Storyism, or: The Critical Preference for Story-Driven Video Games

There is a common response to the discussion of social issues in video games lately, one that I was guilty of using in my previous blog post (Social Issues and Giant Bomb: The Internet Is Serious Business (but It Doesn't Have to Be)). In my words, "Can we just go back to funny pictures and video games?" More generally, I was expressing the notion that social criticism isn't "video games," it's the notion that the video game community has lost something in its heightened analysis of video game characters and storylines.

Straight up: I wish I had not added that line to the end of that post, because it means nothing. All discussion of video games belongs in the video game community, no matter how much you agree or disagree with it. On the other hand, I still feel there is a useful sentiment that I was trying to express, and I'm going to try to explain it here. "Video game" is too broad a label to describe several different types of experiences that very different people enjoy, and the media preference towards certain types of video game is causing a backlash in the community.

To explain this, I will posit that there are two main categories to video games. No game only fits in one category, but almost all games take a side. The first type of video game is the Story-based game, and the second type is the Sport-based game.

Story-based games aren't necessarily visual novels and can have lots of gameplay, but they do not hinge on gameplay: you would not sit for hours at your television moving your character and watching the curves of the jump arc or the dust kicked up by the footsteps and think "this feels great!" No, you would listen to the dialogue and soak in the environments and try to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist.

Sport-based games are those where merely moving the analog stick gives you that tingly feeling of controlling a responsive and interactive world. Multiplayer games are often Sport-based by accident, because telling a multiplayer story has been almost always a difficult task. Single-player games can also fit this description, though: games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or Cave Story, or Spelunky. They still have stories, but if you buttoned through the dialog, you would still have an amazing experience.

The problem is that Sport-based games are seen as simplistic and retro by the media, while Story-based games are seen as AAA, blockbuster experiences. The media has decided that Stories are the video games that should be invested in and cared about. This focus on Stories, which I will call Storyism, is a root cause of the disconnect between games media and the larger video game community, and understanding that focus is key to avoiding that disconnect.

Take a look at Patrick Klepek's article about "The Evolution of Death in Games". Its tagline is as follows:

"It's not always about hitting the next checkpoint. Shadow of Mordor, Spelunky, and others are teaching us new ways to understand (and celebrate) death."

It's not always about hitting the next checkpoint? Klepek makes sure to minimize the mechanics of games before he talks about the narrative of games. There is a clear implication that game mechanics are hurting the impact the games have on their audiences. Klepek goes on to say "Most games choose to ignore how ridiculous it sounds for the player to die over and over," furthering the notion that gamers are just waiting to throw down the conventions of game mechanics and experience the true, central good of video games: the narrative. Klepek picks Spelunky as an example of this phenomenon, and yet here is Alex Navarro's explanation of what makes Spelunky so special in Giant Bomb's review:

"Spelunky is a game about constant death. It borrows from the roguelike genre in that death is permanent. Once you die, you go all the way back to the beginning, with none of your money, weapons, or items in tow. That's the flip side to Spelunky's length, which some have quoted as being as short as 10 minutes, if you've mastered the nuances of the games' randomized level designs. Oh, did I mention every level is dynamically generated? Because it is."

Spelunky isn't significant despite its mechanics, it is significant because of its mechanics. We did not need to lessen the impact of the Sport aspect of the game in order to appreciate its Story aspects, in fact we needed to have those Sport aspects to be able to appreciate the narrative. Spelunky is in fact fundamentally on the side of the Sport, seen by a simple test: With lesser story and environment, it would still be great. With lesser gameplay, it would not still be great, and few would be considering the implications of the environment and narrative because they would not want to play it.

Klepek isn't alone in his Storyist perspective. Arthur Gies's review of Bayonetta for Polygon is an oft-cited example of a rift between game players and game critics, except what both sides are arguing is nonsense: Gies thinks that Bayonetta 2 has misogynistic aspects, and a part of the community thinks that those aspects don't matter and that Gies should stop expressing his opinion. Gies should definitely not stop expressing his opinion -- it is his job as a critic to do so, in fact. However, Polygon and other review sites should delve deeper than simply calling the community misogynistic, as I think it is the Storyist perspective of the review that is generating a lot of ire.

