Stories Don't Belong in Games?

We've Been Having This Argument Since the 90s.

There's a funny coincidence in how I stumbled onto Ian Bogost's recent Atlantic piece, "Video Games Are Better Without Stories." I'd just spent a fair chunk of time deep in his academic work - specifically his concept of procedural rhetoric, which he laid out in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. The short version: Bogost argues that games make arguments and meaning not through words or images, but through the rules and systems they ask you to interact with. It's a genuinely brilliant framework, and it's shaped how a lot of people - myself included - think about what games actually do.

So when I say I disagree with the Atlantic piece, I want to be clear: this isn't a dismissal. Bogost is one of the sharpest thinkers in the room. But the Atlantic headline "Video Games Are Better Without Stories" is the kind of deliberately provocative claim designed to get clicks, and I think it flattens a conversation that deserves more nuance. That's not a dig - that's just how the internet works, and smart writers know how to play the game (pun intended).

This Argument Is Older Than You Think

Here's the thing: the tension between games-as-systems and games-as-stories isn't new. It has a name, a history, and a genuinely fascinating academic paper trail.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as game studies was establishing itself as a serious academic field, two camps emerged. On one side were the narratologists, who argued that games could and should be analyzed through the lens of storytelling - characters, plot, the whole literary toolkit. On the other were the ludologists, who pushed back hard, arguing that what makes a game a game is its rules and mechanics, and that importing narrative frameworks from literature or film misses the point entirely.

Gonzalo Frasca, one of the field's key figures, coined the term "ludology" in 1999 precisely to carve out space for a methodology that didn't just borrow from how we talk about novels or films. Espen Aarseth, another central figure, had already argued in his 1997 book Cybertext that games require "nontrivial effort" to navigate - they're not passive experiences you watch unfold, they're ergodic, meaning the reader/player has to do real work to traverse them. The debate played out at academic conferences from Atlanta to Brown University through the early 2000s.

And then - somewhat anticlimactically - most serious scholars concluded it was a false binary. As Michalis Kokonis wrote in a 2014 paper in Film and Media Studies, the debate between ludology and narratology was "doing more harm than good," and that a "conciliatory framework" is "not only a comprehensive solution but, in fact, necessary" to properly study what games are. Frasca himself, in a paper with the delightfully honest title "Ludologists Love Stories, Too," clarified that he never actually wanted to kick narrative out of games - he just wanted games to have their own critical tools rather than borrowing everything wholesale from literature.

Bogost's Atlantic piece, for all its intelligence, is largely a restatement of the stronger version of the ludologist position from two decades ago. Which is fine! But it's worth knowing that scholars have been wrestling with exactly this question since before Half-Life came out.

What Does the Data Say?

The ludology-vs-narratology debate is mostly an academic one. But there's a real-world question underneath it: do players actually want stories in their games?

The sales numbers make the answer fairly hard to argue with.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - a game that is, at its core, a slow, melancholy story about the death of the American frontier and the men who couldn't outrun it - made $725 million in its first three days. As of 2026, it has become the third best-selling game in history. Baldur's Gate 3, a dense, dialogue-heavy RPG built entirely around character choices and narrative consequence, has sold over 15 million copies and won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2023. The Last of Us, the series that perhaps more than any other defined narrative games for a generation, has sold more than 40 million units across the franchise and generated over a billion dollars - and then went on to become one of HBO's most acclaimed dramas, which is worth noting: the story was good enough to translate to a completely different medium.

These aren't niche titles. They're among the biggest commercial events in the history of entertainment.

A 2020 survey by the National Literacy Trust adds a qualitative dimension to those numbers: three in five young video game players said they preferred games to books specifically because they felt "more part of the story." The ESA's 2025 Global Video Games Report, based on over 24,000 players across 22 countries, found that older players in particular gravitate toward single-player experiences - the age group most likely to have disposable income and the most demanding taste in narrative quality.

Research published in the Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games conference found that interactivity allows games to "elicit complex emotions such as pride, regret, and empathy - emotions that are often more challenging to evoke in passive media forms like film or literature." A 2025 scoping review in SAGE Journals on character-driven game design found that the interactive nature of games fosters a kind of "psychological merging" with characters that passive media can't replicate in the same way.

None of this proves that narrative games are better than non-narrative games, or that every game needs a story. But it does prove that the hunger for stories in games is real, commercially massive, and producing something qualitatively different from watching a film.

Okay, But What About the Walking Simulator Problem?

Let's be honest: Bogost has a point, even if it's overstated.

