Hell no!

Stories have one very important function in a game - context. It's the difference between saving the green dots with your flying red square and saving Earth with your battlecruiser.

The Experimental Gameplay Project found this one out - games with context, no matter how outlandish, became more fun than the pure mechanics. They characterised it as 'graphics being important', but it's also easy to see it in terms of context.

In addition, context gives your game better affordance. Affordance is what they call it when someone sits down in front of a game and knows pretty much what they're able to do. The little bars you see in the corner of windows is an example - it's sending you a cue that you can grab it and drag it. In GTA, you can reasonably expect that if you find a car, you can get in it and drive it around, that sports cars go faster than old bombs, and that ramming into the cops is a recipe for trouble. Get affordance wrong, and you have a whole bunch of people wandering around not knowing what they're able to do. (More seductive but also problematic is leaning on game conventions that really only have precedent in games - like green for poison.)

There's also the issue of providing motivation - stories are often used to tell players what the win condition of the game is, and often what the lose condition is, though this is in practice shoddily applied through non-standard game-overs and the like. Being able to tell players how the mechanics of the game works without breaking the fourth wall helps with affordance, above - players expect that the world runs on rules and they have a good crack at working them out without needing to be told what they are.

I also note that many board games come with a story, which defines the metaphor for the game and makes it less abstract. Sure, you can switch the context around, but there are some contexts that make more sense than others. (And some brave game designers will tweak their mechanics to fit the context - some match-three casual games these days do just this, usually to try and separate themselves from the rest of the market.)

So, yeah, story is important, and a good story will give the game a greater longevity than good graphics will. (Then again, good graphics attract attention, but the appeal of them fade. People still talk about Planescape: Torment and Starcraft, and there's more than one person who wants to find out what happened to Kerrigan in SC2.)

There's a linguistic argument for the need for appropriate terminology -- the words available to us (i.e. the terminology used) will not only describe but also circumscribe how we interpret our experiences. This position is basically an offshoot of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Wikipedia has a decent write-up on it); while it's not an absolute truth of the world, the hypothesis does have some common-sense truth to it.

Not to take attention away from GSW, but anyone pondering the language of video games should check out episode 9 of the Game Theory podcast. It contains an interview with Nicole Lazzaro of XEODesign, who describes the need for a better language to describe emotion in games as well as her working solution.

Merus: "It's the difference between saving the green dots with your flying red square and saving Earth with your battlecruiser."

Except no one really -cares- about this. I have never played a game in which the object is to save the world in which I've actually cared if the world is saved.

I would go so far to say that saving the world is NEVER a good game plot. The world is too big, I have never seen this be a meaningful objective for game, it is just silly.

If you really care about saving the world, then devote that energy to the real world, which suffers now, more than ever, from a severe lack of people who want to save it. You can start by voting Not-Republican in 2008.

The whole 'saving the world with your battlecruiser' was an off-the-cuff example. Replace with something players care about.

Like fighting misanthropy (the hatred of humanity). It's amazing how many problems are too difficult to solve because, hey, people are morons! Or evil! Or viruses! Or the complete lack of beautiful snowflakes! Or not interested in making a difference! Despite the fact that humanity, you know, built civilisation. Over a course of thousands of years. We're entirely capable of solving, say, climate change, but as Al Gore pointed out there's this little thread of despair that ruins everything. Man, wouldn't that be a great game? Your heroic actions with the battlecruiser or whatever inspire a new Renaissance as people feel, well, if that dude with the battlecruiser or whatever can fight that blue square menace, maybe humanity's not so bad! I should smile more.

You can start by voting Not-Republican in 2008.
Aww, and then you failed. First off bringing politics into a non-political discussion because you just can't help yourself makes you fail. Also, I'm Australian, so I vote this year and I can't vote Republican, which also makes you look like you're unaware of the world outside America. So I'm pretty sure you're a jingoist, and would ask people not to vote Republican even if the Republican candidate for 2008 turned out to be the Dalai Lama.

Nothing personal, it's just that it's about #3 on the list of things to make of Americans for.

> So I'm pretty sure you're a jingoist

Apparently you're blessedly unaware of what the Republicans stand for.

> Apparently you're blessedly unaware of what the Republicans stand for.

Apparently you're blessedly unaware of what "context" or "sarcasm" are.

It's think it's kind of pointless to argue over whether videogames need story. It's like arguing over whether movies need computer graphics. The answer is the same: some do, and some don't. Whether a game will benefit from story and how much it "needs" is largely influenced by genre (simple puzzle games at one end of the spectrum, RPGs at the other).

It's equally pointless to compare videogames with novels, for reasons that should be obvious. They're two different media, trying to accomplish two different things, and firing areas of the human brain that are probably entirely separate.

I'm always happier when I see attention being focused on improving the story elements that ARE in games. Complaining that "it's just not like a novel" doesn't begin to solve the issue. In fact it doesn't even state an actual problem.