against Lore is a really interesting meditation on the unifying principles of cults, conmen, storytelling, magic tricks and game design. (The unifying element is that the human audience has to participate in the creation lie for it to work.)
This goes along with my own recent thoughts about TTRPG design, how the game's job is to give the players the broken pieces of a story and let the players puzzle together meaningful connections.
