The argument
The debate over narrative in games has several distinct phases and several distinct positions, often conflated. The position sometimes called "narratology" holds that games are or can be a narrative medium like film or literature, and should be evaluated by standards that include the quality of their stories. The position called "ludology" holds that games are constituted by their rules and mechanics, that narrative is at best a secondary element and at worst an interference with the medium's genuine properties. The debate became heated in academic game studies circles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, partly because game studies was a new academic discipline establishing its methodological identity and partly because the stakes felt high — defining what games are has implications for how they should be made, evaluated, and funded.
The debate is less interesting than its participants suggested, because both sides were partly right and neither side was claiming quite what the other accused them of. Narratologists did not claim that all games had good stories or that all games needed stories. Ludologists did not claim that story was irrelevant to games or that stories in games were inherently bad. The real disagreement was about priority — whether the qualities unique to games (interactivity, agency, rule-governed play) or the qualities shared with other narrative media (story, character, emotional arc) should be primary in how games were understood and evaluated.
What games were doing while the argument happened
While academics argued about whether games could tell stories, game designers were telling them. Planescape: Torment (1999) delivered a protagonist with amnesia, a history revealed through conversation and exploration, and a central question — "What can change the nature of a man?" — that organised the entire game's thematic content. The player's choices shaped the protagonist's identity across dozens of hours of narrative. The game was not a film with interactive elements; it was a genuinely interactive narrative whose story could only exist in the medium it inhabited.
Ico (2001) told its story almost entirely without dialogue or explicit narrative — through the relationship between the player character and a companion who could not understand their language, through environmental storytelling, through the game's visual and audio design. The emotional impact of Ico's ending is among the strongest in any medium, produced by design choices that no other medium could replicate. The narrative was inseparable from the interactivity; the story was the game.
Half-Life (1998) told its story entirely from the player character's perspective, without cutscenes, keeping the player in control at all times. The technique — now called "environmental storytelling" — communicated narrative through what players saw and heard while playing rather than through sequences that paused play. The player's agency was maintained throughout; the story was ambient in the environment rather than delivered in dedicated narrative sequences.
The specific properties of game narrative
What makes game narrative different from film or literary narrative is not primarily that games are interactive (though they are) but that the relationship between player and protagonist is different from any relationship a reader or viewer has with a fictional character. The player is not observing the protagonist; they are, in some sense, acting as the protagonist. The decisions that move the story forward are the player's decisions. The moral weight of those decisions — the consequences of choosing to be cruel or kind, to fight or flee, to save or abandon — falls on the player in a way it cannot fall on a reader or viewer.
This is what game narrative is uniquely capable of: making the player experience the moral texture of a situation rather than observe it. In a film about a character who must choose between saving one person or five, the audience watches the choice and evaluates it. In a game with the same scenario, the player makes the choice. The difference is not trivial. It changes the emotional register of the narrative from empathy (feeling what the character feels) to complicity (being responsible for what happens).
The current state
The narratology/ludology debate has largely dissolved, partly through exhaustion and partly through the evidence of games that were both formally sophisticated and narratively significant. The question of whether games can tell stories has been answered by the games that tell them. The more productive current questions are about how narrative and interactivity relate in specific cases — when does interactivity serve narrative and when does it undermine it? When do player choices produce meaningful narrative variation and when do they produce the illusion of choice without its substance?
The most honest answer to "can games tell stories?" is that games can do things with narrative that no other medium can do, and cannot do things that film and literature do easily. A game cannot guarantee that all players will experience the same narrative — player skill, attention, and choices all affect what players see. A game cannot produce the specific effect of dramatic irony — knowing more than the protagonist — without breaking the player's identification with the character. A game can produce complicity, agency within a narrative world, and the specific experience of discovering a story rather than being told one. These are genuine narrative possibilities that belong to games and to no other medium. Whether they constitute "storytelling" in the sense that film or literature employs the term is a definitional question. Whether they produce experiences of genuine emotional and intellectual significance is not.