What percentage of computer games are fundamentally stories?

[Kyriakos]

It's true, even with very little context, the tendency is to imagine a story.
But the prerequisite for that is to (for whatever reason) be originally interested or tend to be interested in what you have in front of you.

 

[Hygro]

Exactly, “emergent narrative”. There’s no story just the right structure to guide basically a hallucination of a story that, if really good, will even provide predictive value in the gameplay.

 

[Farm Boy]

Isn't that the only fundamental action that founds all human accomplishment?

"Presentness," or whatever the hippie crap is called, just being a call to take it down a notch, to maybe the level of one's dog, for a minute?

 

[Elephantium]

I contribute to an Escape Velocity-derived game on GitHub by writing and reviewing missions and stories. While the official guideline is that you shouldn't be writing like a novel, a lot of the game is text-based story. Certainly I've heard praise for the game's stories, and also some pretty visceral reactions to what is just a text-based game with some flying and shooting in 2D space.

Which one? I play Endless Sky sometimes, so I immediately thought of that. It's hardly the only game that fits your description, though.

 

[Angst]

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.

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"?

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.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Path of Exile has a very extensive lore back story for the progression, NPCs, locations, equipment, etc. It gets expanded with each new release. I mostly ignore it though. But it is there for those who love such things.

There is even a lore expert among the players who does videos on the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/@KittenCatNoodle

 

[Lexicus]

If I’m going to be pedantic—I am—then isn’t that the player making the story and not the game’s creator?

Yeah but so what? Most of the coolest video game stories aren't told by the creators. Like some of the stories on this website!

 

[Somebody613]

Me, seeing that nobody has yet mentioned CK3:

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Racing and flight simulator games are not stories at all. All other games have some story component in some amount.

 

[Sarin]

Racing and flight simulator games are not stories at all. All other games have some story component in some amount.

Some try to tell a story too. Like Need For Speed Underground and some following games.

Anyway, you can find a story anywhere. Even in Pac-Man:

Spoiler :

 

[Gori the Grey]

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?

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.

 

[uppi]

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.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Some new games have "ai" creating the story-part, from pools of variations and who knows what else (so in theory it may not need to be much of an "ai" component, but hundreds of parameters and cumulative triggers; it's not like you are going to tell the difference if the available variations are something like 1000 or typically a lot more than one per game you are going to play).
The challenge itself can be picked up as a story. People do it even consciously transcending the actual game; many years ago, when I was playing the windows built-in card game, I would name the three computer opponents after the title of a chapter in The Trial.
On the other hand, a good example of the gameplay/challenge part allowing for personal story-building which you can project into the game (wonder if it was actually there), Five Nights at Freddie's had if anything very generic gameplay, but people came up with theories to justify it (which is the clearest win in a small game). Personally I wondered if the "bite of 87" (or what year it was) happened to the person you are playing as, so now he is zombified to the degree of only carrying out those simple moves

 

[Gori the Grey]

And insofar as a "sandbox" is realized, particular games can give players the opportunity to craft their own challenges and storylines. I'm thinking of Morrowind, where some people set themselves the task of gathering every pillow in the game and arranging them into pillow forts (challenge) and where I once (storytelling) played a character whose code of ethics didn't allow killing of anything except Daedra (but mandated killing all of those). I ignored the main storyline and ran around doing various guild and house side-quests, but all in service of my own character's mission, which was to eliminate all Dadera.

 

[aelf]

The game play elements are often a puzzle. Even Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 combat is largely about solving a series of combat puzzles and riddles to unlock more puzzles. But you stay for the story. Even something like mortal kombat pays homage to being a story, even if it's kind of a dumb one. You almost need to get to castle crashers or tetris or smash bros before the story is just absent.

You mentioned Elden Ring, and I find that interesting. I'd wager that except for the handful of people who are into lore and delving into its mysteries, for most, the story is only something that appeals the first time around. The story's opacity might be a factor, but regardless, from what I can see, most people stay to try different builds and different approaches to the "combat puzzles".

This brings me to another point: Whether or not there is a strong narrative to begin with, complex games tend to generate communities of practice that stay around after most everyone else has left, the Civ community being a prime example. Consequently, importance arguably shifts from the pre-built narratives to narratives that emerge from within the community (e.g. Let Me Solo Her and Gleb for Elden Ring). That's if stories retain much importance at all.

 

[amadeus]

Yeah but so what? Most of the coolest video game stories aren't told by the creators. Like some of the stories on this website!

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.

 

[Angst]

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.

cool.

from my own set then... if we take alinearity into consideration (again, being able to chart in retrospect that a playthrough or session was a narrative from A to Z), looking at the games i've played on steam...

- i don't think cities: skylines has something that is really representative of a narrative. a lot of simulation games are like that. i don't believe that logic extends to stuff like civilization or crusader kings or such. civilization reads like a grand epic, and crusader kings is literally game of thrones in game form.