Bayonetta 2, again, would be great with a lesser story and terrible with lesser gameplay. It is a Sport-based game, a dance of fingers on buttons answered by a surge of responsive gameplay. Gies can have whatever opinion he wants on the game, but he does not speak for almost anyone who would be interested in it, and so his review comes off as someone reviewing the quality of a football game for the elegance of the players' outfits. His Storyist perspective ultimately leads to a score significantly below that of other critic's evaluations, and makes it so that no Sportist could take his or Polygon's opinion as a useful metric again.

Let's look at League of Legends, or Dota 2, or Starcraft II: these games have stories and characters and yet millions of people watch other people play them with no narrative involved other than the gameplay itself. These are the games that people invest tons and tons of time into and these are the games that lead me to believe that Storyists do not speak for the will of the people, but the will of the critic themselves.

Storyism is beneficial for the critic -- stories have prescribed ways to describe them, they are easy to analyze because anyone can check out a Roger Ebert review and tailor it for whichever video game they're reviewing. Gameplay is hard to describe, seen by the fact that we call it gameplay: a general term of a whole mass of different concepts that are very difficult to unpack. And yet this is the job of the critic, the fundamental task of explaining whether a game is good or not. Describe to me which parts of interacting with the controller and seeing a response on screen felt good, and why they felt good, and how they are similar to other games' good feelings. Get obsessive about it. Coin terms that we can use instead of gameplay and then write articles that only focus on certain parts of those.

Myself and the fans of Nintendo games, the new RTS/MOBA games, fighting games, bullet hell games, and masocore platformers to name just a few Sportist genres, want to hear the deep dive into this tingly feeling we get when we press the buttons and complex movement responds back to us from our screens. I personally want to see developers shamed for sub-60fps games as often as we discuss what Bayonetta has been wearing, and until I do see things like that I can't shake the feeling that critics and their Storyism simply do not speak for me and my intersts. It's not about taking a side in politics for a lot of people -- they pick the side that the Storyists aren't on and hope in vain that they can push them away from saying things like "It's not always about hitting the next checkpoint," because actually -- it is! And we couldn't be happier about it.

There's a media preference for story-driven video games? What does that mean, exactly? You can't just say this as if it's a statement of fact and then not explain it.

I mean if you're looking for in-depth MOBA or fighting-game coverage, there are plenty of places for that sort of thing. But games like DOTA or Destiny can only be released once, and unless there's actual news to cover, I don't see why your average general video game news site has any obligation to continue to cover them.

And besides which, the last thing the video game community needs is more tribalist lines in the sand. "Storyist"? Give me a break.

@julius: "The problem is that Sport-based games are seen as simplistic and retro by the media, while Story-based games are seen as AAA, blockbuster experiences. The media has decided that Stories are the video games that should be invested in and cared about. This focus on Stories, which I will call Storyism, is a root cause of the disconnect between games media and the larger video game community, and understanding that focus is key to avoiding that disconnect."

Yeah, you know what? I disagree. If you feel you need examples I'll go ahead and post them, but that statement is just wrong. I know it's your opinion, but it's just factually wrong. Also, I agree with the post above me. 'Storyism'?...

You should read this write-up on how The Wonderful 101 doesn't fit modern game reviews. Basically, critics are trending towards more story driven games because they are easier to consume in a timely manner. You can play thoughts he game once on normal, give your thoughts on the story and mechanics, and call it a day. Mechanics focused games often have a high barrier to entry and require a certain level of mastery before one can adequately judge their quality. This is something game critics and reviewers simply don't have time for due to the seer volume of games they have to play. I don't have to play every new release, so I can afford to sink hours into games to learn their inner workings, but most reviews can't, which is why things like inadequate tutorials are graded so harshly

It's just the reality of the way things are right now. It's best to acknowledge this and start looking for a source of information on these types of games that lies outside of the major tent-pole gaming media sources, because they simply don't have time for them.

Storyism has to be one of the silliest words ever coined.

As a World of Tanks player, I kinda feel for what you're saying here.

But anything even remotely negative about the staff will turn the community against you in a bad way.

The point's going to be lost because you kicked the hornet's nest. Also because Storyism isn't a word.

Also because his point is nonsensical.

