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No Plot? No Problem! - TV Tropes

Most media have some kind of setting. A world, a time, some characters, maybe some Backstory, or even just a bare-bones Excuse Plot... but not in a large number of Video Games and some traditional games. No frill, no fluff, just an entire experience carried by the gameplay, maybe the sound and visuals in a supporting role. Story will likely get in the way of these games, at worst annoying the player with the interruption; given the chance to skip story, they will. Expect Rule of Fun to be invoked, and often.

In the days of Retro Gaming, limited processing power restricted the amount of storytelling a game designer could employ, so by necessity many games of the era were either this or an Excuse Plot that relied on All There in the Manual and/or environmental storytelling. Today, much of the big money in video game production is aimed at big blockbuster-style story experiences, so this is more likely to be the aim of smaller productions or other games with a limited scope. Sports, puzzle and racing games are also common exceptions to this rule even in the AAA space because of how limiting any sort of in-depth narrative can be on the gameplay, but some have pulled it off.

Since this is used so often in video gaming, let's not list every single example, just genres, notable exceptions, or inversions. Or specific references to this in other media.

Not to be confused with No Plot? No Problem!, a handbook guide to the very popular (Inter)National Novel Writing Month contest.

Some art movies and experimental films may also lack a plot. Art film directors may be tired of plot-driven commercial movies, so they make a movie that meanders through a bunch of seemingly unconnected sequences.

Compare High Concept, Play the Game, Skip the Story, Porn Without Plot, and Random Events Plot. Contrast with Excuse Plot, which is when a game does have a plot, if one that is just an excuse for the gameplay — these games don't even have that, focusing solely on the gameplay.

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    Anime & Manga 

• Fuan no Tane consists entirely of just little individual snippets showing strange creepy things happening, with no explanation, conclusions, or reoccurring characters.
• Makura no Danshi: There's no real plot to the story, and whatever background details that come up in each episode don't really matter in the long run.

    Comic Strips 

• Spy vs. Spy: The entire strip involves two (sometimes three) nameless monochrome spies trying to kill each other in convoluted ways. Why they're doing so is never explained and anything that happens in each strip never carries over.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 

• Club of the Discarded: This film doesn't even have a story. Several mannequins go through the same mechanical motions daily courtesy of Stop Motion, none of the characters have names or motivations and then there's the bizarre ending where all the mannequins (old and new) are gathered around a television watching static on the screen.
• While most segments of Fantasia have a bit of an Excuse Plot to show animals / dinosaurs / mythological beings frolic around to classical music, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, is just abstract figures and colors appearing to the tune of the music with absolutely no coherent plot. The only segment with a solid story is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, also the most well-known segment, somewhat for this reason, probably more due to Mickey Mouse as the apprentice.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Many of the earliest films in movie history made no attempt to tell a story, but consisted solely of the filmmakers capturing scenes they thought were interesting. Some of the Lumière Films (1895-6) consist of nothing more than a train pulling into a station or people getting off a boat. A Trip Down Market Street (1906) is exactly that, a 13-minute trolley ride down Market Street.
• James Benning's Thirteen Lakes is a film that consists of nothing but 10-minute long static shots of 13 different lakes across the United States.
• Frank Zappa's directorial debut, 200 Motels, is entirely made up of incredibly bizarre segments and situations with equally strange imagery and editing all taking place on an obviously cheap movie set with next to no connection between any of them. In interviews, Zappa claimed to have secretly recorded his band mates while they were high or drunk for inspiration while writing the script and intended the film to highlight the editing possibilities of videotape. Granted the plot was the result of the film never being properly finished, but considering Zappa's body of work the final cut probably wouldn't have been that different from what was released.
• Baraka: In his review Roger Ebert said it should be the presentation on the "golden record" of the next spacecraft to go outside the solar system, as it is a wordless montage of Earth's greatest sights and sounds. That Ebert included it in his list of the greatest movies ever made is proof-positive that it succeeded with aplomb. Director and cinematographer Ron Fricke would go on to make a companion piece for Baraka nearly twenty years later with Samsara, similarly unburdened of any plot as well.
• The events of Before Sunrise and each of its sequels can be summarized thusly: Jesse and Celine have Seinfeldian Conversations over an Extremely Short Timespan. There's no driving conflict between them (barring a little in the third), just two people opening up to each other.
• The Bumfights series is a completely plotless montage of pranks on homeless people, interviews and shots of people fighting.
• *Corpus Callosum by Michael Snow is mostly composed of a tracking shot across an impossibly long segment of an office building where elements repeat, surreal happenings occur and early 3D effects are experimented with. Occasionally, we are shown a family's living room where objects disappear and similarly odd events occur to the family members. None of the characters are given any names or characterisation as they function more as extensions of the environment. We can hear a director giving instructions at various points and the fourth wall is regularly played with or broken.
• Alan Clarke's 1989 Short Film Elephant is just 40 minutes of random people shooting and killing other random people. We don't know anything about the shooters, or the victims themselves. Despite all of that, the film was very popular at the time. It even inspired Gus Van Sant to create a feature-length film with the exact same name in America, but this one actually has a plot.
• Empire by Andy Warhol is just a shot of the Empire State Building filmed over the course of 8 hours.
• The Hollywood Revue of 1929 is a feature-length Variety Show in which almost every star signed to MGM at that time appears in a sketch. There is no attempt at a plot, merely a series of sketches and songs until the movie ends.
• Koyaanisqatsi: A precursor to the above-mentioned Baraka,^*Baraka director and cinematographer Ron Fricke was also the cinematographer and co-editor of this movie this movie features sweeping shots and timelapses of desert landscapes, towering cities, assembly lines, and people going about their daily lives, all accompanied to the music of Philip Glass. Aside from a general environmentalist slant there is absolutely no plot or story to be found anywhere.
• 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera is a visual collage of urban life in the Soviet Union. The opening titles proclaim that the film was assembled "without help of a story", and in fact there is no plot, only a record of regular people about their daily life.
• Roundhay Garden Scene: This 1888 film is only two seconds long and features some people walking around in a garden. It's the earliest surviving film and almost an example of a tropeless tale.
• Russian Ark is basically a 96-minute tour of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Faceless narrator and his companion wander from room to room, traveling back and forth through time, observing 300 years of Russian history. There's lots and lots of Costume Porn, Scenery Porn, and talk about art. There's also no story and no plot.

