The Mechanic is the Message

Extra Credits did a collaboration with Idea Channel to make this video about the weird phenomenon in games where people completely forget “what the game is about” (i.e. the narrative, subtext, et cetera), because they only engage with the mechanics (since those are fun, elaborate and demanding).

It’s a really great and important thing to realize, but he goes awry by suggesting that mechanics are “over-privileged”. Mechanics, in contrast with the definition he chose, are not just what allow us tointeract with the game state; they also create the game state and fundamentally underlie it.

It’s true that in many games, the mechanics are in competition with the story or message over the player’s attention – but correcting that issue is not about tipping the balance of the competition in favour of the story. Mechanics are not just a boundary that we have to overcome to be part of the narrative; they are not the elaborate versions of pressing play, or turning pages, because they are also responsible for what is written on the pages.

If you resolve the dissonance between narrative and gameplay by prioritizing narrative over gameplay, what you get is a book, or a film, not a game. What you must do, instead, is to have the mechanics be the message.

When you are playing a game the “things you must do” that the video is mentions need to deliver the meaning on their own! The subtext and the message have to be contained within those actions and those rules. The act of succeeding at the game must require the player to address the theme of the game.

The easiest way to do that is by writing an “interactive narrative”, i.e., one where you incorporate options, and let the player choose how events are resolved: text adventures, visual novels, choose-your-own-adventure books, and games like TellTale’s “The Walking Dead” are all examples of this approach.

If you want a more elaborate gameplay system, then you need to make sure that your mechanics actually relate to the message, and contextualize them properly so that the players can interpret that message. Many great games with great stories nevertheless fail to do this: StarCraft, mentioned in the vid, has gameplay that talks about resource management, prioritization, and even Art-of-War-derived philosophical questions, but the story from the cutscenes is about politics and betrayal, which are not part of the gameplay, so they get ignored. Plenty of great games like Half-Life and BioShock fall into the same trap.

The best example of a game that still has an elaborate gameplay system, but conveys messages with those systems is probably Lucas Pope’s “Papers, Please”, but you can see some of it at work in Yager Development’s “Spec Ops: The Line”, or the new “Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor” from Monolith (specifically in the Nemesis system – the overarching plot is executed no differently from any other “cinematic” game).