I just think for me, what attracts me MOST to gaming, is that having interactivity creates the opportunity for an entirely new type of story. Sometimes that story sticks closer to traditional media, and those are all good fun. The ones that really utilize interactivity in a unique, meaningful way as a central element in telling the story are the ones I want to play.

I totally disagree with the notion of gameplay OR story coming first…at least in the sense of a good “story game.” “Mechanics games” don’t need story, or need very little, because that is not the focus of the experience. But a good story game needs to weigh gameplay and story EQUALLY and develop them together; that is the only way to ensure they fit together, rather than trying to squeeze one into the other’s mold. Gameplay is the signature element of the medium, but every other element is just as important.

As for my Mass Effect and BioShock examples, ANY game has a certain degree of “player-authored narrative.” However, the specific moments I cited are NOT examples of this, other than the specific reaction you might have as the player experiencing these events. But the same twist happens to every player that plays BioShock, and if different players chose the same dialogue branch they’d lead to the same variation of the story in Mass Effect. These are directed, crafted experiences, that leverage player interactivity in very interesting ways, but the stories are still stories that someone wrote and play out in a very specific way, if in slightly different flavors. As for Uncharted, that is a franchise that goes more toward the “interactive film” extreme, which isn’t necessarily trying to be a “game” and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s a very particular type of experience that the designers wanted to make and a very specific experience they wanted players to have, and just because it has fewer traditional game systems doesn’t mean its any less great a piece of entertainment.

This is why I say “gaming” is a misnomer, because modern video games branch so widely that not all of them even fit the definition of a “game,” but that’s okay! All media have different flavors. In film, there are you standard hour-and-thirty-minute affairs, your protracted dramas, your documentaries, your short films, and hell, even TV is technically the same medium simply delivered in a different way. There is nothing wrong with having a

Any GAME should, first and foremost, be about the gameplay. If the gameplay is poor, it’s hard to suffer through it, even for a great story. On the contrary, you can ignore a crappy story for great gameplay. Naturally, it’s best to have both: a great story fit into great gameplay.

As a writer and avid reader, I’ve read very few books where I’ve come away thinking, “This would make an epic video game.” There have been some, to be sure. But the best books tend to lend themselves well toward other forms of non-interactive media, such as movies or television. I mean, despite numerous attempts, how many good Lord of the Rings games are there?

On the reverse, there are plenty of games that I would love to read as books, if only because I know there’s so much more story that could be added in.Valkyria Chronicles, my favorite game this generation, has an amazing story. But I feel like there could be so much MORE done to it and WITH it in printed format, even while telling the same story: because the story is no longer confined to a single character here or there, or a handful of points of view, because time can be taken to detail a specific scene and thus immerse the reader in it in a way that immortalizes it far better than even PLAYING through it could.

Just imagine how chaotic it would be, for example, to have the Game of Thrones game follow a similar format to the Song of Ice and Fire novels. Hell, even if it didn’t follow the SAME format, it’d be impossible to put all the information, all the story going on at the same time, all the characters and their motives and emotions together in as coherent a fashion. Could a movie? Likely. A TV show? Doing good so far. A comic? Based on other comics, without a problem.

But having the player direct the actions of characters makes it difficult to put the story FIRST in a game. And if you have a really great story, yet someone must struggle through awful mechanics and gameplay aspects to get it, then the reception and immersion of the story suffers.

I BELIEVE this is what Jaffe was saying: make gameplay the priority. Ideally, they should compliment each other, so that the gameplay effectively delivers the story without losing enjoyability(is that a word? It is now). It’s far too easy to do it the other way ’round: making gameplay that fits a story is as simple as having a person go from point A to point B and things being told to them, or shown in cutscenes, et cetera.

Your bringing up Mass Effect and BioShock are good examples of where the story is best told as a game, but isn’t that what he would have referred to under the second bullet as a “player-authored” story? As opposed to a more scripted format, like an Uncharted or Final Fantasy, the story in these games is largely based upon the player’s actions. The player is the primary catalyst for the story- and if not primary, then highly critical- moving the way it does. But such things hinge on the GAMEPLAY: the actions the player takes being taken into account, systems or equations or whatever that weigh and balance these actions, the very ABILITY to choose different actions and have different outcomes, in the first place. Without good gameplay, these changes instigated by the player would just seem forced, instead of the natural outcome of the player’s actions. Without gameplay in place that makes it FEEL right, the story changes just wouldn’t… FEEL right.

Yes, story is very important. It’s why my favorite genre is the JRPG, why I own more than 50 of them, why I’ve put 150+ hours into at least half of them. But I couldn’t spend all that time enjoying the stories of these games if I didn’t also enjoying PLAYING the games, themselves.

And for that, you need good gameplay. In the end, a game is still a game, and a game needs good gameplay.

Let’s put it another way: there is no story behind Tetris or Pac Man. No story driving Galaga. A great game can exist with little to no story. But a game with little to no gameplay isn’t much of a game at all. This… truth…?… should be an indicator of which is more important to the medium of gaming.