    Literature 

• Isaac Asimov's Asimov's Book of Facts: The majority of the book is a collection of random facts, sorted by theme, but without any sort of narrative to connect them.
• There isn't a story to follow in A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates, the readers are just expected to use the random numbers presented to them however they see fit.
• Nearly the entirety of À rebours consists of Des Esseintes furnishing his home in accordance with his aesthetic tastes and his thoughts on religion, art, philosophy, literature, and more.

    Live-Action TV 

    Music 

• A lot of instrumental music that just features an abstract title ("First Symphony, "Concert For Orchestra", "Toccata and Fugue in D minor") and no explanation of a central theme. Enforced by composers like Johannes Brahms, who strongly preferred to write "absolute music", or music that is not "about" anything, and thus never wrote an opera or a symphonic poem.
• Bad Lip Reading is Word Salad made from re-recording the audio for music videos, so 99% of videos have no distinguishable plot.
• Songs of the Humpback Whale is an album without any music or lyrics. It only features whales "singing" and consists of just a few selected recordings. It did become a bestseller though and was included in the National Recording Registry for its "historical, cultural and aesthetical significance."
• The most visible shred of a storyline in Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd is in the first five movements, where Endymion worries that Diana has forgotten him in her rush to participate in the birthday celebration. The two eventually resolve to go together, and...that's pretty much it as far as plot is concerned.

    Pinball 

• Prevalent in early pinball machines, due to the technical limitations of electromechanical designs. The pinball's theme would often have little to no bearing on the gameplay itself. The advent of solid-state computers eventually made this a Dead Horse Trope, as pinball designers were able to implement more complex rules and modes in their games.
• There isn't even any attempt to explain what's going on in AC/DC. When a game begins, the player is simply asked to pick a song, then shoot for certain things on the playfield. It doesn't even have a premise like with Metallica where the band members are characters — the only audio in the game are the music, sound effects pertaining to what's been shot, and a few quick and sparse voice clips of some unknown character unrelated to anything.
• The Atarians is notable for featuring a man and a woman in a futuristic landscape fighting various aliens, and absolutely no indication of who they are or what's going on.
• The Beatles Beatlemania' premise begins and ends at "it's the mid-'60s and the Beatles are sweeping America." There is no real plot to speak of.
• Averted with Doctor Who, which has a very detailed (relative to most pinball games) plot involving the Master and Davros teaming up to use a "Time Expander" to destroy all incarnations of the Doctor. Unfortunately, much of it was All There in the Manual, which made it very difficult for some players to learn the game.
• Guns N' Roses (Jersey Jack) is themed around the band's touring circuit and has no real plot, with the various Album Modes briefly delving into different scenarios loosely inspired by the band's music.
• Gottlieb's James Bond 007 takes the details-rich James Bond film series (specifically The Spy Who Loved Me), then tossed it all out for an unorthodox timer-based game requiring the player to make key shots to add additional play time.
• Led Zeppelin has no real story, aside from the implied premise of helping the band attain success (as seen in song modes, where the goal is to get as many gold and platinum records as possible, and in the heavy emphasis on concert footage on the display).
• While Pin*Bot and The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot at least tried to have a story, Jack*Bot gives up and just throws some casino stuff at you.
• The various Playboy pinballs eschew any pretense of a plot and go straight for the Fanservice. Doubly so with Stern's game, which supports fully nude Playmates as an operator option.
• What do alligators have to do with anything in Revenge of the 'Gator? Who cares?
• Space Riders suggests something about futuristic motorcycles racing in a futuristic city with an attractive blonde in the back, but nothing resembling an actual story.

    Tabletop Games 

• In an interesting aversion, Chaturanga, the precursor to modern chess, has a "setting" in South Asia (presumably India) and is named for a battle in the epic Mahabharata.
• Chess, Checkers, Go, and other ancient board games — they have the themes of "warfare", "strategy", and "outwitting your opponent", but no actual plot to speak of.
• In Citadels, players must build districts and earn points to win, while playing as different characters to help them reach this objective. However, there's no real story to follow, and none of the characters have actual backstories.

    Theme Parks 

• The vast majority of theme park rides not made by Disney or Universal Studios fall under this; having no story whatsoever and just being there for the sake of a fun experience.

