Gameplay Vs Story

Oddly enough there is an ongoing discussion about the ideas that storytelling in game creation might not be as important as game design. There are gamers and professionals arguing things like this:

“Good gameplay can save badly written stories, but good stories can not save badly designed gameplay.”
“This game is bad. Players just think they like it, because they get fooled by flashy cutscenes.”
“Many players say they finished the game because they liked the story, but they wouldn’t have finished the game, if the gameplay wasn’t that good.”
“Storytelling in video games in unnecessary, because stories in video games are crap anyway.”
“If I want a story I read a book.”

This has to stop. We need to change the discussion about story in games and those people need to get their act together. And here is why:

1.
It artificially limits the greatness, accessibility, attractiveness and cultural relevance of the medium we love.

Gaming is a colorful and diverse culture, with many unique qualities, coming in many forms and shapes and offering emotional engagement for everybody. With the advent of casual games, the wii and Facebook games, the industry became very inclusive and accessible for a very wide audience. No matter, if you like a challenge, just want to explore new worlds, want to pet exotic baby animals or see a man’s head burst open… there is a game for you. But then there are the people who want to be excluding, to somewhat claim our culture for themselves and have our culture in general cater more to their own preferences.

I’m from germany and am kinda careful with calling people out to be fascistic. So I call those people tribalists now. They treat gaming culture like an ism, like a tribe, campaigning to expand the acceptance and cultural importance of their own values. They don’t want their culture, their tribe, to be measured against other media, like movies and books. So they treat the common quality of all media, the storytelling value, as a minor aspect and put gameplay on a pedestal, the one thing the other media don’t have.

There is also a certain idealistic, bad-ass, young, heterosexual, mostly caucasian male idea of the core gamer, those tribalists want to uphold. Since parents and grandparents don’t fit this image, the wii games are “all shit because they are to easy and not complex enough” and Facebook games “aren’t actually real games at all”.

Gaming doesn’t belong to a certain group of people. It belongs as much to the pro gamer, the hardcore gamer and the game creator as much as to the casual gamer, the 6 year old gamer, the 90 year old gamer and the story enthusiast looking for a new way to experience great narrative.

2.
It’s disrespectful and dismissive towards a very big chunk of the money paying player community and towards a giant portion of the hard working people that create the games for us.

No, really. A line needs to be drawn here. Whoever starts campaigning to put one aspect of game creation over another, therefore devaluating the hard work of creative people and dismissing the preferences of other gamers, is nothing more than a tribalistic jackass. A jackass, who tries to sell his personal preferences as the alpha and omega of game design, but who actually is just severely limited by his imagination.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion when creating and consuming games. So if you don’t care about storytelling, hate extensive cutscenes or consider the story parts of video game are mostly laughable at best… well, that is fine. And yeah, voice your opinion. Do it loudly. And if you want developers to neglect storytelling in favor of better game design… well, that’s a reasonable demand. So voice this also. Go on. But remember: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion when creating and consuming games. This of course means also, everyone who plays games to experience a story and everyone who creates games to tell a story is entitled to do so is as valid a gamer and developer as anybody else.

You DO NOT argue for your own favorite things, by saying that people favoring different things “don’t get what video games are about”. Tribalists need to stop confusing their taste with expertise and start treating other gamers and creators with the respect they deserve. They need tolearn what courtesy is or GTFO!

3.
I hurts the creative industry we love.

Many developers want to sell story based games and many players want to spend their money on them. And that is a good thing. Many new players come from enjoying different media, like movies and bring certain narrative expectations with them and also are inexperienced with games. And when games can fulfill their expectations by offering great stories or even surpass them through the addition of accessible gameplay… well, that is also a good thing.

That is money for the industry, a growing audience and a growing cultural acceptance. Why would anybody want to limit that? Why would anybody campaign against the recognition of storybased games and for complex and challenging gameplay to be “what games are about”.

Nobody needs to fear that challenging and complex gameplay will die out. Nobody needs to fight for that. All the tribalist trying to defend their territory against the expanding casual game a storybased gaming audience are not helping. They do not only shut the door for concepts and people they don’t want to be associated with, they also shut the door for acceptance and money.

4.
It’s absolutely dishonest towards oneself.

Except from players, who’s gaming world only consists of Solitaire, Minesweeper and Tetris, everybody(!) wants story in their games. Players might hate long cutscenes, never played through a story worth remembering, dread awful dialog or feel like many games could have been better, if the developers would have focused less on story. But they would not want story to go away in their games. Nobody wants naked gameplay.

No shooter is more fun when just shooting at cardboard targets instead of enemies. No fighting game is more fun when kicking collision boxes instead of opponents. No Madden game is more fun when commanding unrecognizable no-name stick figures instead of official licensed real life NFL players. To turn target practice into firefights, you need story. You may not need much. Sometimes good character design does the trick, without any word of exposition needed.

So what if the tribalists win their overgeneralizing argument? Do they get the storyless games they want? What about stories that the individual player on the less-story-more-action side actually likes? I mean really likes, all their favorite characters are in there, the dialogs are fun to listen to and the emotional payoff at the end makes for a memorable finish… Does he wish for those games to be less than they are?

This needs to stop.

Bash bad storytelling. Bash bad gameplay. Bash weak voice acting. Bash interruptive cutscenes. Bash whatever is done in an uninspired throwaway lackluster kind of way. Bash it hard. But stop bashing the idea of games as a storytelling medium. They are a storytelling medium and it is important for them to be exactly that. Extracting storytelling does not help to set games apart from other media, it weakens games and makes them trail behind all the other media for a lack of emotional engagement.

Gameplay vs. story – this argument is not helping… no matter who would win. It’s just bull. It’s excluding, dismissive, disrespectful.

And it needs to stop. Right now.

A well, the age of the internet… haters gonna hate. I know.

reposted from my blog