The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media.

- Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture (2004)

This passage reveals the debate that occurs between those who think games are solely a matter of gameplay, the ludologists. And those who think games should be examined as complete narrative bodies with stories that can be examined and discussed as any other narrative form might be. It also serves to illustrate how broad the field of games actually is, as there is a spectrum of games, from those that fit more with ludological views to those that fit more with narratological views.

Both sides see plenty of games that fit perfectly with their own ideals and thus attempt to argue from them to a large complete theory of games. However, this faces similar problems to the grand unified theory of everything that physicists have been chasing after for over a century, the extremes do not mesh with each other. There are games where the gameplay is so dominant that the story is non-existent and others where gameplay is nothing more than walking around and reading text. Between these two extremes is the middle ground, where the main debate is. It seems that gameplay requires very different tools of analysis than story, this difference is too large for a single approach to be used.

The person examining the game is forced to either examine the game from a gameplay perspective or from a story perspective. This means that the personas of the ludologist and the narratologist always exist distinctly, even if they exist in the same person. The fields remain completely distinct even if they can both be applied to a single game. As such, camps appear that think one method or other is superior or more correct. Of course, this would happen in any area where the are two ways of doing something.