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[george]

I think this is a fairly good read. That like, talks about stories in games and things.

Holy cow...can I make a brief tangent here and say how awesome that Love MMO looks?

[Gnarf]

It does There is  thread about it here, by the by.

[Chris Whitman]

It's semantics because your assertion that gameplay and story are the same thing only works with your definition of the word "gameplay". 

Personally, my point was not really that gameplay, as a concept, doesn't exist, it was just that, while it may be very easy to draw a line between story and gameplay from the designer's end, the two concepts tend to be very closely intertwined from the perspective of a player.

That's not to say they're always one hundred percent indistinguishable, but if someone said something along the lines of "Bioshock would have been just as good without the story," they are probably talking about the game without the found audio diaries and the radio transmissions, not a game produced by taking the basic game engine, levels and controls, stripping all models, audio and textures and replacing them with a game where the player is cube who fires smaller cubes at other cubes.

Essentially, I was trying to explain that most of what happens in a game contributes to story, as it is perceived by the player, not just elements the designer puts in on purpose as 'story.' Story is not just something that is tacked on in the end to dress up gameplay a little. It will exist in the mind of the player whether you want it to or not, so there is no reason not to structure your game as to produce a story that is effective and compelling as opposed to one which is boring and stereotypical.

[Chris Whitman]

Regarding the above post, saving and loading would be considered by most as more of a metagame action. Most players wouldn't consider saving as part of the game itself, which is why it seems incongruous when something is shoehorned in such as the infamous "talk to me to record your story" dialogue in old RPGs.

On the other hand, Half Life's gravity gun is a story element. Although picking objects up and moving them around could be considered a gameplay feature, from the player's perspective it is entangled in the idea of a gun for lifting and throwing objects which was made by a scientist and is used in your quest to fight aliens. The actions that comprise gameplay from a designer's perspective directly relate to what is perceived as story by the player.

[december]

And, well. Whether or not everything is story or gameplay is story is gameplay or, something... the game being saved and loaded isn't a part of the story of how Gordon Freeman saved the world from aliens[1]. It is part of the gameplay though. It changes the way you play the game. You can still call it story, I suppose. Part of game-being-played story. Personally I'd me more comfortable discussing it if we called it a game mechanic, and, pretty much like mewse said, sometimes a distinction there is quite meaningful.


[1] I've no idea what goes on in them Half Life games.

Quick saving is part of the story in Marathon though, and that does make things work out in a kind of cute way.

[george]

Regarding the above post, saving and loading would be considered by most as more of a metagame action. Most players wouldn't consider saving as part of the game itself, which is why it seems incongruous when something is shoehorned in such as the infamous "talk to me to record your story" dialogue in old RPGs.

Yeah, though I've played some games that did weave the meta-actions into the story to good effect. Slouching Towards Bedlam comes to mind. It's kind of like the last scene of Brain-Damaged Toon Underworld in the VGNG Compo...the quit scene was structurally integrated into the gameplay, right? Despite the obvious advantages of a clear delineation between the meta-game and the game I think there's something to be said for such integration.

[Gnarf]

First of all,

Personally, my point was not really that gameplay, as a concept, doesn't exist, it was just that, while it may be very easy to draw a line between story and gameplay from the designer's end, the two concepts tend to be very closely intertwined from the perspective of a player.
[...]

That stuff all sounds pretty reasonable to me and is not something I'm arguing against. Just in case and that.

Regarding the above post, saving and loading would be considered by most as more of a metagame action. Most players wouldn't consider saving as part of the game itself, which is why it seems incongruous when something is shoehorned in such as the infamous "talk to me to record your story" dialogue in old RPGs.

Well, yeah. My take on it is that it's still a game mechanic. Unless it's the savegame system of a roguelike, it is part of how you play the game. And then the savegame system is a sort of major design decision (and if you don't make it as a design decision, odds are you're encouraging meta-gaming).

And, I wouldn't consider it a metagame action in that game that limits the number of savegames allowed based on your chosen difficulty. Whichever game that was. Could've been a Hitman one. Not really in checkpoint/savepoint systems either (at least not in certain ones).

And also also, I think the clear line between meta-game and the game should be that the game mechanics are part of the game and not the meta-game. If you have a bunch of stuff that isn't really part of the game around, it seems a pretty sound idea to not put it in the game