Narrative Warfare: Why Gaming Isn't (and Trumps) Narrative

Gaming is not about narrative.

This is something a lot of incompetents in gaming fail to comprehend, especially Fake Journalists working for Fake Media. They fail to comprehend this because they don't know where gaming comes from.

There is no need for narrative in gaming; all you need, at most, is context for taking action. The tropes of narrative do not apply, never applied, and never will apply. Their presence inevitably means that someone thinks that telling a story must occur; it doesn't, and excising a narrative from a game will not destroy the game- it always improves it.

A game is about a player, put in a situation, provided with limited resources, and given an objective. How he goes about that is his problem, which is the tell: gaming, ultimately, is about problem-solving. The differences arise from changes in situations, resources, and objectives. Tactical vs. Strategic, vs. Environment instead of vs. Player (older than you think), abstract vs. concrete, etc. are all expressions of how these variations manifest in the games we create and play- regardless of the medium.

This is also how and why optimization occurs; at some point, the whole of the game becomes a solved problem, at which point the lawful purpose (training) is achieved because you now have an objective rubric to use when assessing a trainee's progress in mastering the lessons offered by the game.

Just as with sport, games are peacetime entertainment meant to take the energies and impulses useful for war and channel them into something that maintains the acumen while preventing undesired destruction of that friendly environment. (Something that politics fails to achieve, being war by another name far more often than not.) Narrative has no place in this purpose.

That this insistence to the contrary persists shows a perversion of gaming to corrupt--even nefarious--ends, often by parties for whom gaming itself is a sore spot due to repeated failure. The insertion of narrative in commercial gaming in particular is suspect because of what is done in the name of narrative, leading to concepts such as "Gamification" that corrupt the gaming technology for purposes of social engineering in the service of supporting a political narrative: training populations, Skinner-style, to conform to an ideology.

And yes, that is what Gamification always leads to: indoctrination by hostile cults into self-destructive behaviors for the benefit of said cults and their backers. (You can tell by the projection evident by the attacks made on gaming; what they accuse gaming of is what they desire to use it for.)

And as we see, once those pushing for the inclusion of narrative begin doing so, they use narrative to justify their push and make more gains- until their warfare is defeated by superior acumen. Once you get gamers mad, they will find out how to beat you- and then do it, handedly, because narrative only works if you listen. Games work even if your deaf, dumb, and blind. Games are Reals Over Feels, and Narrative is the opposite (however true it is), and Reality Trumps Fantasy every single time.

And the end of this insistence--something even retarded children learn not to do--on including an alien element where it does not belong is coming, once those losers who go with it to cover for their failures finally get run out or run over and are gone for good.