If I’m going to be pedantic—I am—then isn’t that the player making the story and not the game’s creator?
It depends. I've played every single edition of
Vacation Adventures: Park Ranger and
Cruise Director, multiple times. I've played all but one of the
Christmas Wonderland games multiple times (the latest just came out recently so I've only had time to play it once, but it will also be played multiple times).
There are some people on my other gaming forums who can't fathom that there's an actual ongoing storyline with the main characters that interweave throughout all three games. I spotted the storytelling potential years ago, and spent most of 2018 working on Park Ranger #1 for my NaNoWriMo project that year. I only stopped because I hit writer's block in the first week of November and got way behind on my daily word count. The only options were either to quit or change projects. I'd already played and fallen in love with the
King's Heir: Rise to the Throne game (it's original title was
Kingmaker: Rise to the Throne, but it was renamed due to the confusion with the other Kingmaker game). I had a notebook full of notes, so I switched to working on that - and have been working on it ever since. It's been over 5 years now, and the end is nowhere in sight.
The game devs may have thought they were making an entertaining medieval adventure story about a couple of knights who have to solve the murder of the king and catch the villain... but they included so many details and subtle blink-and-you'll-miss-them hints that contain excellent plot hooks for sequel and prequel material that I couldn't ignore those. This game is a goldmine of story ideas, and that's even without doing what I did as an extra challenge (I created an alternative version in which the pov character is actually killed, rather than rescued, leaving his brother to have some very different life experiences than he does in the game itself).
Many people just see it as a casual hidden object game. I see it as providing years' worth of storytelling opportunities and a way of improving my writing skills and creativity. The last time I felt such a compulsion to write was in the late 1990s. It feels good to get back into it.
As for the Park Ranger/Cruise Director/Christmas Wonderland games, I'll get back to those eventually, as ideas occur.
this question OP actually necessiates some expansion on what stories entail. in game... research (there's a word for it, i forgot; studied digital media briefly in university and we touched on the nature of games and video games) they're often quite insistent that all games have a story or a narrative, including stuff like tetris.
Tetris... the one where weirdly-shaped blocks drop out of nowhere and you have to fit them together? I honestly cannot think of any story to fit that, unless the character is forced to do this or suffer horrific punishments or even death for failure. And even then, it wouldn't make for much of a story.
i presume by story, you mean a narrative similar to one in eg most literature and movies. ie it mirrors narrative structure present in other types of, eh, linear media. is this what you're asking? even with alinearity of games, i guess the question is that, after you've finished the game, you can say that "this could've been a script/storyboard for a movie"?
With some editing and appropriate casting, I could see
King's Heir as a movie. Forcryingoutloud, the reason I got into
Merlin was because I was browsing Pinterest for inspiration for King's Heir and stumbled over a screenshot of Eoin Macken (Gwaine) and it was like a thunderbolt - he looked almost exactly like I imagined one of the main characters would look if played by a human actor. One thing led to another and now I've got a slew of Merlin stories in various stages of first draft and prep.
Admittedly, a King's Heir movie would be rather predictable, as the game is written, since the good guys win and the bad guys don't. The difference lies in how the story is presented, and how well some of the plot holes are fixed (in 5 years of thinking about this I have not been able to figure out a plausible reason why the POV character, Sir Edmund, doesn't have his sword with him at the beginning of the game; he's a knight, so he should
always have it with him). Some are easily fixed, since they're connected to obvious game mechanics and puzzles. Rewrite or eliminate them and poof! Problem solved.
furthermore, i'm not sure percentage is that useful.
about a thousand games are released each month just on steam. now, one could certainly do a rundown of genre (presuming you have a huge workforce to parse through the backlog to a significant enough degree that you can qualitatively say game 1 has a story akin to literature, theatre and movies, game 2 hasn't, etc) but the vast majority of games aren't engaged with, and as such i don't find guesswork of percentage are useful. i don't think i'm being particularly pedantic here btw, sorry haha. i think it's more useful to look at succesful releases with some audience, whether it be small or big releases, and then ask about the nature of those.
Going by my Steam library, you'd have to make stories about finding cats in crazy places. I have a
lot of hidden cat games.
