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You're talking about two different types of games: Games of Sport vs. Games of Immersion

The difference: Context

Starcraft multiplayer is a Game of Sport, where character and story are nonexistent and mechanics/"interaction" are all that matters in a game of chess completely removed from any context other than the tournament you are playing in.

Switch over to campaign mode and the context becomes the story line and plot. Sure, the game still relies on mechanics but you advance through different scenarios where you meet new characters, form alliances, explore new worlds, and even switch sides and play as a different race based on the plot of the story. Solo play is a Game of Immersion.

The Dark Souls franchise has a good balance of the two. You advance across the world (semi) linearly in a movie-like fashion, learning about the various NPCs and lore of the world. You are also regularly invaded by other players, and then the game becomes completely mechanics/interaction-based until one of you wins the duel.

You're basically arguing that video games are/should be more like a football game than a movie. They can span both forms of entertainment, and people will choose to engage with one or the other based on personal preferences.

You can certainly have both types, but it's annoying and sad that the people whose jobs are to write about video games can't tell the difference between the two, and routinely write articles judging mechanically innovate games by their fluff.

I would say that Dark Souls is still fundamentally driven by mechanics, as most of the gameplay stems from you adapting to various enemies/AI patterns and physically learning to overcome them, while the depth of the story is mostly up to you to piece together.

Sure, you're right that good mechanics are a prerequisite to a good game. But they're not everything. Driving to work every morning requires mechanical mastery and adapting to various environmental factors, but I'm not masochistic enough to call it a game :)

In real life: do you derive pleasure from understanding and mastering the physical laws of the world, or from spending your time creating a mental narrative for yourself and building emotional relationships with those around you? Perhaps a combination of the two?

The Souls franchise became popular solely because it dared to provide complicated mechanics and harsh trial-by-fire instruction in a time where the vast majority of AAA games are dumbed-down handholdy themepark rides with all of their edges filed off. The kind of people that play games only for their stories would never have suffered through any Souls games if it weren't for the massive hype that the "mechanical gamers" generated around it.

Likewise, Starcraft had a story, as did Command & Conquer. But one of those games is played to this day, both in its original incarnation and its sequel, on a massive scale that makes people question their definitions of the word "sport." I don't think this author would have cared to write filler about the story of Command & Conquer today.

> complicated mechanics and harsh trial-by-fire instruction

Super Metroid anyone?

>and people will choose to engage with one or the other based on personal preferences.

Thank you for this comment and the distinction between Sport and Immersion. I love the story mode and do not enjoy multiplayer matches.

You don't necessarily have to engage with one or the other. There's plenty of space in the middle. Most video games have pretty simplistic plots, and I don't get to attached to them, but I recognize that they play a role in tying the whole experience together.

I have been a starcraft player for almost 2 decades now and I never really cared about the story or background to it. What I cared about is that it combines elements of some of my favorite strategy games into a single medium. I often say that it has elements of chess, poker and reaction based games like first person shooters.

It is like chess in that it is a game of strategy and board control, army movement, identifying what your opponent is planning and actively countering it, identifying weaknesses and exploiting them.

It is like poker in that is a game of imperfect information. Unlike chess I cannot ever see the entire board in starcraft, only the pieces I have scouted and as soon as my scout leaves that information is now outdated and assumptions have to be made about the actions of the opponent since I last had accurate information. Poker is similar in that you can never have 100% certainty of what your opponent may be holding, there is always that knowledge gap and great players can exploit it.

It is like first person shooters in that is it reaction based, the person who is able to more efficiently process the information they are receiving and make correct decisions about their course of action can execute faster and have an exponential return in terms of tipping the scales in their favor. This applies to many things such as base building, army building and micro mechanics during army engagement.

I've been a fan for so long precicely because these fine strategy details and forced decision making make an excellent filter between the good and the great, the great and the elite. Watching the elite play is comparable in my mind to watching chess grandmasters battle only in real time and not turn based where their perceived life is on the line and one slip up can cause instant death. It's that great adrenaline high, not the background story, that has kept me so engaged for so long.

That's an interesting synergy, I think you're right. I think it explains a lot about why I do not do well at SC: I am poor at most of those other games, so a union of those seems especially daunting.

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).

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.

^^ 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.

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.

> 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.

Instead of waiting for society to understand and comprehend the medium, those who craft video games work to make their medium more like film or novels or music or other "high" artforms.

Yeah, seriously. For hardcore StarCraft fans, the narratives they REALLY care about involve characters such as Greg Fields, Lim Yo Hwan, Lee Young Ho, and Lee Jae Dong; not Jim Raynor and Kerrigan.