I mean, if you want to say that competitive games shouldn't always feel the need to slap story elements on top of their gameplay (like DOTA and its ridiculous and unnecessary "lore"), then fine, I'm on board. But the idea that a game reviewer shouldn't be allowed to criticize Bayonetta 2's story because a review should be all about gameplay, that's a complete load, I'm sorry. Gameplay and story do not coexist in separate compartments that must be judged independently, they are inextricably linked. So not only is it fair to judge a game harshly for its lousy story, it is absolutely right to do so. If the designers didn't want their game to be judged based on the quality of their storytelling, you know what, don't have a story. It's a totally valid option.

Though that's (supposed to be) different with Giant Bomb as they basically play what they want, they're not forced with the same constraints of having to play through game after game after game. I mean even when they decide to actually post a review many are usually long after release anyway. Yet at the same time most still tend to play with that mindset, with Jeff and Patrick in particular who typically play games with that assembly line mentality of getting through 'em all as fast as possible so they can move on to the next one. They have their occasional deep dives with something like Dota 2, Destiny, or Spelunky, but they otherwise still share that same playstyle with the rest of the critics, and when it comes time to talking about game mechanics in depth they're sometimes completely off-base.

Also, ''storyist'' is stupid ect.

Oh, so this explains why Bayonetta 2 and Spelunky got such low review scores. Those Storyist game critics just don't understand Sportist games!

@julius: I suggest you go and take another look at the first few paragraphs in Patrick's article, because I feel he does a good job of simply explaining popular decisions for handling death in modern game design. I get the impression from your phrasing that you seem to think Patrick was personally condemning particular design choices, even though the fourth paragraph is devoted entirely to explaining that that isn't the case.

SoldierG654342 has already provided a good explanation of why things are the way they are. I would also add a couple points of my own. First, for games that are really driven by their mechanics, even their fanbases can still take a month or two to really take into account all the best strategies, so even if critics had the time to get more in depth with games, there's still no guarantee that they would be able to provide an authoritative statement on, say, whether the next DMC game surpasses DMC3 in the kinds of options it gives the player. Second, while I don't take issue with the fact that you distinguish between story-focused games and gameplay-focused games, I would like to stress that story-driven games don't necessarily have gameplay that isn't enticing to the point where you just dick around with it.

I guess what would help me better understand your argument is what kind of things regarding gameplay do you feel need to have terms created for them? You mention how there's an established way of talking about cinema and go on to say that there isn't such a method of talking about games, but there are in fact a great deal of terms to describe not just a game's genre but specific aspects of gameplay. There have even been plenty of debates on whether we should even bother having such terms.

@soldierg654342: I feel that's exactly the reason Alien:Isolation did not review that well, while games like Sunset Overdrive and Shadow of Mordor got high praise. All 3 of them are great games in their genre's, but only 2 are really fit for reviewers. You can pick up and play Shadow of Mordor and Sunset Overdrive and you get right in the action, they never frustrate much. Hell, the death mechanic of Shadow of Mordor even progresses the game, perfect for a reviewer!

Alien however is a game where you must exercise a lot of patience. Something a reviewer can't afford, he has to put up the review ASAP, most of them probably have a deadline to finish both game and review. Result; progress get's halted by impatience and death, which frustrates and affects the opinion on the game.

I explained the media preference for story-driven video games by citing Patrick and Arthur Gies's pieces, and gave a counterexample by citing Alex's review.

It's not "tribalist" to categorize concepts, it is a useful tool for people to express what they like or do not like and then build upon these opinions that they can more easily understand.

Feel free to post examples, I would love to discuss them. I disagree that it is "just wrong," though -- we have a community where many people watch and play games that have little to no narrative, revere Nintendo, Sega, Namco, Capcom, games that had little to no story, and yet the most common article to see on a game site other than straight-up news is commenting on the lack of progress in the characters and narrative in games. These weren't the things that made a lot of us fall in love with games, why do we have to accept that we need to go in the direction of Gone Home and company?

@soldierg654342 I agree, but it's not an excuse. Open-ended gameplay-based games were reviewed easily back when they were the norm, we shouldn't accept a degradation in the quality of games criticism.

