Huh, the fact that this riles people up is more interesting than the comment itself. Granted I feel the comment is laughable in my gut, but logically it makes sense.
Why are we allowed to complete a game with no real knowledge of a story because we skipped all the cut-scenes? Well, often times you aren't. Cut scenes tell you where to go and what to do. Skipping them will often leave you clueless with a timer ticking over your head and no idea where to go. Of course, over time, features added to the game have made this less the case, but there's still plenty to miss. Imagine skipping all the dialogue in Neverwinter Nights and figuring out what to do. Sure, if you've been gaming for a while you might have a general sense of "go forward", but even that can be a thin guideline.
At the end of the day, even if you made it through the entire game skipping all the story elements, you still have a story. A virtual agent controlled by you defeated a series of puzzles (deterministic or nondeterministic). Or maybe even didn't defeat the puzzles. Something happened and the record of that is a story.
By the same token, if you skip all the gameplay, guess what? Something still happened. While you were watching the story unfold, you were making predictions over what characters would do and in your head imagining how they would defeat the series of puzzles the characters would encounter. Even if the story was entirely linear, you have still made a series of interesting choices making it a game.
The above two paragraphs you will note, are needlessly philosophical, reducing both gameplay and story to parts of one another. What we are actually looking for here is the reason the community flipped out. There are several underlying problems. First is in what people value.
By virtue of the way games have been made for the past 30ish years, gameplay IS the game. That is what the modern notion of "game" was built around, and gameplay is what attracted people and formed the "gaming community". Even if you don't actually value gameplay yourself, that is the perceived notion of what those around you value. When someone implies that gameplay is unimportant to a group in the gaming community, they will hear "video games are a waste of time". This can be heard all over the country and world and never causes such a riot as Hepler's comments.
Here's where the second problem comes in. Another value of the gaming community is of course, the developers. Developers may or may not be gamers, but nevertheless, the gaming community looks to them as the gods of their world. In different communities I will hear players curse Blizzard, Riot or Bethesda with the same fervor one blames god for one's car not starting. Devs are literally the creators of the worlds that gamers spend hours and days of their lives in. Hepler is a developer. A writer, but also a developer. So her innocent opinion that she doesn't enjoy gameplay was seen by the community similarly to how much of the USA would react if the President openly said "Look, this civil liberties thing? I'm not really a fan." Political feces flinging ensues and here we are today wondering how all this got started.
But here's the flip side. There's another community that's being overlooked. The writing community. Hepler might not be a gamer, but she is a writer. Generalizing, I imagine that she cares about writing the same way most gamers care about games. So she has a right every time you skip a cut-scene to feel the same rage the gaming community exhibits when someone mentions that gameplay should be skippable.
As far as gameplay vs. story goes, many of the medium-for-expression crowd gamers were also likely to be offended by this comment. Possibly more than the writers or the gamers alone. Generalizing, those people that I've met and read articles by that view games as the next great medium value both the story and the gameplay as two parts of an organism. To say that the organism would be just fine as one part or the other is cutting short the amount of wonder that can come from the organism as a whole, with all organs fully functioning. Most of these people are game developers and so view this as a betrayal from within their own ranks.
Its easy to say "well she should stick to writing novels or movies or something". People SHOULD stick to doing the things they love, but its hard to know what you will and won't love. Maybe she was having a bad day, and a single statement slipped her feelings of the moment into the world's image of what she is like all the time. Alternatively, maybe she always has wanted to be a pure novelist or playwrite, but she had a friend who had a friend and decided that bringing a story to one of Bioware's games would be a worthwhile endeavor. And of course it is also entirely possible that she was just in it for the money. The point is beyond this one comment about gameplay that is at the end of the day perfectly logical, if inadvertently devaluing much of a gamer's play-time, we really don't know much about Hepler and who she really is.
TLDR: Story and gameplay as concepts both exist as part of each other, even if they are not exhibiting the traits we normally associate with one or the other
"Gameplayless" games are entirely possible and already exist. See visual novels
A portion of the gaming community were insulted by the idea that gameplay might not be valuable to a representative of the gaming industry.
A portion of developers were insulted by the idea that the work they put into blending story and gameplay is not valued by some.
Writers may feel the same insult that gamers feel about skipping gameplay every time you skip a cutscene.
Hepler was just reflecting her personal opinion of what she does and does not enjoy, hardly anticipating this backlash. Beyond this we know really nothing about her.
