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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30654
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Some roles writing can play in your game:

- **Story as enjoyable content** - this is story as one of the "main dishes" of your game, along with gameplay, creativity, etc. - part of what makes the game enjoyable is just watching / listening to / reading the story parts. Final Fantasy does this a lot, but the story has to be good, and works better when the music, voice, visuals etc. of those story parts are also very good. Story can be a reward in your game, something players seek.

- **Improving immersion** - Often goes with the previous, but here it's about making the player engaged in the world and it's characters. But you can have good immersion without strong explicit "story" segments (other things that help: a believable, coherent world, memorable events, a feeling that actions have consequences; but also a lot of small details in the world: signs, dialogue, books to read, etc.), or storytelling segments without strong immersion (Ace Attorney comes to mind).

- **Giving something to discover** - just like some genres of games can have a lot of places to explore, or a lot of items to collect, they can have a lot of books to read or NPCs to talk to. This is especially if "exploration" is something you want to be in your game; games that have more of an open structure, RPGs, etc. It's one way of adding immersion.

- **Making the game more understandable** - this is almost more UX / Game Design than writing, but having good names, good taglines, one-line-summaries of various characters, places, etc. can make the game easier to navigate for players.

- **Giving the player feedback on his actions** - if he feels other characters noticed what he did, if they seem impressed by his actions, or judge his choices, this will increase immersion _and_ make him understand the game rules better.

Note that like "fun", "immersion" is a bit of an emergent property of a game, that can happen for different reasons, and gameplay is usually more important than story for that (though good graphics, writing, animation, etc. can turn a boring hack-n-slash into the exploration of a living world). Minecraft is an example of an extremely immersive game with no (game-provided) story or writing. And Angry Birds is a good game that doesn't particularly try to be immersive.

Original score: 5