I've written before about how I play games for mechanics, puzzles, atmosphere, power, and even just for music. There's yet one more thing that attracts me to a game, and that's a good story.
It's pretty widely recognised that we humans are suckers for a good story. We love sharing experiences, and the next best thing to a truly shared experience is the re-telling of an experience. It makes us feel like we were somewhere other than here. Maybe it makes us feel like we've cheated the account books of life and snuck in a little extra experience for something we didn't actually take the time to do ourselves. Or maybe it's just our innate need to follow a sequence of events to a logical conclusion. Whatever it's all about, I'm in no way immune. The story's the thing, even in a game.
I find it interesting that games and stories have not always been tightly bound. There are games out there that barely attempt to tell a story. Chess has a nod to story, in the sense that we've named the key playing pieces after real life social and political structures, but something like Sudoku doesn't even try to suggest a story (come to think of it, I could probably make a killing just by repackaging Sudoku along with some pretty art and a shoe-horned narrative.)
There's an argument, I think, that a "game" with no story is actually a "puzzle". The story is practically what makes a game a game and not just a fun pastime. Games have a narrative, at least on the tabletop (I'm not considering a sporting event as a game, in this context.)
The flexibility of storytelling is particularly fascinating to me. Games come with varying degrees of story, from just the barest suggestion of a theme to a whole dedicated publishing house, and everything in between.
It seems to me that for a long while, most games suggested a story just through physical design. There were suggestions of a story, probably in part because games just didn't look interesting without a little decoration. What story emerged from the design and packaging of a game depended on the your interpretation. Is Chess really about warring nations? Does a Poker deck tell the story of 4 competing courts? Does Ur represent a spiritual journey through life? Is Battleship a game about naval warfare or is it just a guessing game (to be fair, I haven't read the official Battleship rules in ages, so it may well spell it out.)
For me, this was every board game throughout my game-deprived childhood. Even something as explicit as Clue didn't tell the story it claimed to be about. The mechanics of the game couldn't support that. Sure, Clue was about solving a murder, but you never knew the victim, you don't understand the motives of the potential killers, and the investigation was down to brute forcing a random selection of cards. It's hard to construe that as a narrative, but it was a suitable excuse for going through the motions of the game.
Whether a story is implicit or explicit, many games don't actually generate a narrative aside from producing a winner and a loser. But if you try hard enough, you can accept the story of a game as at least a setting. The game might not tell a story, but it might at least reference the story.
I remember the first time I encountered "flavour text" in a game. It was on the Fallen Angel card in Magic the Gathering.
The flavour text was, I think, the first flavour text I'd ever encountered:
"Angels are simply extensions of truth upon the fabric of life—and there is far more dark than light."
—Baron Sengir
Mind-blowing stuff, because first of all, there are angels in the cosmology of Magic the Gathering? Tell me more. Also, there are fallen angels? Also, who the heck is Baron Sengir and why is he worthy of being quoted?
After that first innocent encounter, I took every chance I could get to gaze longingly at Magic the Gathering cards in hopes of piecing together the story I was sure it was trying to tell. A decade or 2 later, I learned that most Magic the Gathering took place on different distinct planes, and each one had its own background story, much of which was told in magazines, paperback books, and the Internet.
It was for the art and flavour text that I finally started buying Magic the Gathering cards. The game play was fun, but to date I've spent more time flipping slowly through stacks of cards, gazing at art and reading flavour text than I have playing the game.
Other games learned from MTG's technique, I think. Dungeoneer inherently does tell a story through quest goals and theme and gameplay, but it adds to the tale with carefully crafted flavour text. Mansions of Madness provides backstories for each player character on the back of the character profile card. Flesh and Blood features flavour text and a living storyline published online.
Taken to an extreme, Games Workshop has managed to create a storyline around Warhammer 40,000 that nearly rivals the popularity of the game itself. In the case of Horus Heresy, with several books making it to various bestseller lists and the wargame being only a side project within Games Workshop, there's an argument that the story actually does overshadow the game.
None of these stories are the game, but they do help create the game. Whether it's flavour text or a 400 page novel, the story at least claims to exist external of the game, and the game is created with elements taken from the pages of the legend.
Finally, there are games that literally are the story. Roleplaying games are an obvious entry point, but storytelling games extend beyond that. The Dark Cults card game is arguably a roleplaying game in retrospect, but it never claimed to be one. It's gamified storytelling, where the cards and the story are so inseparable that there are literally cards just providing transitive verbs.
Wargames are often thought of as chess with a fancy board and over-elaborate player pieces, but most people I play with treat the game as emerging storytelling. You didn't know a squad commander was going to make a specific choice until the game demands it, but once the actions have been writ into the history of your game world, a coherent story appears. It's often out of necessity, because you have to explain why a squad made a seemingly stupid choice and either ended up dead or the unlikely victor, so you make something up. You rationalise the game events through character development or worldbuilding, and the next thing you know, you're telling stories at the game table.
The best part of a story, for me, is often the time after the story is over. It's that lingering memory of the details you can't quite remember, but can't get out of your head. It's the characters you befriended with but can never meet because, well, they're fictional. Like sitting and gazing at Magic the Gathering trading cards between classes, the time I spend with stories in retrospect are the way I work them into my memory.
When I read a really good book, it often feels more interactive than it actually is. A good book, for me, makes me feel involved and invested in its events, whether it's because of the strength of the emotions I feel while reading it, or how much time I spend obsessively pondering its events while not reading. With a game, that investment is more or less inherent. To get the full story, you have to play the game. Sometimes, for me, a good story outweighs the game mechanics. Other times they work together in perfect balance. Whatever the case, I enjoy a good story, and that's one more great reason to play games.