    Toys 

• The first European set of Flick-to-Stick Bungees figures completely lacks a plot. The succeeding set, Bionic Bungees, adds a plot involving some people on a safari who discover the Bungees in the wild and observe their behavior.
• The Gogo's Crazy Bones series in general does not have a plot. This is averted in the Urban Toys set, whose plot is that the Gogos are aliens that came to Earth to be played with.
• Most Tamagotchi releases are pretty much just taking care of a virtual pet. Averted with the Corner Shop videogames.

    Video Games 

First-Person Shooter

• Deadhunt, a game that literally doesn't have a plot whatsoever. You're thrown straight into an arena filled with zombies, skeletons and assorted monsters, must kill everything to proceed, and the next area sends more enemies until you finished all 40 levels.
• Doom:
  • While the original Doom has an Excuse Plot, probably the majority of custom maps and full-game "megawads" entirely lack a plot or even a defined setting. Many of them actually mock the very idea of a plot in a Doom WAD in their readme files.
  • John Carmack, who was the lead programmer on the game, once commented that "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
  • Downplayed with the 2016 game. Within the game, there is a plot, but it's still pretty thin. Within the Codex, however, is a plethora of information on the history of the characters, the UAC, the monsters, and even the Doom Slayer himself. Fully averted with Doom Eternal, which has a more engaging story and puts an extra focus on fleshing out the series lore.
• Halo's multiplayer maps avert this. They are all Canon in some way or another. The multiplayer from Halo 4 onward averts it further: it's justified as combat exercises carried out in the advanced starship Infinity and various other special facilities. The maps are even used in the story-oriented Spartan Ops, and some maps made specifically for Forge are even said to be real locations picked for the potential "War Games" mapmakers could use in them.
• Overwatch: The game primarily shelves the lore in favor of PvP gameplay, so those wanting to know more about the characters and the world will have to look into the rest of Overwatch's media to scratch that itch. However, they have occasionally dabbled in annual Archives events featuring PvE (back)story-driven missions.
• The levels of SUPERHOT don't even have any interconnecting theme or context, something which is lampshaded within the game itself. This is justified however, considering that SUPERHOT In-Universe isn't a game to begin with.
• Splitgate in its current form as of September 2021 simply has no plot explaining why the various power-armored (or casually-clothed) sorts are shooting at each other through portals. The devs have stated before it's some manner of competitive sport, however, but have not yet elaborated.
• Team Fortress Classic, unlike its sequel, has no plot to speak of.

Driving Game

• Mario Kart: Unlike many other Super Mario Bros. spin-offs, which often have at least an Excuse Plot to help contextualize the gameplay — with even the sports games having at least a cutscene or two to lead into the proceedings, if nothing else — no Mario Kart game has any sort of narrative to explain why the characters are racing in all these diverse locales, much less why they're happily Go-Karting with Bowser.

Fighting Game

• While the manuals may contain some Backstory for the characters, frequently, gameplay itself generally consists of nothing more than beating the other player up. Many go for the Excuse Plot of a fighting tournament ^note although no tournament format known to man requires a participant to match up with every other participant and requires a perfect record to advance or win; otherwise, it can be tough to make excuses for why every good guy wants to fight every other good guy, and the game winds up here.
• Once in a while, some franchises also have plotless installments, also called Dream Match Games. This allows them to return fan-favorites who for some reason can't return in canon games.
• The first Chaos Faction game had no plot whatsoever other than 'just beat the crap out of your opponents.' Chaos Faction 2 had a miniscule subplot revolving around the Big Bad, Vortigon, returning, but it too focused much more on the actual combat, other than the stage-specific scenarios.
• While the first Dragon Ball: Raging Blast does have a story mode recounting the Z storyline from the Saiyan to the Buu Sagas (plus the first two Broly movies and some What If? fights), the second game ditches that for specially made challenge towers called Galaxy Mode for each playable character. Completing those battles is what nets you extra abilities, items, and characters for Versus and Tournament Mode.
• There is no mention in-game in Pocket Rumble, or anything on the description pages where the game can be legally downloaded, of its story or even a premise. You are given 8 characters, Color-Coded for Your Convenience, to fight against other people, and that's about it. Even the single-player mode is completely devoid of plot, consisting of your selected character going up against every character in the roster (including themselves) in a fixed order followed by a shot congratulating the player and then the credits.
• Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers had no story whatsoever, and barely even any presentation. No pre-battle or win quotes, no intro animations, a quick victory animation only at the end of a fight, no stage transition, a very quick and generic vs. screen and an equally generic ending. You don't even get to knock Geese out of his high-rise for the umpteenth time.
• The Super Smash Bros. series didn't even have a plot to speak of besides Nintendo toys coming to life and fighting until Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which had a proper storyline of Nintendo characters resisting an interdimensional army invasion across multiple fronts. Then Masahiro Sakurai was dismayed that people could just go watch the cutscenes of Brawl's story mode on YouTube, so on the next go-around he wrote Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's story mode with the Excuse Plot that an evil ball of light makes a World-Wrecking Wave that kills every video game character that is not in the game and transforms their disembodied souls into evil knockoffs of the playable roster for no apparent reason, so off you go killing knockoffs and collecting the liberated souls on your way to the evil ball of light; the amount of cutscenes during your adventure can be counted on one hand. In fact, Sakurai's reluctance to develop a plot-heavy Adventure Mode after that of Brawl led to said mode being ditched altogether for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U (though 3DS hardware limitations may also have played a role), not even having a fully story-free version like that of Melee.

