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)
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