Every "ism" word is ridiculous and overly general, but a lot of these higher-level discussions about social happenings and trends in entertainment require ways to abstract all of the intricate details. "Ism"s are an effective way of doing so.

I believe you missed a part of my post: "Gies should definitely not stop expressing his opinion -- it is his job as a critic to do so, in fact." It's absolutely fair to judge the game in that way, but from the perspective of Polygon, is analyzing a game on the parts that most of its audience ignores in that time of a game useful? I guess there's an evangelical aspect to it -- Gies may feel that he's educating the masses, but he is still writing a piece that people will base purchasing decisions off of. By not acknowledging the Sportist attributes in the score, he is losing the attention of a large portion of his audience.

@prestige

True, but when they are analyzed afterwards, the analysis often concerns the narrative and characters, which are again not the subjects the reviews even raved about.

Why is it that we can so rarely follow up reviewing a game well with putting out our thoughts about how the XXXYY combo is the reason the gameplay flows so well? Those tasks are left to the "weirdos" as I have heard them referred to as on Giant Bomb, the people who go look into speedrunning (just observing, it may be too hard for most people to do) or frame data or anything else like that. Once the review is over it seems like it's time to put the controller down and go have some opinions about the larger context -- there's still so much more to see, keep on playing and help us all remember why we love games so much.

If you're basing purchasing decisions solely off of a single reviewer's word and don't know that reviewer well enough to fully parse and contextualize their review, then you're gonna have a bad time. If you feel that Gies leaves out important information, then either factor that into your analysis of his reviews or avoid them altogether. Find reviewers who talk about what matters to you and who haven't steered you wrong in the past, andread their words not just for their content, but for their context. Saying that Gies is "losing the attention of a large portion of his audience" is an oxymoron, as his audience is his audience because they have similar interests.

There's no journalistic sin committed by harping on a lackluster story. Likewise, there's nothing wrong with describing a mechanically dense, execution-heavy (or "sporty," as you might call it) game as frustrating. After all, if you spend 10 hours with Spelunky and don't get over "the hump," then that's your experience, and that's your review. If you're just an anomaly, then history will note your dissent (well outside the standard deviation of the mean), and move on. It's not your job as a reviewer to predict what a game might be like for someone who more perfectly fits under that bell curve. It's not your job to say, "the Kinect stuff didn't work in my apartment, but maybe it will in yours." You call it like you see it, because that's the only thing you can do with any shred of accuracy and honesty, and contribute your tiny little drop in the statistical pond. No review could (and certainly no review should) be everything to everyone, but as long as the reviewer landscape is diverse enough, every stone will be turned by at least someone (for an example of what happens when this is not the case, you should read up on the French "Academy" system that controlled trends in art for over two hundred years). If consumers really don't care what reviewers have to say about story, then they'll go elsewhere. If people want to make sure they aren't missing out on a game that takes 100 hours of intense play to reveal itself, then they should listen to pro players and streamers who have put in that kind of time and achieved greater mastery of the mechanics. In the meantime, I'm glad to see articles like Patrick's look at death in games because I don't just want to play games, I want to understand them, reflect on them, make them, and laugh at how really dumb they can be, even when they're brilliant.

And as for "accept[ing] that we need to go in the direction of Gone Home and company:" This incorrectly implies that GAMES is a monolothic entity that leaves one set of practices and values behind as it finds ways to accommodate new ones. Sure, it's entirely possible that The Fullbright Company, in making Gone Home, used resources that could have gone toward a totally bitchin' character action game. But no, they didn't. They made the game they wanted to make, and there's no real opportunity cost associated with that, especially since it was successful enough to allow them to then work on another game. Like other popular media, the world of games is a mixture of commercial product and artistic expression. Commercial products focus on the desires of the audience, while art first and foremost satisfies the needs of the artist. One great thing about that is that it gives us a way to interact with new things, things we didn't even know we wanted, which can then make similar products more commercially viable. Commercial products come into existence because a lot of people want them. Art comes into existence because a particular person (or collection of creators) wants it. So if you are somehow correct in thinking that games are "moving from A to B," then it's because the masses want something different and people want to make B, C, and D, not A - only once both conditions are met will A disappear. But that's not what we see. We see A because there's commercial demand for it, and we see brave people creating demand for everything else by doing new and interesting things, and doing them well.