.io Game

• Agar.io provides no backstory for why a group of cells are on a white grid and eating each other to become bigger.
• BattleRoyale.io has an Encyclopedia Exposita which describes the background of the setting, items and monsters.
• Surviv.io has the short audio recordings you can trigger at certain locations, which give wider context to what happened on the island when combined with the environmental storytelling and the info written in the change logs.

Light Gun Game

• In Chiller, you're in a gothic castle and have to shoot at prisoners trapped in torture devices in order to maim and kill them. Why do you have to do that? Because some game developers thought that kids in The '80s liked senseless violence and gore, that's why.
• Friction is an rare case of the gory action kind. There's not a semblance of a plot or even anything to believably discern a plot from. Pressing start immediately drops you into the game without any intro cutscene, the Player Character is never seen, the stages don't have names, there's no dialogue or voice-acting besides the enemy soldiers' dying grunts, and finishing merely gets you a slideshow of all the enemy models followed by credits.
• The Point Blank (1994) and Police Trainer series were essentially glorified shooting galleries, though the console ports of the former had story modes added in.

Platform Game

• Astro's Playroom starts off by dropping the titular Astro into a digitzed version of a PlayStation 5, where afterwards he's free to explore several regions of the system, solving puzzles and fending off enemy robots with red or yellow eyes, which are never really given a reason for their hostility. The final fight has the upgraded T-rex spitting out some of the enemy robots at you during the fight, implying he might've been behind their malevolence, but otherwise we don't get an answer.
• Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout appears to be a Game Show of some sort, but it gives no explanation for its content beyond that. Just slap on a wacky outfit and jump into a 50-to-60-player free-for-all tournament, orchestrated by... someone. It doesn't give any clues as to why all the competitors are bulky bean-people, either, though the fans have plenty of theories.
• There's no story given in The Floor is Jelly, not even on its official website or development blog. Just you jumping around in a very bouncy world.
• In Heavenly Bodies, you don't know who you're working for, who you are, why they want you to complete all these tasks, or even what country you're from. All there is is gameplay and a couple sentences telling you what to do in each level.
• Rayman: while Rayman 2: The Great Escape and Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc have elaborate plots (though the latter can also be described as having a Random Events Plot), Rayman, Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends just briefly tell you that the world is in danger and then you're off joyfully jumping around jungles, forests, Band Land and a giant Mexican kitchen.
• Secret Maryo Chronicles: No explanation or plot is ever given for why Maryo is exploring the levels.
• Sonic Dash. You run, jump, duck, kill enemies, collect rings, and occasionally fight a boss.
• The original Sonic Jump had a plot, but it was removed in the Sonic Jump Fever and "Pro" versions.
• Transformice: The game is simple : you play a mouse and you need to find the cheese to bring it into the hole. It is a multiplayer game where players can contribute to create maps and customization of the character. That's it.
• Wrecking Crew: This game is about two Palette Swapped brothers walking around demolishing walls while a foreman and some monsters try to get in their way. Not even the manual tries to explain why.
• Even though Yoshi Touch & Go is based on the Yoshi's Island series, there is no plot and the game has no tie-in to that series.

Puzzle Game

• Antichamber: Has no narrative. Just a minimalist series of hallways full of puzzles, wry observations on the current situation and how it relates to life written on the walls, and Alien Geometries.
• Bejeweled - at least, the first game. The later games revolved a Captain Ersatz of Indiana Jones solving puzzles to win back his girlfriend, uncover treasures, and defeat villains.
• Bomberman games generally focus more on the multiplayer aspects, so there's not much incentive for a plot. However, there are cases where the single-player mode does have a plot, especially in games where that's actually the main focus (like the Bomberman Adventures series), or games that were made for platforms where multiplayer may be more difficult to achieve (like the portables). Surprisingly, despite being infamous for trying to look more "mature" than previous titles and the name and back cover of the box art implying that it was meant to be some kind of Origins Episode, Bomberman Act:Zero actually plays this completely straight! No matter what mode you pick, there is no plot.
• English Country Tune is an abstract puzzle game, where you control a square and do various tasks on cubic, (apparently) floating structures.
• Puyo Puyo: While the series has a vibrant universe and quirky characters, and most games have a story mode with a mostly-coherent plot, there have been exceptions where there is no plot at all:
  • Puyo Puyo (1991) merely consists of an Endless mode, Mission mode, and a rudimentary versus mode.
  • The Game Gear Nazo Puyo and Nazo Puyo 2 have preset puzzles with nothing else really going on.
  • Puyo Puyo Champions is a heavily multiplayer-focused game. There's battling with AI, local and online multiplayer, but that's about it. Even with 24 playable characters, with some either returning after years of absence or appearing in the main games for the first time after being exclusive to the mobile game Puyo Puyo!! Quest, there is no in-universe explanation as for why they're there.
• Super Monkey Ball: With the exception of "Banana Blitz", the Challenge Mode of each game is basically your monkey is hungry and wants to get bananas by navigating deviously designed obstacle courses inside a clear plastic ball.
• Tetris traditionally lacks a plot. The closest it has to an actual canon is Puyo Puyo Tetris, and even then it's obviously a crossover with another game, one that uses new characters to represent Tetris. And even then, they're technically Puyo Puyo characters since they don't appear in any other game.
• Unpacking is a downplayed example, as there is a basic outline of a plot regarding the protagonist's life but a lot of details are left ambiguous for the player to fill in themselves and make up their own story for the protagonist.

