Developing the drama engine

We're doing a cheerleader game now. And we've not been so inquisitive about our research since the development of our school project PromQueen. I'm reading cheerleader books about the culture, sport etc. Johan was given the task of reading a terribly sleazy "sex-sizzling" novel named "Confessions of a Cheerleader" or something like that.
Today I made a long lecture gathering my research on Cheerleader stunts to inform the other members.

But it's not the fact that we're doing a game about cheerleaders that is the most interesting about the project. Not in terms of game design at least.
What we're doing, that might be of interest is exploring how we can add drama as a game mechanic and dynamic narrative to a game. The goal is to some extent to create characters that are believable and lovable and that goal will then reinforce the sense of meaning the player gains from manipulating their lives in the role of a trainer of a six girls strong cheerleader squad.

In order to make this work we've been thinking a lot about how to bring classic dramatic structures such as episodic storytelling, cliffhangers and the lot into the mechanics part. We've done a reasonable job so far and yet I don't think the drama engine will be anywhere near the dynamic and mechanized drama of PromQueen. Actually, it's quite difficult dissecting social interaction and then making the layer of narrative so thin that it's possible to say that it's "game mechanics" and not narrative as told by the designer.
What we've done to the drama engine today is to compose small episodes of events, not all revealed to the player immediately, so that the player will have to interact to be told short sequences of story meat from characters. Retrieving and distributing information could be said to be the core of social interaction or one of it's main functions. In this scenario, you are gathering news from the girls on the squad and getting to know how they work with information is also quite relevant, since they will be extrovert and talk lots about others, egocentric and talk lots about themselves, or introvert and be unlikely to know about, or shed lights on, others.
Then we'll have a few states, speaking about their condition, physically and socially. And quite a few properties that are invisible to the player, for example if a girl is secretly in love with someone: That in itself might trigger an episode of drama about "the troublesome boyfriend".

While our main concern hasn't been to eradicate traditional narrative structures from the game and make them game mechanics, it's rather been a pursuit of how to give the dynamic narrative a lot of space within our otherwise, compared to our previous products and processes, limited game mechanics (or ludic space, we might say).
No conclusions yet, but I believe I will attempt to force the player to prioritize a lot between the girls and second, to attempt to make the player responsible for manipulating attitudes in the social sphere that is the cheerleader squad. The tools for doing this might be the complex metaphor to uncover.
Pictured is my (some days mine, most days my girlfriend's) cat. She's been pinned by a german elite infantry marker from Europe Engulfed.