So if you wake up next week and hear that there will be no more Call of Duty games, it won't be because evil reviewers said "we're done with shooting, now it's all about crying." It will because consumers don't want to buy it and creators don't want to make it. Neither of those seems terribly probable, so I wouldn't worry about it.

@peezmachine: I find your response very confusing. You tell me that games are not a monolithic entity, well, that is exactly what I'm saying. The problem is that games coverage biases towards to stories and characters of games, and they treat games and though they are all equally suitable for this type of analysis. That's not the case: Sport-like games such as Bayonetta or Spelunky are based on their mechanics, and the story is nothing more than a context for those mechanics, as much as the background or soundtrack.

Then you go knock down a strawman in "if you wake up next week and hear that here will be no more Call of Duty games..." and show that Sportist fans will still have their games, with the example being Call of Duty. The problem there is that I never said that these games are disappearing, I said that they are being critiqued and explored from a perspective that makes no sense for their content.

You also say that Gies's audience is his audience because they value what he writes and I disagree completely based on the limited quantity of major game criticism sites and the scope that they encompass with their reviews. People can be on Polygon for many different reasons, not just because they are a fan of Gies. He's analyzing parts of a game that the creators analyzed less than he himself did, and worse than that, he's trying to then make that game into an example of bad characterization. The whole thing loops back around when we have Storyist games then held up as shining examples of games when compared to Bayonetta, whose developers I could only imagine would respond with confusion as to why anyone took their game so seriously in that sense in the first place.

The point here is that stories aren't created equal. If we are critiquing a story that a writer worked on, considered, and fleshed out, then there may be value to that analysis. If we are critiquing the thin contextualization of the action in a game like Spelunky or Super Meat Boy in terms of its characters' motivations or the meta-narrative occurring, what are we really doing?

This is ridiculous. Everyone is different. Critics too. You don't agree with one? Don't take their advice! Do they not teach critical thinking in school anymore?

@julius "It's absolutely fair to judge the game in that way, but from the perspective of Polygon, is analyzing a game on the parts that most of its audience ignores in that time of a game useful?"

Yes! The purpose of a review is to write what YOU think about something, not what your hypothetical reader might think. There are many people who probably found Geis' review useful, and many others who did not. If you fall into the second category then don't read his reviews. That's how the problem sorts itself out. Also, it's my understanding thatGies plays tons of DOTA, which is arguably the biggest mechanics driven game out there, so he hardly fits the definition of "storyist".

This whole thing seems to be assuming that video games all still evolve in the same direction, when we actually have a vast variety of games and there are many different ways in which they're moving forward. We can certainly live in a world where Gone Home's ilk and Spelunky's ilk coexist. As for reviewers, there have been plenty of mechanics-focused games with good reviews. Arkham Asylum and City, Spelunky, Civilization, Bayonetta 2, Nintendo's games, and so on.

@julius: Bayonetta 2, again, would be great with a lesser story and terrible with lesser gameplay. It is a Sport-based game, a dance of fingers on buttons answered by a surge of responsive gameplay. Gies can have whatever opinion he wants on the game, but he does not speak for almost anyone who would be interested in it, and so his review comes off as someone reviewing the quality of a football game for the elegance of the players' outfits. His Storyist perspective ultimately leads to a score significantly below that of other critic's evaluations, and makes it so that no Sportist could take his or Polygon's opinion as a useful metric again.

So you take one of the two mixed reviews of Bayonetta 2 (of which there are 64 positive and glowing reviews) to be a symbol of the growing divide between critics and consumers? I don't see how that math works out. If you want to claim that critics are too focused on story, which I don't really see happening considering that Bayonetta 2 was given a perfect score by a ton of sites despite having a generally poorly regarded story, it is going to take more compelling evidence.

I also think a game review should take the entirety of the game into account, even if the story drags down an otherwise solid game. If there is a story being told then it is worth mentioning in the review. Just because you ignore story in nicely-playing games, does not mean that all players do. It also doesn't mean that all people who like games with fun mechanics and good controls do not want to know about a game's story elements.

