The reason I don’t want to get into it here is because, well, I’ve changed my mind. My flaw was in having too narrow of a view of what a medium really is. As Ian points out, games are a medium of procedurality, of systems, a medium “that lets us play a role within the constraints of a model world.” Games are the medium through which the very procedurality of systems is transmitted, can be accessed, controlled and played with.

Once you fully grasp this concept, suddenly games aren’t just about either being entertaining or being serious. I think Ian says it best when he challenges us to “do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.”

I’ve come to the point where I have to wonder why we still call everything in this medium a ‘game’, when that term implicitly connotes entertainment and basically just causes confusion or ruins the legitimacy of some interesting systems of play. Of course, I won’t propose or start using some new name, but there will either come a time when we will have to adopt a new name for this burgeoning medium, and ‘game’ will remain the name of entertaining systems of play, or else ‘game’ will need to lose its current connotations and come to express all interactive procedural systems, regardless of whether they’re just for fun or something else/more.

In a ripost to James Willis’ article “Making Games That Make Stories” for Second Person, Juuls asks the “ludological” quesiton: Why?

Why make games that tell stories? Well, in this tiny corner of cyberspace—where ludology and narratology make sweet, sweet love: a Venn diagram whose sets are related at a point, immeasurable, like lovers kissing with just the tiniest lick of tongue—we will try to answer it, or at least explore the possibilities.

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There will always be a place in our consoles, on our computers, (in my heart) for games that aspire to be great games and nothing more, games where “story” is just another word for context. Games for gaming’s sake don’t need a story, and so Juul has every right to beg the question: Why?

The answer’s simple. Because games have revealed themselves to be powerful storytelling systems. With each generation the stories and the storytelling get better. Why do it? Because games tell stories in a novel and engaging way. Why progress instead of standing still? Because we can.

I think the current situation of “game” vs. “story” is a non-issue. Unfortunately, the bad rap around “story” seems to be kept alive by the fact that a great game can have a horrible story and still be fun, whereas a horrible game with a great story is irritating and just plain not fun. So why put so much effort into the story at all? But this assumption isn’t completely accurate. A horrible game could never tell a great story, because the telling would be as horrible as the game. The story itself may have the potential to be great, but a terrible game will do a terrible job telling it to you. So it’s never the case that terrible game has a great story. In reality, only a well designed game call tell a great story well.

To touch another point in Juul’s riposte, let me agree and say that games aren’t stories. A game by any definition will never be a story; they are two distinct kinds of things (they share some characteristics only because they can both be considered systems and are both experienced linearly in time—like everything else). Stories in games are experiential, they are produced by the game through the act of play. To say that “no silver bullet will appear that allows any arbitrary story to be made into a satisfying game” is to miss this distinction, or miss the point of storytelling in games.

Stories can’t be made into games, but games can be made to tell stories.

The art of telling stories with games is one that many game designers flirt with without truly knowing it. It is a formalistic,  system-centric (read: ludological) approach to the act of storytelling (read: narratology) that, ultimately, has yet to be defined.

And that’s what this site’s all about. It’s that metaphorical space where ludology steals a kiss from narratology.. when no one’s looking.