Does it really matter, when Blizzard ruined both sides of that equation? The story of the Koprulu Sector is a complete joke, and competitive Starcraft II is one of the biggest gaming letdowns in recent memory.

I see the IMO very dismissive "competitive Starcraft sucks now" sentiment being repeated all over the internet. While it is smaller than say DOTA/LoL, I would encourage you to check out the Blizzcon finals from this past weekend, which I think shows that it is still just as compelling as any of the other eSports out there.

Nothing lasts forever. Sports go through cycles like this. Tennis was in quite a down cycle before the emergence of Roger Federer. Competitive RTS is in a down cycle now. The real tragedy here is how much more power large corporations have over esports as compared to traditional sports.

> The real tragedy here is how much more power large corporations have over esports as compared to traditional sports.

This just makes me think you have no idea how traditional sports are managed at levels above "let's get some kids together to play in the field". If anything, large corporations have much more power in traditional sports.

They have a lot of power over the medium of broadcast. They don't have much power at all over the rules of the game. Fans tend to revolt over such things.

There's so many failures to it. The company apparently thinking the professional scene drives the player base, the company apparently thinking it's responsible for 100% of the balance of the game, not realizing "the meta" plays a huge role towards that end. Because of these Blizzard was way too conservative and the game ended up just not being fun. Once the game is not fun, the player base leaves. Once the player base leaves, the professional scene dies.

The most egregious error might be the company not having a genuine designer in charge of the game, which to me seems like a very corporate-y lack of respect for game design. SC2 as a whole was way too conservative. And this is just on the design side, there was greed and short-sightedness all over the place.

Competitive Starcraft is bigger than its ever been outside of Korea right now, as measured by total views.

I think this actually demonstrates a common mistake people make in thinking about video games. There's room for a lot more diversity in experience, and talking about them as a single type of art is sort of like lumping together films and novels. They run the full spectrum between tight text-based interactive fiction with two boolean decisions in the whole work, and Minecraft. Generalizing games as a special case of interaction design works for a subset, but certainly not the entire medium.

As a more personal counter example: There have been many games where I have hated the mechanics and continued playing for the story or art, and I know many people who are the same way.

There is a balancing act that every successful game has to perform between gameplay and motivation. Without gameplay, games are dull passive experiences (see David Cage) with no pull to keep the player engaged. Without motivation gameplay feels empty and pointless like playing chess with yourself. Starcraft's campaign wouldn't have been half as engaging if it was a map pack with basic instructions before each mission. While games aren't movies they have learned a valuable lesson in using dramatic tension to make certain moments memorable.

I think StarCraft's campaign is almost irrelevant. It serves mainly as a tutorial for the multiplayer game. Which is why escort missions are boring.

I'm glad someone is finally saying this. Gaming seems to suffer from a serious inferiority complex, where they hope by mimicking the dominant art forms they can gain legitimacy. So a game like Bioshock is seen as superior to a game like Ms. Pacman because it has all these "movie-like" qualities. It has nice production values, and a narrative, a soundtrack. In reality I think 20 years from now you will still have people trying to break high score records on games like Ms. Pacman and Donkey Kong whereas Bioshock will be seen the same way we look at games like Night Trap today.

I think the most damaging idea to ever enter gaming is the myth that it's primarily a 'narrative' medium. That is horribly reductionist and limiting. Games are about narrative generation, not narrative delivery. That's the beauty of it. Each starcraft match is a narrative in the same way a professional chess match is a narrative. I think this is why let's plays are so popular. You aren't watching to get the game's story, you are watching to get the specific narrative that is created by a certain person playing the game.

one trouble with game stories is that 99.999% of the time you know exactly where they're going because you're the protagonist and you will win or die.

the second problem is that there are only a few good writers of the correct style out there and they're all in television. (total hyperbole but the point should be evident)

the third problem is that video game makers refuse to accept their actual demographics and they keep aiming the story at 14 year old boys, who have awful taste, frankly.

edit: accidental word

Two interesting exceptions to the win-or-fail linear narrative:

Kentucky Route Zero — Player choice affects the flavor of narrative but not the direction of the story, so that the story is linear but the experience is wildly different for everyone who plays it. Absolutely brilliant. Player choices that both do not matter and, at the same time, matter more than anything else.

Black Ops 2: I know, I know, and yeah the first one is probably in the top 5 worst games I've ever played, and this one's got a ton of issues, but what it gets right are a huge number of opportunities to fail forward—losses, big and small, that affect the story rather than showing a game over screen. More dumb action games should do this, it would make them suck less. It's also got the best local multiplayer I've seen in an FPS since Perfect Dark (though still not as good) but that's another topic.

one trouble with game stories is that 99.999% of the time you know exactly where they're going because you're the protagonist and you will win or die.

