For the engineers of these machines, playing out fictionalized conflicts allowed for an escape from the heavy burden of running life-or-death war simulations. It's a different sort of escapism than pretending to be Hyrule's savior after a long day at the office, sure, but the fundamentals are there. Yet these games didn't only serve as a break for the players, they also served the interests of the military personnel who oversaw the operation. "Yeah," you can almost hear them saying, "Let the nerds play games on their machines—that's how they'll be ready when it's time to really work."In the same way, the themes, characters, and stories of commercial games do different things for different people. Game publishers might not staff generals glowering down at an office of programmers, but they do have bottom lines.Above: the X-Men arcade game's attract mode.[S]imulations could also be a diversion from working on mass death if they were cut loose from serious application, enjoyed for their technical "sweetness" and oddity without instrumental purpose, transformed into play. Such escapes were possible because the military allowed its immaterial workers a lot of latitude. Computer scientists and engineers were the only people who understood the new digital machines. Transgressing standard procedures, fooling around with computers, was at least tolerated because that was the way to discover new uses and options.
In this way, storytelling in games also solves problems for players. Listen, I love Invisible, Inc., I really do. And there's a chance I'd even love a version of it that didn't feel like a whole game built around the occasional futuristic moments of Samurai Jack. But without the mystery surrounding the game's super-AI, Incognita,and the pre-mission banter between my cyborg assassin and my elite hacker, I may have bounced off the game's steep learning curve. (And for what it's worth, this is the same sort of love for a game's story that drives players to do their own creative work in the form of fanfiction, fanart, and cosplay.)I don't want to paint the picture that game stories only serve as a way to hide design seams, though. Working inside the framework of a story can also encourage designers and artists to develop ideas in a direction that they may not have ever considered if they were simply playing Red Team vs Blue Team. The striking lock-on missile barrages of Galak-Z are meant to invoke the "Itano Circus" of mecha series Macross, not only in look but also in gameplay feel, harmoniously blending narrative theme with mechanical design. When Jake Elliott says that Kentucky Route Zero's dialog choices are meant to feel like an actor's inflections, that doesn't only reflect the influence of theater on KRZ (a process that, as Bogost would say, takes-apart-and-puts-back-together the stage play) but also as a result of the team's decision to fundamentally communicate the story they've decided to tell.