How many stories does need a game? Replaying and rewriting process

This is my first English entry to the Blog, so forgive my mistakes!!!

Modern videogames are storytelling devices; therefore, they are related not only with gameplay’s strategies, but also with narrative’s rhetoric. We can here refer the typical video-gaming distinction between games with emphasis in story and games with emphasis on gameplay. Obviously we are going to referring here to the former group. Thus, our question is exactly related about how many histories does need a game. And the most immediately answer says: “just one”. Nevertheless we want to make a nuance about it. We claim that a game tells not just a story, but many.

For instance, if you are playing Batman Arkham City, you play while the game tells a story, but actually there are many stories as well (the story of each villain, the story of some places, etc.). Indeed all these stories make a single story, but it is possible to distinguish between principal story and secondary story (and respectively, principal missions and secondary missions). But this difference is not enough to support our claim because all these stories build a single story. Therefore, we have to argue a better reason in order to justify our thesis.

A brief view shows that a game presents its story through two narrative strategies: dialogues and scripts, and gameplay and controls. Dialogues and scripts reveal explicitly the story, but gameplay and controls shape implicitly the story. Thus, if you are any character in game and talk with any NPC, you get the story directly. It is possible too to access explicitly to the story through a narrator. But gameplay reveals another shape of story. Each good game has an accurate articulation of both. If this articulation is weak, the game has narrative problems. For example, if you are playing again Batman Arkham City, on the one hand dialogues and scripts show you what Batman is doing there; on the other hand gameplay and control reveal the internal cohesion of story. Thus, if Batman has to infiltrate into Arkham City, controls must be related to this situation. Therefore, Batman Arkham City should not be a classical hack and slash, but it must have stealth missions. Actually, Batman Arkham City articulates accurately both narrative strategies, consequently it is a good game (from narrative point of view).

In order to make clear our conception, we show a fail narrative game, it is Remember me. The scripts and dialogues reveal a women which is capable to manipulate and modify memories. It is a powerful plot, but gameplay betrays it because the game is a hack and slash, so we can ask how it is possible that a game about manipulation of memories could be a hack and slash? Here we find a “ludic-narrative discordance” (The concept belong originally to DayoScript), because one thing is said by the dialogues and scripts, but another is said by the control and gameplay. This disharmony makes difficult a cohesive storytelling.

 https://youtu.be/eTBzX4eTHs0?t=4m37s

So, the story is not complete just with the script, it is necessary to play it (that is why they are videogames). However, scripts are usually the same (indeed there are many role games with many endings and many ways to resolve puzzles, but it is another question), but gameplay is different according to each gamer. The difference could be brief, but it is important because it implies that game experience is different. Hermeneutically this renovation of the same experience, feature that is typically of games because games appear each time in a new form to experience. Gadamer spends many pages to explain the concept of play according to this statement:

The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players. We can already see this from the use of the word, especially from its many metaphorical usages... Hence the mode of being of play is not such that, for the game to be played, there must be a subject who is behaving playfully. Rather, the primordial sense of playing is the medial one. Thus we say that something is "playing" (spielt) somewhere or at some time, that something is going on (im Spiele 1st) or that something is happening (sich abspielt) (103-104) … In cases where human subjectivity is what is playing, the primacy of the game over the players engaged in it is experienced by the players themselves in a special way (106)

As it is presented, games consist in a special way to experience them. It is the same idea that Borges argued many times about each new reading is indeed a re-writing process. On this account, if you play a “new game” each time you play a game, and games are storytelling devices, it is possible to claim that games need many stories to tell in order to be a game. These stories concern not only to dialogues and scripts (eventually they are always the same), but to gameplay and control. 

So, the more games are played, the more stories are told.