Creating a false dichotomy between story and mechanics is also a really problematic way of looking at games considering that most games have both elements and appeal to players for both story and mechanical reasons. Is Bastion a story-ist game or a sports-ist game? Is Psychonauts a story-ist game or a sports-ist game? Are the Final Fantasy games story-ist of sports-ist? I love the story and gameplay of all of those games and the two elements often intermingle to the point where they are inseparable. If a reviewer reviewed those games as though the story or gameplay didn't really matter, then much of what makes those games incredible would be lost. If you assume that your reader base doesn't care about a portion of a game and thus doesn't need to be told about that portion of the game, then you do the game and your writing a disservice.

If your issue lies in the amount of coverage story-based games receive, then consider that GB has had recurring features with Spelunky and Dota and Patrick has interviewed a Spelunky speedrunner before. Unproffessional Fridays has featured plenty of multiplayer competitive games multiple times. Story based games almost never get played more than once on GB barring an endurance run. This site gives a ton of coverage to games with little to no story. Also I'm sure plenty of users would be quick to tell you that this site has NO ONE who seems to cover JRPGs at all. So I don't see a bias towards story based games on GB, much less one that would cause a rift between players and critics.

Patrick only likes story-driven games like Dark Souls, Spelunky and Binding of Isaac.

The argument that the critics have more than a slight bias is bull. I can accept a little bit of bias from playing habits, but that would be unconscious and honestly unreasonable to complain about too much.

But I wouldn't mind to have some reviews be more in depth about mechanics and "feel" of games. I can usually make that stuff out from video, but occasionally something might look a lot better than it feels, and that's a real bummer. Though I can respect that reviews aren't really supposed to cater to people that are already informed about the game anyways....

Hmm, I like where you're going with this. It was a bit frustrating to read Patrick's take on Spelunky because he seemed (to me) to miss that the mechanics are the narrative, not merely in service of a narrative. But go back and read that article; all of his reverence is for the mechanics themselves.

"The construction of the world is different every time the player jumps in, but the pieces used to build the world--enemies, items, objects, structure--are very familiar. The early hours of Spelunky (by early, we're talking dozens) are spent internalizing that ruleset. Though Spelunky has reactive physics that can sometimes result in unexpected events, 99% of Spelunky is completely known to the player, and it's a matter of applying the lessons of what's come before."

This is the crux of Spelunky's design; a meta-game where the goal is not to reach the end, but to master the concepts. Scoops isn't downplaying the mechanics at all, in fact the entire article is an examination of mechanics (specifically death) and how a player might engage with them in new and interesting ways.

Other than this one sticking point in your analysis, I think you're on to something. I've always felt a divide among GAMERS, between those that wish for an experiential thrill ride and those that want an obstacle to overcome through practice and skill. It's not like you can't have both types of games though, and we do have both types. The problem comes when one side claims that the other is wrong.

But....what's wrong with a game having a good story? What's wrong with praising a game for things it doesn't well, whatever that is? Mass effect 2 has a highly involving story and it's great to play.

I mean the real nitty-gritty mechanics stuff takes weeks or months of internet hammering to discover. Even the most scrutinized games, like Dark Souls or Fez, really require a crowd-sourced effort to fully understand. I don't see how a reviewer could find all of the depth in a game's systems out by themselves in the time frame they usually have, or even if they had a few weeks in isolation. Also describing the feel of a game's controls or action can be a real exercise of player preference. I prefer the floaty jump of a Halo to the speed of COD, but that feel element is really a personal preference. I'm not sure how you can adequately cover the feel of some moments when it is a matter of controls just "clicking" with a player.

@thatpinguino: I'm not asking for a walkthrough or anything, figuring out mechanics is a lot of the fun in games for me anyways. I just mean specifically examples like the jumps in shooters. Don't tell me if the jump is "good" or "bad". But if Halo has a floaty jump and enemies tend to be a bit spongy, while still letting the guns feel powerful, then I'd be happy to hear about it. But yes, considering time and target audience of a review to begin with, I understand why detail like that isn't really prevalent in them. Video is enough to figure stuff out 90% of the time anyways, so it's just a greedy request of mine. Don't pay it no mind.