Why are we allowed to complete a game with no real knowledge of a story because we skipped all the cut-scenes? Well, often times you aren't. Cut scenes tell you where to go and what to do. Skipping them will often leave you clueless with a timer ticking over your head and no idea where to go. Of course, over time, features added to the game have made this less the case, but there's still plenty to miss. Imagine skipping all the dialogue in Neverwinter Nights and figuring out what to do. Sure, if you've been gaming for a while you might have a general sense of "go forward", but even that can be a thin guideline.
At the end of the day, even if you made it through the entire game skipping all the story elements, you still have a story. A virtual agent controlled by you defeated a series of puzzles (deterministic or nondeterministic). Or maybe even didn't defeat the puzzles. Something happened and the record of that is a story.
By the same token, if you skip all the gameplay, guess what? Something still happened. While you were watching the story unfold, you were making predictions over what characters would do and in your head imagining how they would defeat the series of puzzles the characters would encounter. Even if the story was entirely linear, you have still made a series of interesting choices making it a game.
The above two paragraphs you will note, are needlessly philosophical, reducing both gameplay and story to parts of one another. What we are actually looking for here is the reason the community flipped out. There are several underlying problems. First is in what people value.
By virtue of the way games have been made for the past 30ish years, gameplay IS the game. That is what the modern notion of "game" was built around, and gameplay is what attracted people and formed the "gaming community". Even if you don't actually value gameplay yourself, that is the perceived notion of what those around you value. When someone implies that gameplay is unimportant to a group in the gaming community, they will hear "video games are a waste of time". This can be heard all over the country and world and never causes such a riot as Hepler's comments.
Here's where the second problem comes in. Another value of the gaming community is of course, the developers. Developers may or may not be gamers, but nevertheless, the gaming community looks to them as the gods of their world. In different communities I will hear players curse Blizzard, Riot or Bethesda with the same fervor one blames god for one's car not starting. Devs are literally the creators of the worlds that gamers spend hours and days of their lives in. Hepler is a developer. A writer, but also a developer. So her innocent opinion that she doesn't enjoy gameplay was seen by the community similarly to how much of the USA would react if the President openly said "Look, this civil liberties thing? I'm not really a fan." Political feces flinging ensues and here we are today wondering how all this got started.
But here's the flip side. There's another community that's being overlooked. The writing community. Hepler might not be a gamer, but she is a writer. Generalizing, I imagine that she cares about writing the same way most gamers care about games. So she has a right every time you skip a cut-scene to feel the same rage the gaming community exhibits when someone mentions that gameplay should be skippable.
As far as gameplay vs. story goes, many of the medium-for-expression crowd gamers were also likely to be offended by this comment. Possibly more than the writers or the gamers alone. Generalizing, those people that I've met and read articles by that view games as the next great medium value both the story and the gameplay as two parts of an organism. To say that the organism would be just fine as one part or the other is cutting short the amount of wonder that can come from the organism as a whole, with all organs fully functioning. Most of these people are game developers and so view this as a betrayal from within their own ranks.
Its easy to say "well she should stick to writing novels or movies or something". People SHOULD stick to doing the things they love, but its hard to know what you will and won't love. Maybe she was having a bad day, and a single statement slipped her feelings of the moment into the world's image of what she is like all the time. Alternatively, maybe she always has wanted to be a pure novelist or playwrite, but she had a friend who had a friend and decided that bringing a story to one of Bioware's games would be a worthwhile endeavor. And of course it is also entirely possible that she was just in it for the money. The point is beyond this one comment about gameplay that is at the end of the day perfectly logical, if inadvertently devaluing much of a gamer's play-time, we really don't know much about Hepler and who she really is.
TLDR: Story and gameplay as concepts both exist as part of each other, even if they are not exhibiting the traits we normally associate with one or the other
"Gameplayless" games are entirely possible and already exist. See visual novels
A portion of the gaming community were insulted by the idea that gameplay might not be valuable to a representative of the gaming industry.
A portion of developers were insulted by the idea that the work they put into blending story and gameplay is not valued by some.
Writers may feel the same insult that gamers feel about skipping gameplay every time you skip a cutscene.
Hepler was just reflecting her personal opinion of what she does and does not enjoy, hardly anticipating this backlash. Beyond this we know really nothing about her.