Rhythm Game

• Especially older ones such as beatmania, Pump It Up, DanceDanceRevolution.
• While not directly related (or related at all) to the game, the characters in DDR do have backgrounds, though this is most likely an Excuse Plot for the pairings.
• A notable exception is Cytus II, which goes all out on plot.
• Rhythm Heaven mostly played this trope straight for the first 3 installments, but it had an actual story in Megamix. Some of the minigames also have a backstory explained in either the description, Reading Materials, or Rhythm Items.
• There is no background plot in Thumper for why a beetle is flying along a railway at high speed while being confronted by eldritch horrors left and right and avoiding getting killed by obstacles.

Role-Playing Game

• Mass Effect 3: Averted by multiplayer missions, which take place in locations Shepard visits in-game (before the expansions, at least) and involve parties of side characters helping with the war effort. They even get mentioned in (and have some impact on) the single-player campaign, and with a DLC you can even meet and overhear some of the participants talking about them.
• While most Pokémon games have an Excuse Plot at the very least, Pokémon Dash and the second Pokémon Trozei! game don't even have that. Pokémon GO has the usual Professor handing out starter Pokémon, but that's pretty much all the story you get—no reason is ever given for why there are Pokémon in the real world, or why the Valor, Mystic, and Instinct teams are endlessly fighting to control gyms.

Shoot 'em Up

• The many, many ports of Centipede usually tried to give it a plot. They had a variety of backstories, but the most commonly used were:
  • You're a Space Marine fighting in a Bug War.
  • You're a garden gnome trying to defend the garden from pests.
  • You're a traveling wizard who gets lost in the "perilous Enchanted Forest" full of monsters led by a Centipede and has to fight his way out. This is the most common variation, with all home ports of Millipede recycling this plot, just replacing "Wizard" with "Archer" (see here).
  • You're an evil wizard who is destroying the mushroom forest for kicks and the Centipede is trying to stop you. This is the least common variation, but arguably the most creative as it deviated from the usual plots and provided an explanation for the fact that the game was Unwinnable.
  • Oddly enough, the 1999 Video Game Remake actually gives its own explanation on the game that utilizes a mixture of the first three stories: you play as a gnome (or gnome-like, the race is known as the Wee) kid who is picked by a wizard to pilot a Magitek tank to defend their kingdoms from the invading bugs, who are led by centipedes, and eventually travel into the bug's own land to kill their leader who is an even bigger centipede.
• The Atari 2600 launch game Combat had no plot outside of having two players duel each other as tanks or planes.
  • Its 2001 Windows PC remake focused on the tanks while doing away with the planes. It became a narrative-less shooter/platformer hybrid where players control a hovertank traversing futuristic mazes while shooting nondescript machines. Think Alpha Waves meets the '90s Battlezone games on a budget.
• Crimzon Clover, despite bearing many of the staples of a modern arcade Bullet Hell shooter (such as a finite number of stages), has absolutely no plot, even if you check the manual. This trope continues into its Arcade Game and Steam Updated Re-release.
• Everyday Shooter, although that might also be a Rhythm Game.
• Galaxian. And to an even larger extent, Galaga and its descendants. To this day, there is confusion as to who the Galaxians are. The original game strongly suggests that it's The Federation which your ship (called a Galaxip) presumably represents. But Pop Culture Osmosis has suggested that the Galaxians are the alien invaders. And is Galaga a sequel or a remake/reimagining? Are any of the Galaxian/Galaga games even related to each other in story? Does Galaxian share a universe with Gorf (which has a Galaxian stage)? or Pac-Man (which has a Galaxian flagship as one of the bonus items)? Eventually Namco did some Canon Welding by creating the UGSF Series, which gave some backstory information and confirmed that Galaga was a sequel to ''Galaxian'.
• Giga Wing Generations is the only game in the series that has no plot or characters.
• Why must a submarine destroy an underwater city, and a ship repair it, in Nautilus? Who knows, because it's never explained anywhere.
• Phoenix gives no explanation for the premise in the arcade version. The manual for the Atari 2600 port, does create a reason for why the phoenix birds are hostile (something they clearly were not in Greek Mythology) and why there are so many of them (traditional mythololgy is consistent on there being only one phoenix at any time). Radioactive fallout fell on the phoenix's nest causing them to mutate and multiply.
• Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Geometry Wars have no plot attached to them.

Simulation Game

• Many "resource simulation" games, like SimCity or RollerCoaster Tycoon, will begin with a blank slate. In the case of SimCity, creator Will Wright came up with the term "software toy" for his Sim creations: since you can do anything you like and the "game" doesn't really tell you whether you've "won" or "lost", it's more like a toy (a LEGO set comes to mind) than a game. To be sure, you can be doing "better" or "worse," but then, toys have that function too (e.g., when your LEGO construction falls apart or breaks or just doesn't look right to you).
• Conway's Game of Life has neither a plot nor an objective. You simply draw on the grid, press play, and then sit back and watch how the Life universe evolves.
• For Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!, the whole point of the game is for the player to smash everything in sight. The closest thing to a plot are the cities, which only have a passing resemblance to their Real Life counterparts.
• Kerbal Space Program has no real story or backstory to the game aside from player fanon. There's just you, your space program, a ton of rocket parts, a solar system filled with planets and moons, and an endless supply of eager would-be rocket jockeys.
• MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries: You're a mercenary who winds up running their own outfit after their commander gets killed on a mission. Take contracts for different employers and try to survive and eventually earn enough money for a cushy retirement while the main plot (of the Clan Invasion) happens mostly to other people.
• The only plot for the majority of Story of Seasons games is to come to town and start a farm of your own. After that you're free to do what you like forever.
• The Wide-Open Sandbox of the X-Universe series easily outshines the games' plots as the main attraction. The developers even included a gamestart where the plots are disabled (though the Custom Start is intended more for testing mods than actual play).

