Hopefully this will be the worst of the worst

A little note on a little quote

From this whimsical analysis of a whimsical analysis of Braid:

"Red Dead Redemption was great because of its bleak message about civilization's failings. It was also great because I was able to jump off of buildings and scare unsuspecting crowds of people. Far Cry 2 conveys a sobering story of war and violence, but it also provides an inexhaustible supply of stories about the sheer stupidity of starting a fire in the middle of a forest or letting a grenade roll back downhill towards you."

The purpose of these two examples is to illustrate how the same game can have moments of slapstick and moments of poignancy, as Braid does. What stands out to me about this quote is that in both examples we know that the poignancy basically comes from the story and the slapstick comes from the gameplay.

Game stories, so long as they exist, will often do their best to be poignant. And in triple A action games like Red Dead Redemption, Far Cry 2, and while I'm at it the Modern Warfare games, gameplay will often do its best to be over the top and exciting.

I'm not trying to make any big generalizations here. But the thought made me sigh.

My definition of "story"

Defining "story" is something that even the best academics struggle with. It's one of those concepts like "art", "religion", "good" and "game" that is very old and carries a wide variety of baggage.

I'm going to lay down a definition of story which I know to be faulty, which I would never claim to be universal. But it is carefully tuned to my purposes. Here it is:

Game = A + B

A is a version of the game with the bare minimum of content required for the system to be experienced. With all the animations and locations cut down to the choppy cuboids required to communicate their shape. With the sound effects including the voice acting and music reduced to nothing, unless it’s a rhythm game or a game that uses sound to feed back on what is happening. Obviously, with there are no cutscenes of any kind in this version of the game.

B is everything else – the things superfluous to the gameplay. B is the "story".

I told you it was faulty. "Story" is annoying because it is a catch-all term, and here I have made that even worse. But the things that it now catches are the things that I want to talk about. I hope to show, with this blog, that when ever a game developer expands the "B" part of there game, it all basically stems from the same intention. I also want to show that that intention is silly and out of tune with the language of video games.

(How do I define "gameplay"? That's way too hard a question! I just hope you know it when you see it)