Gamers Don't Understand Story

Narrative is more than cutscenes and dialogue boxes.

The Gamer believes that story is when the game stops.

Story is in the cinematic cutscene that wrests control from their hands. It’s in the dialogue boxes that are selectively absorbed. It’s in the audio logs that beg to be listened to and the collectible tomes that dare them to pause and read. When Gamers talk about story, narrative, writing, plot, or any other vaguely-associated word, this is what they are talking about.

Story is when the game stops.

The Game Awards just presented Metaphor: ReFantazio with Best Narrative.

Predictable, perhaps.

The game is saturated with words, with dialogue that branches like arteries and monologues that swell with gravitas. It’s a game that clearly signals its depth through how much space it gives to ideas. Yet for all its text and themes, one could argue it lacks subtext. Its "narrative" is so obvious, so deliberate, that it leaves little room for interpretation. It will be most impactful to those that have simply never encountered its biggest ideas in other media before.

This is the kind of storytelling gamers recognize, and perhaps the only kind they respect. When a game speaks the language of novels or cinema—when it relies on dialogue, plot twists, and emotional crescendos—it is a story that can be separated from the act of playing a game. It’s a story that can appear in a synopsis on Wikipedia. This is a story that it is legible to them and its value is unquestioned.

1000xResist, another favorite in the same category, leans heavily into this same tradition. It is celebrated for its narrative because it gives players a lot to read, a lot to digest as if holding a book instead of a controller. These are games that remind us of the old ways, and so we call them storytellers. We call them “story games.”

But gaming, at its heart, is not old. It is not a book. It is not a film. And it is peculiar, bordering on absurd, that so few in this medium consider the story of a game as anything more than what is spoken or written within it. Placement, movement, systems of organization—these too are the language of storytelling. To ignore them is to misunderstand the medium itself.

Let me reflect on 1998’s Pokémon Red, where the story begins in denial. The player, eager to leave their boring hometown, is stopped. A local professor intervenes. “It's unsafe!” he warns. “You need your own Pokémon for your protection.” This moment is narrative and mechanical design working as one.

The choice of your first Pokémon is about preferences just as much as it is empowerment. That decision, trivial as it may seem, unlocks the world for you. Every subsequent decision—the Pokémon you catch, the moves you teach, the battles you fight—builds on that first moment of agency. This kind of storytelling doesn't play out in dialogue. This is storytelling that scaffolds your experience as a player. It ensures that the mechanics of the game are not abstracted but meaningful.

Consider this: Pokémon Red introduces the player to Viridian City almost immediately. There is a gym there, but it is locked and inaccessible. It isn’t until the end of the journey, after the player has conquered seven other gyms, crossed treacherous lands, and triumphed over rivals, that they return to Viridian to claim their final badge. The decision to place the last gym in the city closest to the player’s starting point is not random. It is narrative design, a deliberate choice that dramatizes the journey itself. The gym stands as a mirror to the player’s transformation—what was once out of reach is now yours to claim, not because the world changed, but because you did.

This, too, is storytelling. It is the crafting of experience, the deliberate arrangement of systems, spaces, and obstacles to make the player feel something. And yet, I feel this kind of narrative design is largely ignored in favor of the plot that is written in dialogue exchanges and big stakes. Gamers don’t consider the closed gym in Viridian City a narrative decision, nor the way the first Pokémon becomes the catalyst of their journey. These are mechanics, not story.

But they are wrong.

Storytelling in games is not confined to the cinematic or the literary. It is in the spaces we inhabit, the paths we trace, the mechanics we master. When a game asks us to move, it is asking us to participate in its narrative. When it positions a locked door at the start of our journey and allows us to open it only at the end, it is telling a story of transformation, of agency, of growth.

Games are an interactive medium and I believe stories constantly form around games we wouldn’t consider “story-focused,” due to that interactivity. Would it be so wrong—so insane—to examine the narrative and storytelling qualities of Balatro, Astro Bot, or Marvel Rivals? How are these games intentionally designed to give way to the specific stories players will spin out from them?

Games are not books. They are not films. They are something else entirely—a medium where story is not told to you but experienced by you. And until gamers learn to see this, they will continue to miss the most impactful narratives happening in the space.

Thanks for reading all that.