Since I agree with @feels here I'll jump in and post a bunch of examples, starting with actual sports games. But first I'll clarify something. By stating that sport based games are seen as simplistic or retro and story based games are seen as blockbusters you are implying that the inverse is false, which is what I'm contesting.

• MLB The Show. From the 2006 to 2014 entries the lead console version of the game (so the PS3 version when there was a PS2 and PS3 version etc) has a metacritic ranging from 81 to 91. The franchise gets high praise every year for it's high quality mechanics. There is no story mode that gets praise here. It's just pure baseball.
• NHL 08 to 14. The metacritics range from 80 to 88 for these games. Again, high praise for something with no story. It's entirely about the mechanics. When a bunch of mechanics got removed for NHL 15 the scores dropped to the low 60s.
• Forza Motorsport. One of the most successful motorsport series there is, with little to no story to speak of. It gets a lot of coverage in the press and the series has scores ranging from 79 to 92.
• Burnout Paradise. It could very well be Jeff's game of the generation. The people that played it loved it and wish Criterion had the chance to make another one. Was there a story? Nothing outside of Welcome to Paradise City. Here's a car, go wreck some shit.
• Borderlands. The original Borderlands has a notoriously unsatisfying ending, with an almost nonexistant narrative to begin with. Every story beat and side quest in that game is just an excuse to send you to a new location for shooting things. It reviewed incredibly well because the shooting things part was great, the leveling was great, the abilities were great.
• Spelunky. For some reason you seem to think Spelunky isn't getting it's due from the press? The press fucking love that game and can't shut up about it.

Do games like MLB The Show and NHL XX get much coverage outside of "Hey, this is a pretty good video game that is a decent approximation of the thing it's trying to recreate?" No, because what else is there to say outside of that*? The audience isn't looking for anything outside of that.

When GTAV came out there were lots of topics to talk about, so the press put up think pieces about the torture scene, the mental issues of Trevor, how the game treats women, etc and the the audience reads it because it is relevant to the thing that they are playing. The audience also reads all those Spelunky and Dark Souls articles because it is relevant to what they the audience are playing. The press puts out stuff that they think their audience wants. Why is no one writing about the handling of the Ferrari 458 Italia in Forza 5? Because it doesn't matter to anyone but Garnett Lee.

*After some thought Breaking Madden and NBA Y2K I guess. But the reason that stuff exists on a sports website and not a gaming website (like their sister site Polygon) is because it's a sports audience that is likely to read it.

Creating loaded buzzwords to push some conspiracy of bias is pretty silly. Story is a facet of a game and something to judge its merit on, when its clear that that is supposed to be a big part of the draw. Mario games don't get deductions on that basis (and shouldn't because its clearly not part of the design doctrine), but (fairly) a COD campaign may, or Killzone or Wolfenstine or Fallout, Skyrim, etc. And certainly any game putting a ton of money into story cutscenes probably should so when it sucks like Heart of the Swarm that's something worth noting, because many people might be buying the game because of those story bits and they deserve to know. This is like saying "this guy accounts for gameplay when reviewing he's a playist!" Well to the first half of your argument, yes he is and there's nothing wrong with that at all, and to the second part where you make up a word putting such a thing in the same category as sexist or racist, calm down with your hysterical nonsense please.

@mosespippy: Thanks for looking up all of those scores. It seems like the critical scores are pretty darn strong for story-less games if they are well made. Also the number of think pieces on story that come out are relatively small as well.

I think the root of the "there's too much talk about story" issue is one of perception. In an industry that has been story-light for many players, any amount of story consideration is new and excessive.

On this site the game that wins Game of the Year is typically a major release with a lot of gameplay elements to it. Sure last year we had a game that had pretty good gameplay and a story that blows everything else out of the water in terms of the cinematic presentation (though admittedly in terms of the core plot is still probably inferior to various PS1 JRPGs). But in general it's going to be something that favors gameplay.

As to why "Story" games get more notice in general: They're easy, fast, and make reviewers feel lovey-dovey at the end of them; anything that's not easy and fast and isn't already scripted to get a good review because of pre-release difficulty hype will not be treated so kindly. That's not to say every story game is without merit or that they shouldn't exist but obviously there's something of a tilt given to these kinds of games.

Portal is the only game I can think of that justifies itself in a very short time frame and even that is a little bit overrated.