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Comment by rtehfm | Hacker News Reader

I partially disagree with you. Some of my most memorable moments are the stories of various games. Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: A Link to the Past and so on all, with their great gameplay for the time, above average to great story lines that captured its audience.

Now on to games like StarCraft, DoDA, Quake 3, and Counter-Strike were all hailed as some of the greats, not because of the story like you pointed out, but because of the game mechanics that allowed them to be used as a medium for competitive gaming. And, as a former competitive gamer, I can attest to the addictive nature of gaming that causes your heart to race and one's palms to sweat while trying to clinch a victory.

For this, I believe you can't say stories don't matter. I believe there are games that are better suited for repetitive gameplay and those that rely on a great story and subpar game mechanics to reel in or captivate the player(s).

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This sort of brings us to a philosophical problem of determining where game design ends and writing begins, sort of how movies have often had difficulty delineating between the responsibilities of a writer, director, and producer. The actor was ad-libbing in that scene, should he get a writing credit? The director picked his own DP, Editor and half the cast, should he get an executive producer credit?

When Miyamoto invented the Goomba and made him the first enemy in Super Mario Bros, was he writing or designing?

Certainly he was writing because he was creating a protagonist and an obstacle for the protagonist. But certainly he was also designing, because he described a system for the gamer to control the protagonist and rules for how Mario could interact with the Goomba.

Metal Gear Solid and A Link to the Past are great for the sake of comparison. How many cut scenes could you tear out of MGS and still have the exact same gaming experience? How many from LTTP?

I don't know what the answer is, but I know that the answer for MGS is higher than 0. I'm less certain for LTTP.

Does that make Miyamoto more pure as an artist than Kojima? At least where these games are concerned, I lean toward yes, but there's quite obviously gray areas here.

And blurred lines like you illustrate above are a good argument why we can't say video games should be primarily considered performance art pieces in the realm of interaction design, as well as why we can't say video games should be primarily considered story delivery mechanisms.

The video game is both interactive and passively consumed.

Machinima exists because of how enjoyable experiencing a story through a video game environment can be. Spectating video games is a Billion Dollar Industry (TM), with Twitch and international professional gaming leagues getting ESPN coverage.

There's value in the mechanics and human interaction as story, on one level, and the fiction in the game itself as a story.

As well there's value in how the interactions make us a part of the game and a part of the story. Sure I know I'm not the lovable Italian plumber, but after a while my brain stops making that distinction, at least a little bit. I know I'm not a Guardian defending the remnants of earth from big brutish aliens, but after a while I stop consciously identifying that barrier, letting it become translucent.

The closer and closer we get to immersive 3D gaming, the blurrier that line becomes. So there too ^^, the story is incredibly important as a driving motivation to play and enjoy video games.

And really... the closer we get to putting the human inside the game, the more important that story is going to become. The interaction mechanics are important because when they're done right, when they're executed beautifully, we stop thinking about the game and form a more consciously transparent symbiosis with the technology. The COD games were fantastic because the FPS controls Just Worked.

What happens when we continue progress and get to neural interfaces, where the designer builds a realistic-enough-feeling environment that you can engage with the characters and elements in it? Story, I guess.

So... to summarize too many words for a simple counter-point: it's all a part of the whole, and inappropriate to say games are just a subset of interaction design.

If we follow this rabbit hole too far, we'll end up trying to answer questions like "What is a game?" and "What is art?"

But what you're describing is what I want. I want more immersion, I want the focus to be on the what the gamer experiences and giving them something meaningful to do.

But when you plug your brain into the NeuralCube4000 two decades from now, what are you going to get?

What I want: You're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest. Beyond the forest, you see the peak of a mountain escaping from the trees. You look to your left and see a farmhouse, and the farmer is starting his day at work. A fawn leaps across the field and birds take flight as the deer breaks the treeline.

At this point, you're going to want to do something. Chase the deer, climb the mountain, beat up the farmer and take his gold, whatever it is you want to do, the game should encourage and reward your action with feedback.

What the games industry is likely to give me:

You're dropped into a dark room. A disembodied voice speaks: "You are Reginald Brisbane, a young farmer from Bastogne in the 14th century. Your father perished at the hands of brigands when you were seven and you were sent to live on your uncle's farm, but you've never stopped nursing the need to avenge your father's death, and you're now ready to seek it." Then, you're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest...

Now, clearly both of these scenarios were written by me, but one was written to encourage interaction, and the other was written to tell a story.

Which one do you want games to be? I think I've made my desires clear.

There is a great book on film by David Mamet[0] in which he describes the authentic way to piece together a story. Roughly, stories should be told through editing and camera movement, somewhat following the montage theory.[1] You see a picture of a man staring. You see a coffin. He's sad. Replace the coffin with a bowl of soup, and now he's hungry instead. According to Mamet (and many others) even feature films should be done in this manner, no dialogue whatsoever (and definitely no voice overs or signs/texts to read).

In the same vein, a game should be told with the protagonist as the camera. You go to the farm house, no one is home. You go the forest, you see broken twigs and no animals: Somethings not right.

The upcoming game The Witness seems to embrace this sort of thinking. So did many rpgs (even vanilla WoW, to a certain degree. Much of the feedback from the game came through interaction with your surroundings[2] and you could always choose a different quest line).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/On-Directing-Film-David-Mamet/dp/01401... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory [2] The first time you see a glowing plant you realise there's something called herbalism etc.

The realism is a bit orthogonal to the interactivity/discover-ability you describe. For example, some really old text adventure games fit perfectly what your ideal (while others fit perfectly the story telling example). A game that mostly fulfills that promise for me is Morrowind.

^^ Is why all of this has to be as much or more about the story as the tech. Story development needs to grow to do things like giving NPCs in the games personalities to deepen your immersion in the story and to help it grow toward it's confluences of "predetermined destiny" or whatever.

Fret not! Of your two NC4000 possible futures there, we're already getting some fantastic examples of the first case.

I'll be contentious though in that you've stood up two straw men there. A "here's different world simulator, go explore" game will take you only so far without story and motivation toward some end. And the second option would get the same reviews a game like that would today -- formulaic, boring, pedantic.

One aspect at the expense of the other gives you a not motivating game, it's as direct as that. You need an interface that becomes transparent over time, and you need compelling storytelling to engage you in the lives of the characters and their plight.

> Machinima exists because of how enjoyable experiencing a story through a video game environment can be.

Let's not oversell. That's a minor contribution. A much, much bigger reason machinima exists is that it's easier to harness an existing video game to display things than to animate the same things yourself.

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