In Halo: Reach, you win, and then you die. Halo 4 didn't have what I'd consider a happy ending either.

Interaction accomplishes the browsing of information, just like scanning a picture or looking through a card catalog.

And when folks make broad appeals to interactivity, they are saying that somehow the interaction of the gamepad is fundamentally different from turning the page of a book.

But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there.

It is the simulation that people turn to next - a believable world that responds to your actions in complex ways.

But again, there is a problem - more than one problem. If the simulation is as chaotic as reality, people lose track of the hooks that kept them involved - they no longer have the ability to make extensive plans or strategies, neither are there any puzzles to solve cleanly and gracefully. And if the simulation adds detail without purpose, it dilutes any designed intent. The small differences in situations are vastly overwhelmed by a few key elements that control the real outcomes - leading to a noisy experience. Only a few kinds of games can survive the extensive sim treatment - the kinds of games that you play with the intent of telling a story about later. Put to this purpose the details rise back to the surface as important story elements.

If not those two things, what is it that is grabbing you about Starcraft? Here I would pause to consider what unifies chess, science, and literature. It is the conversation of being posed problems and arguing your case and proving your points, given a factual situation involving arbitrary rules. There are different interactions involved in each case, different skills and levels of execution needed. But it is this thing of being posed interesting problems with variety, one after another, that drives both the best liked games and stories. They don't have to be hard or deep problems - "who will the main character hook up with" drives countless stories and "which team will get the most points" drives most sports - but they give you something to chew on.

And so a writing focus is, in this light, an equal partner to a mechanics focus - either could be taking the lead role. The writing could pose a question that the player solves mechanically - that's a very typical model. Or the writing could usher you in one direction, only to reach a mechanical contradiction, leading the player to a critique of the system, a desire to escape the rules.

What we don't ask people to do in games is to design, from scratch, large parts of the experience. That takes us out of the realm of immersion, browsing, and strategizing, and into "hard" creativity where an intentional vision drives large bodies of work.

The novel parallel is a great one. Novels, like games, are not passive art or entertainment. The reader has to keep turning the page, moving left-to-right through the world the author has created.

I can certainly agree with you that writing can have a meaningful impact on a game, but it's not the reason a game becomes art, as this Polygon piece would have us believe about StarCraft. StarCraft is absolutely an example of how interaction is the core of the experience, and writing only helps construct a narrative to draw you into the experience, providing a cohesive metaphor to describe the experience - both during and afterward.

Like Mario saving the Princess or Donkey Kong collecting his bananas or Terran defeating the Zerg, whatever goal the game designer creates to propel you into the narrative is orthogonal to what ultimately makes the experience meaningful. The first Goomba in Super Mario Brothers is far more important to the experience than the Princess at the end of the game. Hell, the first question mark block is even more meaningful than that.

But you're right, that without the eyes on the Goomba or the question mark on the block or Mario raising a flag at the end of the level, there's no narrative to be drawn into, there's no way to describe what you're experiencing.

And you put it so perfectly: But that isn't what we are thinking about as we get immersed in a game experience - we soon forget that the controls are there.

In a great novel, the words fade away and the book disappears and all that remains is the dream world the author has written for you.

A game does almost exactly the same thing, but through action and feedback. The feedback can be text, voice over, artwork, animation, or any of the thousands of possibilities digital multimedia has opened up for us, but it should never try to be meaningful unto itself. This is where game designers get bogged down in trying to be like other mediums. Feedback is about rewarding the gamer's action and pushing into the next action, looking for greater reward. A mushroom comes out the question block, the old man gives you a sword, your wave of zerglings wash over a gas refinery.

You might argue that writing is key to creating this experience, and I won't disagree, but the Polygon piece absolutely fails to illustrate this, and so another wave of English majors says to themselves, "Well, if I can't get my novel published, there's always video games"

As John Carmack said: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

Your viewpoint totally discounts wide swaths of games and gamers for which the story and lore ARE very important. Games aren't one or the other, they're the combination of all these things.

I think it is ok for an article to focus on one aspect of a game series without covering everything. Also the three unique races with different characters made Starcraft special.

And maybe the writing is what gets "society to understand and comprehend the medium." If you ask any adult who does not play video games what they think of Mario, they are more likely to say "oh the cute chubby plumber" than they are to say "I heard that game is well-designed."

I would have to say your talking about design not story. They designed him to look like a plumber because he was more western friendly. Had nothing to do with the story.

That was so beautiful it almost made me cry.

Thank for putting into words what has been in my heart for so long.