Turn-Based Strategy

• 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel: The game makes no attempt to justify how or why these medieval armies gained access to multiversal and temporal travel, nor how mythological creatures (unicorns and dragons) ended up fighting alongside them in some of the variants. It just is what it is.

Other

• 2048: You have a 4x4 panel board. You have to slide blocks with numbers on them to combine them into blocks with larger numbers. That's pretty much it.
• 4X: These games sometimes let you slip into a historical or fantastic scenario with a little scene-setting to kick things off, but for the most part, it's "Here's your starting units and basic knowledge, now go make something happen."
• 625 Sandwich Stacker: Experiment 625/Reuben is hungry; help him make sandwiches. Don't ask why there's food (fresh and old), smelly boots, and fish bones falling from above.
• 20 Minutes Till Dawn: Survive twenty minutes against a horde of Eldritch Abominations for twenty minutes. How did you get there and why did it happen? The game doesn't say.
• Active Worlds as a whole doesn't have a storyline, instead focusing as a social and building game. Some players have created builds and worlds with plots, however.
• Aerobiz: The goal is to start and expand an airline.
• All Points Bulletin (APB Reloaded): This game by the developers of Crackdown also looks like this at first. Being a game about cops and robbers in punkish outfits. However, the backstory e-mails and the long carefully detailed backstories of your contacts show that the developers actually tried to make the game world have a story.
• Bad Omen (Devilish): Strangely averted in this game for the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive. It follows the fate of a young couple who have been cursed into animate statues attached to large stone platforms and be used in a Breakout clone.
• Balatro: The game is Poker modified into a Roguelike, and has just as much plot as poker does (none). Truth be told, since you're not really bluffing against an opponent, it almost resembles Solitaire more than Poker. As such, the entire game consists of playing against sets of blinds repeatedly while attempting to clear increasing score thresholds.
• In Binary Boy, there is no plot. There is just the Boy who can only walk on one path but can do so upside down, and five levels he needs to be guided through past obstacles and enemies, with a records table at the end.
• Boomerang Fu is a multiplayer-focused game about a bunch of Anthropomorphic Food characters fighting each other with boomerangs. The game doesn't bother explaining why.
• Brawl Stars began with no plot to speak of, only a vague Weird West theme. One of the first adverts for the game had a character ask where they are and why everyone is fighting, only to be responded with "no time to explain", which became a tagline of sorts for the game. Eventually the game defined its setting as Starr Park, but still kept it vague (and at times cryptic) as to why anything was happening.
• Carmageddon played with this, mostly as it was conceived as a Death Race 2000 game but didn't actually get the license. Thus they kept the general idea, but changed the plot to "Plot? Want a plot? Buy a book!" while leaving only vague hints of the "world" in the race maps' description.
• Castlevania: Harmony of Despair abandons all plots so that players can pick one of several heroes of the franchise, some of which are centuries apart in the Castlevania timeline. The menu is the pages of a book, and there are equipment hotspots that are books. There is a very light Excuse Plot that Dracula is taking over the book and the other Castlevania heroes, including Dracula himself, have to stop him... but it's an arcade-style game, and Word of God states there is no plot.
• Clustertruck has no plot, just the concept of jumping from truck to truck in various settings.
• Cobra Triangle: You're a boat. Here's some challenges.
• Crackdown doesn't have a plot. It has a premise. You are a super-soldier cop, you are thrown into a city full of gangs, and your mission is to kill as many of them and their leaders as you can, evolving into a stronger, faster, higher-jumping cop as you go.
• Devil World: The intro scene shows nothing more than the game's characters and the message, "Attack the Devil's world!" No actual plot exists beyond this.
• Dustforce doesn't have anything resembling a plot. Only cleaners and locations needing to be cleaned.
• Dwarf Fortress: You could pick up on enough procedurally generated history to assume your own plot and come up with a purpose for your fortress or adventurer, but it isn't necessary for most and doesn't change gameplay itself.
• Electroplankton has absolutely no proper story or goal, instead being a tech demo where the player makes music by manipulating plankton in different ways.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 1: Early-Installment Weirdness, it's just a series of progressively harder fights, but there is an ending, with plot, that leads to the sequel, Epic Battle Fantasy 2, having a plot.
• Escape! never explains explicitly or implicitly who you're playing as, why they were trapped, or why they want to escape the tower the game takes place in.
• Escape Lala: The first game has virtually no plot explicitly presented to the player. There are, however, some subtle hints at lore, such as a room containing three empty suits of armor, each holding weapons or a battering ram, seemingly recoiling in terror at something that was in the room ahead. The second game has a deeper story, but it is told using Story Breadcrumbs.
• Falling Sand: This "game" isn't really a game - different types of sand falls. That's pretty much it.
• Fast Eddie has no plot to speak of, Eddie simply run around, collects prizes and avoids Sneakers.
• The original Full Auto has no plot or characters. Early press releases told of a cab driver being blackmailed into participating in illegal street races by a terrorist group, but none of this is apparent in the final game.
• Grand Piano Keys: There's no plot or even characters. The only point of the game is to hit the piano keys.
• Helter Skelter: There isn't any explanation for why all the monsters are running around, nor is there any description of what world the abstract level designs are supposed to represent.
• Hurdle Turtle’s entire premise is that you’re running around jumping over hurdles and dodging walls. Why? Who knows. The end screen in Hurdle Turtle 2 does imply that Hurdle does it all because he wants to earn a medal, but that doesn't make the "plot" much more complicated.
• illWill (2023): Why are you alone in a monster-infested world? Never explained, but who cares when you obtain a sweet shotgun barely ten seconds into gameplay and keeps getting better weapons as the game throws increasingly larger amount of monsters for you to massacre?
• Infinity Blade: Played with. The first game consists of a Warrior and his descendants trying to slay the God-King. There is little explanation given for this, although if you break into the God-King's lab, you'll get hints that this is a story behind all this. The second game has even more of a plot and explains some more. The third game concludes the story and explains almost everything.
• Kerbal Space Program, especially in the original Wide-Open Sandbox mode. You get a launchpad, a runway, and a giant box of rocket/aircraft parts to mess with... and that's it. Fans have made up various explanations for why the Kerbals want to go to space, because the game doesn't give you any. Career mode gives you objectives, but they're all randomly-generated and often nonsensical Excuse Plots.
• Krakout: This horizontally-oriented Breakout game for the Commodore 64 has some Lampshade Hanging about this on the title screen: "Sorry there is no scrolly message but we decided to give you an amazing game instead."
• Legend of Ace: While a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena at least provides Excuse Plot to explain what's going on in the game's background, this game only goes as far as hero biographies being based on historical or mythical figures or explaining where they come from (especially Original Generation characters). The background story on where the fights take place is nonexistent. But since story isn't supposed to be a selling point in a MOBA, this doesn't become a big problem for the game.
