Games don't need stories.

[WereKitten]

richardhutnik said:

Pyro as Bill said:
The humour in Portal definitely added to the game. GLADOS was hilarious as is every character in Team Fortress 2. Still doesn't need a story though.

I've only played a couple of hours of Braid but I can't say I've even noticed a story, just some dinosaur who tells me the princess is in another castle. Awesome music though, nice artstyle too.

Story might make a good game great but I've yet to see it happen. I see cutscenes and dialogue hurt games more often than help them.

What kind of story does Portal have?  I see a series of puzzles, and GLADOS taunting you in very humorous ways.  The game has a goal of completing multiple puzzles.  I don't see a story.  I do see how the game could be used to generate a story, but the game itself doesn't really have a plot.  It does have some interesting stuff regarding the background though.

Of course it has a plot, simple and twisted as it might be.

You're not only presented with a few characters in a setting, but their roles and interaction change in a meaningful way.

During the game you're revealed additional information about Chell, and as you go on you start seeing cracks revealing the backstage beyond the aseptic test environment, leading to increasingly distrusting the very tutoring authority that led you through the previous areas. Then you move from the "test chambers" to the deserted backstage area, ascertaining GLaDOS' madness. That's a very proper "plot twist". You have a final confrontation during which you learn even more about GLaDOS' personality. Then there's the closing sequences which brings even more clues about what you just saw.

Saying that it has no story would mean that there's no narrative value in the order in which you're exposed to the details, dialogue and environment. But if you -in an ideal experiment- were to mix and swap some of the later scenes of the game with the ones in the beginning, then you'd clearly break or at least change deeply the progression of how you, the player, read the characters and the situation.

That's basically the definition of story: the scenes and events gain additional meaning by the order in which they're exposed.