@e_zed_eh_intern haha I can't tell if you're being facetious, but I'll elaborate or ramble a bit:
It's a common question that's relevant to basically any artistic medium: form and content (gameplay being form, story being content). I don't think 'story' is really the right stand-in for content since there are a lot of games that don't have any story and are just designed gameplay loops, but perhaps that's just a symptom of video games starting as an abstract art and becoming representative over time.
My point is that story and gameplay, should a game have both, are inseparably linked. Form is content and vice versa. Even the most rudimentary arcade game builds drama through its interaction with a player, and uses symbols/story logic to make its gameplay legible and points to indicate dramatic significance. A virtual novel's story's progression is entirely at the behest of the person reading it, even if there isn't any 'gameplay' or even any choices in story progression.
Now, I do like games that are abstract. Ones that have no story to speak of. I love Tetris, I love Super Hexagon. Their symbols are meaningless, meaning no associative or implied stories can be formed. But like music, there's still drama to these. Beating the hardest level of Super Hexagon was still dramatic---probably more dramatic than other abstract art given my inputs are part of the visual feedback. Like other abstract art, there was still meaning and feeling to be drawn from it that was deeper than just overcoming the challenge of ingesting it. I guess if I had to propose a form/content dichotomy for games it would more about design/meaning instead of gameplay/story. It's broader, includes games with minimal story (keeping people from mistaking story for plot) and allows for internalized rather than solely external conversation.
I guess it's easy to say I'm being pedantic about all of this, but I think that gameplay vs story is a lot more unspecific than it sounds because A LOT of what I like about one is also the other, and games that I think are great kind of use both at the same time, or in unconventional ways. Having a button committed to holding Yorda's hand in ICO is entirely dramatic despite being purely mechanical. Just like pressing a button to pull a trigger without a prompt at the end of Gungrave or MGS3, which you've probably done hundreds of times in the hours before, puts a mechanical strain on what is an instance of pure story. These things are bigger than their games, they tell us things about life or ourselves just by having a single button to press---the perfect unity of significance in video gaming.
