I'm writing an article on storytelling in games and have come to a point on which I'd like to have some feedback. In the article I'm stating that gamers fairly easily accept strange concepts on stories and game worlds. In Super Mario Bros for example the player (controlling an italian plumber) has to rescue a princess from the hands of a monstrous Turtle in a world inhabited by evil turtles, mushrooms and carnivorous plants (living in plumbing pipes). Despite the fact the concept is ludicrous we as gamers seem to have no problem with this at all (at least I don't). This would be very different had this been the concept of a movie or even a cartoon series. I'm trying to find the reason why it's so easy for players to accept these strange concepts without questioning them. Right now the only thing I can think of is that players are used to these sort of concepts (games were like this from the very beginning). Somehow this doesn't seem enough (there must be another reason behind it). Does anyone have any ideas on this?

the world is internally consistent.

It's just like the 'rules' playing sports or learning to get along in a different culture, people just adapt.

I think there is much more to a game than just a story, especially in a game like this. It is true, that game story is very important and most of people I know wouldn't play a game with such a story .. at least not for a long time.

But many people just wanna have fun.. fun with a game that is funny, maybe also playing a game that has funny story, or even foolish story.

In movies, there is no interactivity, so story has much more importance than in games.

Internal consistancy would indeed seem as one of the most important aspects to this. Had Bowser's army consisted of highly trained army soldiers the game probably wouldn't have worked as well.

Mario worked fine as a cartoon/liveaction children's comedy tv series. I agree that internal consistency is essential, and also consistency between the world and the type of story being told. Readers may reject the concept of a serious tragic story being told in a happy cute world because the setting does not create the right atmosphere to prepare the audience's minds for that sort of story.

If the context of the game allows for a strongly defined main character, then this main character needs to;

a) Be sympathetic to the player. Personality, that's a point of relation.

b) Not fit in the world's context. Stranger in a strange land, that's a point of relation.

c) Be totally silent, an empty vessel for the player to occupy. This shits a lot more of the workload onto how interactive you've made the world.

d) Let the player do something that is so 'fun,' that character flaws in the player they occupy are ignored or automatically rationalized. see GTA.

e) I'm sure there are more, not to mention combinations of the above.

this is only peripherally related to the world itself, but if the player's going to be doing everything through this main character, it shades their whole experience of the game.

In my opinion a player is not accepting the situations of the game because the situations are abstract and unreal, therefore the player has to make little or no concious effort to understand because the situation is so far away from their reality.

Did you ever wonder why your little sister blatantly accepts the 'animaniacs' every morning, even though it contains a talking rat and young mischevious mice. You dont have to ask because your sister does not feel the need to identify with the cartoon seeing as how the cartoon is so far away from her situation that she shares nothing in common, no need to look for similarity.

In fact, the only time in movies, games or television where we say, "no way, that couldn't happen' is when the movie otherwise attracts us to it through a shared sense of reality, that is when the characters are bound by moral or ethical situations that we could see ourselves in, based upon a reality that the viewer shares with the character. Then if say, the main character jumps 10 feet straight into the air we feel cheated because we have lost the shared reality with the character and therefore any commonality, we can no longer 'accept' what we are seeing as real. The difference between this situation and the last is that 'mario bro.s' never established a connection with the viewer in the first place.