• Lizard: The only real objective in this game is to explore the world within it. You get no intro cutscene, no NPCs to talk to, no tutorial on how to play. The closest thing there is the the hints in the manual.
• Marathon: This approach was explicitly disavowed by Bungie (as well as by Double Aught, who did much of the work on Infinity). As writer Greg Kirkpatrick said in response to a Usenet post criticizing Infinity's story as overdone, "Read my lips: Computer games tell stories. That's what they're for."
• Mario Paint: Just paint anything or compose music. It also has a mini-game where the player swats insects for no reason.
• Mario Party 10: This game lacks a single-player campaign mode of any kind, and doesn't even have any cutscenes to pretend that there is a story going on.
• Minecraft:
  • The basic plot is "Wake up on a island. Punch trees, mine, build, kill monsters." Notch has however said that he wishes to include some type of plot in the game later.
  • Make whatever you wish from the NPC villages, strongholds and abandoned mineshafts.
  • Now there's a general structure to the game with a long sequence of tasks necessary to "finish" the game. First you learn to make wooden tools, then stone tools, then iron tools, then diamond tools. Then you use the diamond tools to build a portal to another dimension called The Nether. Then you find a Nether fortress and kill a bunch of blazes for their powder. Then you combine the blaze powder with Ender Pearls dropped by Endermen, and use the resulting item to locate a stronghold and activate a portal to another dimension called The End. Then you slay the Ender Dragon. Technically, all this is just an optional side quest, and the real objective of the game is to have fun, whatever that means to you.
• Monster Hunter: While the series would go for more complex stories over time, it started out without any single one.
  • Monster Hunter (2004): As the first game, it lacks a real story and all you have to do in the story are quests unrelated to each other. The closest thing to a plot is your slaying of the Monoblos that is treated as surpassing the retired Kokoto Chief in hunting ability, but even that hardly impacts your experience if you don't pay attention to the dialogues. The Updated Re-release Monster Hunter G and portable adaptation Monster Hunter Freedom/Portable are also devoid of any real plot
  • Monster Hunter Frontier: As a fully online MMO it lacked any single-player story or plot. Like the first game, all you did was hunt monsters for a living without having to care about the reason why. The main draw to the game being the online and social-heavy nature of the game.
• None of the Need for Speed games before Underground had any semblance of plot; you simply drive high-price exotic cars in scenic locations, sometimes while running from cops. Even the Shift sub-series and most of the installments made by Criterion Games don't have a set story.
• No Luca No: The entire game just has you trying to keep Luca away from your bowl of cereal.
• One Step From Eden: Like most Roguelikes it doesn't present a plot or story, but even by genre standards there's very little lore for the game. The amount of Story Breadcrumbs in the game is minimal and not nearly enough to flesh out the world and items and enemies don't follow a particular unifying design.
• The Pedestrian (2020) is about a black image of a person navigating drawings.
• People Playground doesn't have any plot. You have a huge free space and can spawn characters like humans or androids, and things like weapons, firearms, electronics, or vehicles. Then brutally kill the characters you spawned with various methods!
• PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds drops around a hundred players from a C-130 cargo plane onto an abandoned island arena filled with random weapons and equipment to fight one another to the death, till only one comes out on top. Why? No one knows, and frankly no one cares.
• Pong, being the second earliest form of virtual table tennis game, there is no story or plot for it.
• Proteus: Guess what? You're on an island! Why? Who cares, look at those pretty hills!
• Played with in RimWorld, which bills itself as a "story generator", complete with a Storyteller who controls the game's random events. The game itself doesn't have a plot beyond "A handful of people survived a spaceship crash on a dangerous planet. Good luck!", but the idea is that each playthrough will evolve into a story of its own.
• Qix does not have any backstory or explanation for why you have to draw lines while simultaneously attempting to avoid the titular Qix.
• Qwak is fast-paced and simple enough that most players probably won't notice the absence of a plot. "Games this good rarely need a story" is how the manual of the Amiga version put it.
• Rolling Sky: Swipe along the screen to make the ball you're controlling avoid pitfalls and traps. The App Store description has something about conquering the world, but that was never mentioned again. Interestingly, its In Name Only sequel is an inversion. See below for more details.
• Romance Academy: You're a high school-aged girl who wants a harem of boys and has to fight other girls with Eye Beams for them within two minutes. Can't get much simpler than that.
• The first two Scribblenauts have no real plot to speak of, although the prequel Scibblenauts Unlimited and DC Crossover Unmasked do.
• Sauerbraten: The official plot for this FPS is as follows: "You kill stuff. The end."
• SD Gundam Capsule Fighter: Created for the entire Gundam franchise, virtually has no plot.
• The first Skate or Die game revolved around your character doing sick skateboarding moves and competing in a tournament to become the best, with a much heavier emphasis on gameplay than anything story-related.
• Snake: You are a snake. You eat things. Try not to crash into yourself or a wall.
• Spore:
  • Doesn't have a story in the main game when you take your creature from the five game modes, and there will be no conflict that can build up as a plot (well, things do happen in the creature stage and you can fight with animals, tribes, cities and empires but it still doesn't add anything to it).
  • Some users actually thought outside of the Core Spore aspects and gave their races a backstory and their creatures do things that weren't possible in the main game. This trope still counts in Galactic Adventure because some user-made adventures have an arcade feel to them and only focuses on gameplay, while most of them do have a plot.
• Star Ruler: The goal is this: Conquer the galaxy. With no hint of plot, just set up a game and take over the galaxy.
• Street Fighter Online: Mouse Generation gives players bios or info for most of the characters but there is no in-game plot whatsoever.
• Sydney Hunter and the Shrines of Peril: There's no real plot to this game besides "get Sydney though the screens to the shrines".
• Tony Hawk's Underground: Averted, with one of the most developed plots that had so far ever been seen in a sports-oriented game, about two friends slowly growing to hate each other as each follows a different path to stardom. Many later games in the series have taken to including a solid story.
• Trigger Knight: It is anyone's guess why the knight is running through a field, beating up monsters, with a limited amount of time before she fades away.
• A few games in UFO 50 lack any sort of plot beyond just having fun.
  • Mooncat is a surreal explorer-platformer, with the end goal being to beat a boss and find an egg. Your reason as to why is never given.
  • Kick Club is an Elimination Platformer where you play as a kid with a soccer ball attacking sports-themed enemies on a screen.
  • Campanella has you navigate the titular ship through various tight corridors, fighting weird enemies with no rhyme or reason.
• Warlight: as an Indie Risk adaptation, it doesn't provide much more plot than the original tabletop game.
  • Some games do avert this through Emergent Gameplay elements created by players though.
• Worms:
  • Worms are trying to kill each other with nasty weapons. Why? Who knows? More to the point, who cares? Later games have a Story Mode that still don't really explain why the worms go out into war to solve their problems.
  • Amusingly enough, the Theme Tune in some games is in fact a voiced ballad with an incredibly long intro leading up to the lyrics (either through a menu screen or credits). Known as the Wormsongs, they provide the closest there is to an overarching story, detailing the battles of a soldier named Boggy B in the near-eternal cycles of wormy war.

