Since videogames became an entity on this planet, gameplay has been the defining feature that separates the medium from other mediums. Story meanwhile, is a staple of art as a way of gathering meaning in a work of fiction, a bedrock to which we understand and connect with the words on a page in a book, the images and interlinked shots in a film and the woven cutscenes in a videogame. Both elements are extremely important in the realm of videogames in particular, because when they both work together, they produce the greatest pieces of entertainment-where the game can be felt emotionally through the story and its themes and scenarios, as well as the gameplay through how the actions you control through a videogame controller make you feel as the player. Here the argument pertains to how gameplay is far more important than story in a videogame, a question that can only truly be answered by giving textual examples. The following aims to explain why gameplay will always be more crucial to videogames than story can possibly hope to match.
Let’s start things off with the facts-not every game has a story. You don’t see many sports games with a story, leaving only the gameplay as the main crucial aspect to which the game can define itself visuals notwithstanding. It’s true that sports games are incorporating MyCareer and My Player modes as sporty alternatives to a conventional videogame campaign, but gamers didn’t flock to Fifa, Madden, NBA, NHL and MLB games because they had stories or emotional embellishments to care about. Therefore gameplay has to take the floor, and when it comes to sports games, the competitive play entices gamers to play together as well as alone-appearing to favour the gameplay as the reason why people play and have fun-the potential stories from My Player and My Career are secondary and are non-important in the grand scheme of things when it comes to that genre. Videogame stories are very compelling and they can make you want to see a game through to the end, but the thing is a videogame story ends, whereas gameplay continues to endure long after a campaign or story mode has been finished provided they have any replay value beyond the single-player. Countless multiplayer offerings are testament to this, especially ones with a compulsive hook like the Call of Duty franchise, Fortnite, Battlefield, Overwatch, Rocket League and Monster Hunter among many others. Many of these multiplayer games are overwhelmingly popular because of how they play because that’s why gamers keep on coming back for more and more of it. Some games like What Remains of Edith Finch know how to make a story come to life through its gameplay. In Edith Finch you interact with items and keepsakes whereby you’re then transported to the memories of a Finch family member and play unique memories of their final moments in a sombre but often very captivating way. It’s usually the smaller studios and indie developers that know how to ring great gameplay out of their games in the most sensational of way, maybe because they understand that videogames are about playing and not watching. Another point in gameplay’s favour is that videogame narratives and stories are often cribbed from films and therefore they can be very unoriginal and regurgitative. When you think of The Last of Us you think of The Road, you think of other videogames with stories at their centre like The Walking Dead, you think of games that try to do what The Last of Us did like Days Gone, God of War and Detroit: Become Human-you get many games that don’t do much that is new or daring. Story is very important to any art form but in videogames the stories are told in cinematic ways-yes cinema-like, when it comes to gameplay you don’t have that in any other medium. I mean if a Scorsese classic like Goodfellas or Casino had gameplay then that’s be bonkers and awesome, but no films rely on visual storytelling-and so do games, whereas gameplay is its own entity-a simulation-style phenomenon that continues to evolve, whereas stories tend to change based off societal attitudes, gameplay changes are to make things more fun and accessible for the gamer-which of those sounds more exciting? Admittedly there are games that deserve a completion based on their stories, but if a game frustrates me along the way where I keep dying due to unfair difficulty spikes or technical chugs-then that’s no reason to keep on playing-the story is therefore unimportant if the gameplay falls down. It is through the gameplay that the story can be told and therefore story doesn’t matter as much. How are you going to experience a game’s story if the game breaks down on you-watch it on YouTube? To wrap this debate up story is very crucial to the success of the videogame medium, but that success wouldn’t be as astronomical if the gameplay didn’t allow for it. Gameplay has seen an increased revision throughout videogame history-but stories have become somewhat stale through their repetitive themes, seriousness and lack of innovative ideas. Gameplay is where creative potential can explode-where we can feel experiences rather than being told them, where the potential and future of the medium lies. Storytelling will not go away and will keep evolving, but it will not create newer grounds like gameplay will. |