The games that contribute to my storytelling, on the other hand, are the Jewel Match games, whether the puzzles or the solitaire. The point is that as you solve puzzles and win solitaire games, you acquire gems and money to build castles and manors. And those become the settings for stories.
For instance, I can make a story out of this. In the Jewel Match franchise, it's just one 'castle' among many. But transpose it to the kingdom of Griffinvale, and it becomes a creepy backwater place where the characters come across it... and who knows what could happen there (I don't know; I've got a few ideas percolating in this obviously once-prosperous village that got flooded and is now home to ghosts and eerie denizens that most people wouldn't want to meet).
Or how about this:
It's a mysterious, run-down inn, that's not part of the region of the kingdom where the main characters usually go. Strange things happen here, and since it's beside the lake, I had the idea that it could be a place where various illegal things happen. It's delightfully creepy, and there are a lot of secrets waiting to be discovered here.
It's fortunate that so many of the castles and manors in the Jewel Match games inspire me in my King's Heir stories. What's even nicer is that one of the representatives of the company that makes the Jewel Match games posts on another of the forums I belong to. They asked some questions awhile back, about what we like and don't like about their games, and when I said that the castles inspire me to write stories, they were pleased to hear that (even if it's stories based on another gaming company's setting; I think it's likely not seen as a problem since Jewel Match is primarily Match-3 and solitaire, while King's Heir is Hidden Object - they're very different types of games, so not in direct competition).
That is what I meant.
But on your other point, I don't need the answer to come from an exhaustive tally of all releases. It can be, just as you say, the ones people actually play. That's why I asked it here: because some people on this site play a lot of games. So I'm happy to have that--the games you play--be the data-set from which you draw to answer the question.
I would guess that if you took a survey of everyone here who plays Steam games, you'd get quite a variety of games.
Computer games have two fundamental components which are usually somewhat at odds with each other: story and challenge. Storytelling requires at least some control over the events, which means the player has to be limited in what they can achieve (e. g. the heroes being captured as dictated by the story although a good player could have fought themselves out of the situation. And story gets on the way of challenge. That starts with skipping cut scenes on the 5th try of the level and ends with the honest and just king declaring a surprise war in their long-time ally, because that is what is required for the win.
Games can fall anywhere on that spectrum from a minimally interactive visual novel to a puzzle game with no story at all. Often games even have different game modes catering to both ends of the spectrum (e. g. story-heavy single player and story-devoid multi-player).
From a percentage of hours played point of view, the challenge games tend to win out. Not necessarily because there are more of them, but because increasing the difficulty of the challenge is easier and offers replayability value, while altering the story in such a way that it is a fundamentally different one and you would want to replay it for that, is quite hard.
I've played and replayed King's Heir multiple times, for multiple reasons. Part of it is to analyze each scene with a fine-tooth comb (to mix metaphors), to really get at the details that I want to emphasize and that I want to understand. There are so many details in this game that contribute to a better understanding of the characters' motives if the player pays close attention. It's mind-boggling that the devs didn't have the characters mention some of these, or include a scene in which they're pointed out. That one detail in the Royal Lineage puzzle in which it's shown that the king who was murdered had
two wives suddenly made so much of the plot more understandable to me. I couldn't figure out why the villains acted as they did until I realized that this was essentially a coup by the second queen's family, and the heir is descended from the first queen, who is long-dead. This is a detail shown in a puzzle, but never mentioned by any of the characters.
This is where the pedantry comes in: the stories are the product of the player, not the game. The question asked was how many games are stories, not can be.
A video game is a toy. Can a toy tell a story? Maybe the toy has a backstory, but that doesn’t need to follow through when played with. Nuts to canon! Barbie can dump pretty-boy Ken for GI Joe.
Most of the toys I had as a child didn’t really have a backstory to them. Lincoln Logs, Matchbox cars, and a little farm playset with animals and a barn.
Kids create their own stories with their toys. I had a farm set with animals and a farm truck. It turned into a soap opera, with the animals as the heroes and Lord Elgin (a historical figure my mother got in a box of tea and gave me to play with) became the villain. I could sit and entertain myself for hours at a time with all this stuff. I was about 4 at the time, and still have a couple of the animals (most of them have been lost over the years).