Now, the notion that story doesn’t matter is worst with the industry old-timers. “Just repeat that 30 seconds of gameplay, and you’ve got it,” I’ve heard. Or worse: “We’ve never had to worry about of that story stuff before.”

Maybe that’s okay for a small audience of addicted gamers, but the new charter for platforms like Xbox 360 is to appeal to a mass audience, not necessarily people who have even played games before. That means that if games are ever to rise to the level of universal cultural experiences, the way movies have, we have to figure out the same story problems movies did in the last century. —What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story (Gamasutra)