There are games that have essentially given up on being games in any meaningful sense - experiences that function more like interactive PowerPoint presentations than anything that meaningfully uses the medium. Some studios do seem to have a mild inferiority complex about being "just" games and reach too eagerly for the prestige of cinema. The walking simulator genre at its worst can feel like a film where the director forced you to hold a torch while you watch it.

And the broader criticism - that games sometimes use "story" as a kind of aesthetic decoration over mechanics that don't actually support or deepen it - is genuinely worth sitting with. Bogost calls this ludonarrative dissonance (though that term actually comes from critic Clint Hocking), and it's a real thing: when the story tells you your character values human life but the gameplay asks you to murder 400 people to progress, something has broken down.

So yes: games that are ashamed of being games, games that are essentially just cutscene delivery systems, games that treat gameplay as an inconvenient interruption to the real story - those are fair targets.

But the answer to bad narrative design isn't no narrative design. It's better narrative design.

Alan Wake 2 and What Only Games Can Do

Let me give you a specific example of why I think Bogost's framing, taken to its logical conclusion, misses something important.

Alan Wake 2, released in 2023, is one of the most narratively ambitious games in recent memory. Its creative director, Sam Lake, studied screenwriting, has spent decades obsessing over the intersection of cinema and games, and has openly drawn on influences like Twin Peaks and psychological horror literature. The game even integrates live-action film sequences into its structure. On paper, it's exactly the kind of thing a hardcore ludologist would roll their eyes at: cinematic, story-heavy, self-consciously "prestige."

And yet it won Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, and Best Art Direction at The Game Awards 2023 - not as a film, but as a game. Here's why that matters.

Alan Wake 2 has a dual-campaign structure where two characters' storylines interweave in ways that only make sense because you are the one navigating them. One character literally has a "mind palace" - a physical space within the game where she pins evidence and constructs her understanding of the plot in real time. You don't watch her figure it out. You are her figuring it out. The pacing of revelation, the sequence of discovery, the moments of dread - they all depend on your choices about what to investigate next.

Sam Lake himself put it well in an interview: "Interactive storytelling and the ambition to push that as far as we possibly could meant we needed mechanics and gameplay mechanics that are about story and about following the story and piecing together that story." He wasn't making a film and slapping gameplay on it. He was asking what storytelling looks like when the audience is also the protagonist, and designing the entire experience - mechanics included - around that question.

Watch a let's play of Alan Wake 2 and you'll find it watchable, even compelling. But you won't feel what it feels like to be lost in those woods yourself, to be the one deciding which door to open next, to carry the weight of the narrative in your own hands. That gap - between watching and experiencing - is where games live. And narrative is one of the most powerful tools for making that gap matter.

Not Hollywood. Something Else.

Here's where I think Bogost and I actually agree more than his headline suggests: games that merely imitate cinema, that treat their medium as a lesser version of film waiting to grow up, are squandering something. Games are their own thing.

But the conclusion I draw is the opposite of his. The answer to games imitating Hollywood isn't to strip out narrative. It's to ask: what does narrative feel like when you're inside it, when you're making choices, when the story is happening to you? That's a question cinema cannot answer. Literature can gesture at it but can't fully get there either.

Bogost wrote, brilliantly, in Persuasive Games that games make arguments through processes - through the rules you interact with and the systems that push back on you. I believe that. But a story is also a kind of argument. And when you put a story inside a system that you have to navigate, something new happens that neither the story nor the system could produce alone.

That's not a bug in the medium. That's the whole point.

Sources referenced: Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007); Gonzalo Frasca, "Ludology Meets Narratology" (1999) and "Ludologists Love Stories, Too" (2003); Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997); Michalis Kokonis, "Intermediality between Games and Fiction," ACTA UNIV. SAPIENTIAE, Film and Media Studies 9 (2014); National Literacy Trust, "Video Game Playing and Literacy" (2020); ESA Essential Facts 2024 and ESA Global Video Games Report 2025 (AudienceNet, 24,216 respondents across 22 countries); Zaini et al., "Character-Driven Storytelling Design for Digital Games," SAGE Journals (2025); ACM Digital Library, "Enhancing Player Satisfaction Through Personality-Based Narrative Adaptation" (2025); Red Dead Redemption 2 launch sales, Fortune (2018); GamesRadar (2026); The Last of Us franchise sales, Video Game Sales Wiki via Fandom; Baldur's Gate 3 sales, Statista/GamingBolt (November 2024); Sam Lake interviews, Den of Geek and Inverse (2023–2024).