@voidoid:
You were only discussing those elements insofar as they relate to playing the game. You didn't discuss the aesthetic or the actual narrative (a spare marine opens a portal to Hell on Mars, or something) or the music or any of the other elements outside the gameplay.
I have not satisfactorily summarized what it feels like to play Doom, I have really just described player input.
That's because there's more to Doom than its gameplay. (I am assuming gameplay means "the elements of play.") There's more to any game than just its gameplay. Given the nature of video games, all the elements of a game will inevitably overlap. However, it's still possible to separate them for discussion's sake, and then bring them back together to discuss how they affect one another.
Picking up health-restoring painkillers from a medical cabinet and picking up health-restoring kittens from a vacuum cleaner are the same gameplay mechanic if you divorce them from their narrative context, yet one of them would cause ludonarrative dissonance in a realistic military shooter and the other would not.
That has little to do with your interactions, but how the game presents itself. That's more an aesthetic (narrative) dissonance than a ludonarrative one. The classic example of ludonarrative dissonance is BioShock. Quoting Wikipedia:
Hocking coined the term in response to the game Bioshock, which according to him promotes the theme of self-interest through its gameplay while promoting the opposing theme of selflessness through its narrative, creating a violation of aesthetic distance that often pulls the player out of the game
Ludonarrative
Its sequel runs into similar problems, allowing you to perform actions that wouldn't make sense for the world it creates. However, this brings up a bit of what you were saying in how elements overlap with one another.
Log in to comment