I’m specifically thinking of EVE Online as an example, probably my favourite story generating game and all achieved by setting up potential constructs like Corporations and then trusting the players to create and run them like a living breathing entity. Trumps Gal Civs repeating “pay tribute” demands when it’s a real person blowing up your ships and hate spamming your comms channels.

This last point got me thinking. I would answer: depends on what you consider a ‘story’.

I think we all tend to make the mistake to only consider ‘story’ the part which is presented in form of narration, either written, acted by character dialogues or likewise; to only consider the narrative-story. However, the events that happen in any systems-driven game could surely be translated into a compelling narrative-story by a sufficiently skilled author.

I disagree with one of the comenters above when he mentions that the events that happen in a game like Spelunky are always the same, as opposed to the epics inspired by Civ style games. One could also argue that Civ games always consist on “Civilization started in a precarious state. Civilization slowly explored its surroundings. Civilization encountered opposing civilization and slaughtered/assimilated it. Civilization advanced in a specific direction in a tech tree. etc.”. I think that the biggest difference between these types of games is that the Civ type tends to accompany the game systems with much more narrative pieces, making it look that it creates richer stories, but I’m not quite so sure that the interactions arising from the systems in such types of games are inherently much richer material for a story, than those in Spelunky (isn’t the Indiana Jones saga a good example of this?).

I think that a lot of the systems in apparently story-lacking games are indeed generating very rich stories (in the broader sense of ‘story’). And probably yes, those stories are staying in the background in most cases. I also think that the capability to generate such stories (considered in the broad sense, not necessarily in the narrative form) is _the_ main point which makes games a unique form of expression.

Not that I have anything against linear, narrative-story based games such as Half-Life or the more recent The Last of Us (although I find that narrative-story-wise there’s plenty to get inspiration from in more ‘mature’ mediums such as literature or even cinema), but I fin the idea of stories emanating from game systems a much more compelling area to think about and try to advance into.

You can get some crazy cool personal stories through the Sims, like with Anthony Burch he had a sim who just wrote loads and loads of novels but stayed at home all day and never got married etc.

With ‘Gunpoint’ your initial goal was to have a web of different story paths the player could traverse from start to finish. Of course, that’s too much content you have to create that many players might not even see. My suggestion takes place on a much smaller scale. Think of the way ‘Deus Ex’ makes mention of your actions if you barge into the woman’s restroom. Or the many colorful titles you can earn in ‘Hitman: Blood Money’, depending on how you choose to handle the mission. In ‘Papers, Please’ you can choose to take pity on a family of fleeing immigrants, but doing so makes the game harder for yourself.

Simple things like this make me feel more engaged in a game. They make me care much more about the decisions I make. It’s better to start with a simple idea, anyway, and then make it as fully realized as you can.

Some good examples of this are Storyteller by Daniel Benmergui (http://www.storyteller-game.com/p/about-storyteller.html) and, of course, The Sims.