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I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"
And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.
Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.
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