Being that I personally believe that the writing in games has a long way to go before it becomes passable, I can’t really say that the storyline in games rarely are good enough to actually benefit the game; most of the time the stories are so juvenile that the game would (probably) be better without a story. So, no I don’t believe that a story is automatically a good thing.
Now, I don’t want to be rude but the vast majority of stories in games today are far worse than the crap that Hollywood cranks out on a daily basis. The sub-par writing that is (rightfully) made fun of in countless movie reviews would be praised by game reviewers; sadly enough, one of the main reasons game-movies are so bad is because the original material they started with was (typically) not very good.