- when games get arcadey enough, they also don't count. galcon fusion, vampire survivors, king arthur's gold.

- i also realized from looking through the games i own on steam that i vastly prefer games with a somewhat concrete narrative. like, if it gets too abstract or detached inworld i stop getting excited. for comparison; big fan of paper mario. much less a fan of regular mario games.

- and on that note, most of the games i play (and the hours i've put into them) have a heavy sense of narrative. like, by far. i think 99% of my hours are spent in games where i'm a part of an actual story. or a game with a story option and a multiplayer scenario option (where the multiplayer game is usually a large action setpiece with amazing moments that you can retell excitedly as a story).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

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).

 

[Angst]

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 don't remember the theory well, and i remember at the time i felt it wasn't quite on the mark, i didn't agree with it. but the arguments were there and they were substantiated. it wasn't a story as in a book, but a story as another form of storytelling in a sense. today, i might reread and agree with it maybe. my qualms are more that i don't want to impose a story onto tetris, as i don't think it's necessary; tetris is completely legitimate both as a cultural artefact and an experience without being literature. but yea. i do remember the arguments not being done for that reason, but rather that they recognized similar structures in the way we engage with tetris that also exist in the way we engage with other forms of storytelling. been ages though.

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.

i don't know King's Heir, but adding to this, i think most video games would make for terrible books and movies. a lot of video games that have good stories either don't translate well into movies (SOMA) or are written to be good stories by basically being a movie with interspersed action (The Last of Us - and yeayea, i know it's made into a series that a lot of people like). i don't think it makes the writers any worse, though for writing stuff like The Last of Us. you need a foundation that you can follow to engage with easier, and sometimes it means a simple setup that'll just never match The Godfather or whatever. a simple but good story setup that is basically a very simplistic movie but plays well is very hard to do. and to make something as intricate as like... A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, it's very hard to do in a game without basically making the story functionally a visual novel. to get to that kind of twisty dynamism, you need stuff like Crusader Kings, which indeed does flourish in what it's trying to do as to twists and surprise, but specifically because of this dynamism, it makes for player experiences that are never the same. like, for that question, one might ask what a Crusader Kings movie would even look like. like, the stories the game tells are literally amazing, but that's specifically it, that's not really translateable into a "Crusader Kings: The Movie". i had a recent game where i started as tyrol, serving a weak king in bavaria, both my dukes died from unrelated stupid accidents, then i got a horrific evil duchess, starting sinful from being sadistic, impious and brutal, but gaining legitimacy from being a shrewd scholar. the pope named me the spawn of satan. in italy, there was basically a constant civil war under their king, so i manufactured a claim on the kingdom and moved in, conquering the kingdom and declaring myself queen of italy. the aftermath was a lot of civil war in italy, a lot of intrigue and assassinations, all ending up with me actually befriending the pope, and ruling well into my 80s as an iron fisted sinful tyrant that also somehow had befriended the pope. it was also compelling as to the imagination of just the world; my capital was this huge stronghold at the northern end of italy where i brought up all the wealth, one could depict chains of wagons carrying gold and silver to that distant alpine fort where the devil queen lives. and i was indeed extremely wealthy too from the mine in tyrol. it was a huge reason i could even fight for italy. most of my army were hired men.

now, all of these elements could chain together a pretty grim and gruesome book of medieval policy, with a lot of twists and turns. which means Crusader Kings is just a great vehicle for storytelling. but would that mean a "Crusader Kings: The Movie" would even work? most games that have succesfully been made into a movie were either very movie-like games to begin with, or were completely detached from what was going on in the game world.

a lot of very dynamic, heavy alinear narrative games are like that, that their strength in storytelling also means they can't be translated back into linear media without being a heavy warping of what made the game good to begin with.

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.

this is not surprising <3

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).

View attachment 680909

Or how about this:

View attachment 680910

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).

this is actually extremely interesting. i'm not much into the puzzle world, but i know that a lot of recent puzzle games have made some excellent endeavours into making their ambience compelling, indeed evocative, and makes you think of stories just from the environmental storytelling the games do. i'm remniscent of my only experience with this kind of stuff, which was Meteos, a DS title, where i would take the space aesthetics and imagine the weird puzzle stuff as intricate galactic politics and war.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

i guess it comes down to "fundamentally". what percentage of the experience depends on a defined story, vs one that player makes up on his own each time or having none at all.

i suspect most people would put rpgs and point/click adventure games into "fundamentally stories", and games like 4x as "not fundamentally stories". shooter is more of a grey area/depends on the shooter. some shooters are basically rpgs with a gun rather than different weapon. others have a clear story progression like halo or gears of war while also having competitive mp and don't have that character leveling up aspect. others still are like cs:go or fortnite where you're presented with more of a setting than a story, and at this point it's again a reach to call it "fundamentally" a story.