Not a gamer, so a bit confused. AAR is a narrative description of events in a game after the game has concluded? Is that the case?
After action report, yeah.
In places like the Something Awful forums, you would get people playing rare games and writing up everything they did (with screenshots) so other people could see that game. Some Japanese games only got an English version because of AARs attracting attention to the game.
With historical role playing games like the paradox games you play as a country and you control its economy, politics and army to grow and thrive throughout centuries of conflict. This essentially creates little AH stories, in which the player's Scotland or Azerbaijan enjoy new golden ages and conquer half the world, and each game creates a unique world that noone else got to see and so was felt worth sharing.
In various video game forums, people began writing up long faux history books and narratives to explain their historical role playing results rather than just showing the maps. How did Scotland conquer Egypt, why has this AI Russia converted to Hinduism, what culture emerges from Somali ran Italy etc.
Some of the most popular ones on Something Awful and the Paradox forums began playing the game solely for the narrative, deliberately making bad gameplay choices but interesting narrative ones for instance or modding the game to introduce new challenges so the narrative would have ups and downs (a popular choice was for players converting a Crusaders kings game set in medieval Europe to a Europa Universals game to mod the Asian, African and North American countries to be much more advanced so instead of European nations gaining power by conquering weaker countries in the rest of the world, you'd have to fight against an Incan Pizzaro attacking you).
I used to read them years ago. They're not proper AH stories, but they are something vaguely related.
