Stories and what-not.

Stories are -and always have been- an integral part of culture, not just ours, but everyones. Looking way back you could argue that we owe creativity itself to stories, the desire to relay an experience or idea has always been there; painting on walls, rudimentary grunting, gesticulating uncontrollably- bloody London.

Computer games get knocked about by storyline and its easy to see why. There's always pressure from buyers to slap a narrative onto things, but look at the Tekken series, this has absolutely no need or want for a storyline whatsoever. It's a beat 'em up, you're only going to play it 2-player except for the first 10 minutes spent unlocking the characters in a series of completely unorchestrated arcade fights. Still people seem to prolificate this soap opera of incoherent bi-stories.
"That's Kazuya's son!"
"Terrific, let's play"
"No wait! First let me take you on a journey..."
"Christ."
"When Kazuya was but a child his father Hiachi threw him from a mountain top..."

Then we all button bash till somebodies dead.


See, I love stories in computer games, I'd like to say that they're massively important and in most games they are, but truth is gameplay goes a long way. We so often make up our own storylines and scenarios in games that an excess of narrative gets irritating- "gameplay too linear" could well be the most overused criticism in the industry.
You might not want to, but take a look at World of Warcraft; there is no overruling story to this game, you get a gist of the ebbs and flows of what's happening in the world- Alliance are waring with the Horde and you fight for whichever side, but you follow no definitive path other than one you make up yourself. The game is made up of a series of what seem like side-quests like Fedexing parcels and killing various sub bosses. You annotate your own story on the character and freestyle your own narrative on the world and those around you, games that facilitate this tend to be more popular than ones with blunt left and right signposts towards the next crucifyingly forceful chapter. I proposed this argument to a World of Warcraft gamer and asked him his opinion-
"yeeee wow ftw!!"- was the response I got.