It’s big right now—“right now” meaning “since video games began”—to incorporate branching choices in game narratives.

Most explicitly, this’ll show up as options during dialog or interaction: Tell Almond he’s an idiot; Slap Almond in the face; Give Almond a lil smooch; Leave, doing nothing.

Less explicitly, we might call choices during active gameplay the purest form of branching narrative—at each millisecond during an action game, you’re evaluating dozens of variables, picking a route through your enemies, selecting a weapon, etc. From the growing stack of these actions on top of each other emerges a narrative.

That’s what a ludonarrative is—the narrative generated by the player as they play the game. Emergent narratives like those in Doom Eternal or Dark Souls are powerful because of their experiential, systemic nature and the resulting narrative clarity. Most of the lore in these games is optional. The story the player gets out of it depends on the play the player puts into it.

But what about narratives that can’t be reduced to mechanics in the same way? Take something like ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium. Its world is obsessively, paranoidly detailed, full at every corner with random chunks of history that have little mechanical or narrative purpose, at least so far as the player’s goals go. Elysium’s story is about social and economic inequality, grief, racism, Communism, injustice, addiction, trauma, corporate duty, gay rights, and like eight hundred more things scattered everywhere like the aftermath of a humanities department orgy. There’s simply no way to tell a story as complex as Elysium’s in a hyper-focused, pure-gameplay paradigm like Eternal’s.

But what if we reconsider our language just a touch: what if we describe reading itself as Elysium’s gameplay? It’s not typically considered gamey–“ludic,” to use the fancy word–but poring through walls of text, determining a narrative throughline, and unraveling Elysium’s plot and characters are Elysium’s primary interactions. The more traditional RPG acoutrements of stats and leveling serve as doses of more characterization and environmental flavor text. Where another RPG might unlock magic spells or weapon mastery through its stats, Elysium opens up more conversation options–even more to read. Elysium’s gameplay, far from being sparse or overshadowed by its story, is that story, just as Eternal’s story is its gameplay.

By framing narrative criticism like this, when we talk about a game’s story, we’re simply addressing one mechanic among many. Games that incompletely integrate textual narrative with tactile narrative may be labelled mechanically unfocused rather than the more pretentious and nebulous ludonarratively dissonant.

We know intuitively that, say, a mandatory farming minigame doesn’t belong in Doom. Neither would a five hundred page Russian novel, or an anime romance, or an extended film about what the Doom Slayer did instead of gameplay in which the Doom Slayer does it. There’s nothing qualitatively different about a game’s failure to successfully combine mechanics—like farming in Doom—and its failure to tell a story.

Everything is a mechanic by virtue of the player experiencing it in-game. Game developers talk about what verbs a player’s given to interact with the world, and the verbs for cutscenes are just wait, sigh, mash the skip button instead of jump, dodge, chainsaw monstrosity in half.

You might have a competent writer on staff, and you might pay top-dollar voice actors to voice your script, but without real thought put into the mechanics of communicating that narrative, it’ll at best run only parallel to your game rather than complementarily and at worst come off as obnoxious or even drive players away. I loved the visual, auditory, and area design of Remedy Entertainment’s Control, but any time someone started talking, I checked out. The writing on its own was simply not good enough to engage, and poor mechanical implementation of it in the form of waxy-faced AAA cutscenes brought it from unengaging to a major detractor.

Framing text as a mechanic means that mechanical design of textual components can be handled just as a designer might handle any other mechanic in their game. Rather than splitting game design into story and gameplay, we can ask the same questions of textual design that we ask of any other mechanic:

• What does my minute-to-minute implementation of text look like? How am I displaying things to the player? It will likely help here to either know something about visual design or have a good designer on your team. Typography, colors, layout, size—everything means something. Mechanical design here is like tuning a long jump in a platformer: you’re determining the micro-level, feely decisions that most effectively communicate your ends.
• What interactive components constitute my exposition? What does my exposition lend to the mechanics communicating it, and what do they lend to it? If your text ends up pasted in static textboxes in an otherwise competent game, not lending it any major benefit besides context, it’s a good idea to either redesign the text’s mechanics or cut it entirely.
• In what way does what I’m saying in this mechanic mesh with what I’m saying with the other mechanics? How might these mechanics play off of each other? Failure of this design question is everywhere. Everyone’s played games with engaging non-textual mechanics that stop short for extended periods of slow-crawling text boxes. Viewing text as mechanics means looking at pace-killing text boxes as though they’re, for example, mandatory meditation segments in the middle of an action game boss fight.

Everything is a mechanic; everything means something. We’re only used to talking about mechanics and story separately because for too long they’ve been largely designed as such.