    Web Animation 

• CoComelon doesn't seem to have a discernible plotline as the show is mainly music-centric.
• Fresh Guacamole: The short doesn't have a plot other than a man making guacamole, and it's instead a showcase of PES' pixilation style.
• G’s Paragate: In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth episodes of the series, the narrator gets usurped by another character named Do Good. Aside from Do Good's stories, the episodes are plotless, and Do Good's motives are never disclosed.

    Web Video 

• Drb0sch: Downplayed. The series as a whole is one player digging into the oddities of an eldritch Minus World. While it becomes clear that there's something else running about, there's no truly cohesive mystery so much as vague details with consistent themes and minimal context.

    Western Animation 

• Much of early animation is this, with many an animator simply reveling in the idea that, yes, we can make these drawings move like magic. As such, you find yourself with a bevy of what could now be considered experimental short films, where bizarre events occur for no rhyme or reason beyond the creators wanting to play around in this new medium.
• The two Animusic films are similar to Fantasia but have even less plot, being just a bunch computer animated music videos of animated instruments, machines, and robots playing songs.
• The 1942 War Time Cartoon Any Bonds Today? has Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd appear to sing and dance in an effort to convince people to buy war bonds. That's all that happens in this very short (1 minute, 38 seconds long) propaganda cartoon.
• A typical episode of The Groovie Goolies would comprise random short unrelated sketches and gags involving the Goolies, along with two musical numbers.
• The Mind's Eye series. Its primary purpose was to showcase animation technology and talent of the early '90s, and it is composed of clips of computer animation from hundreds of animators, so there was very little thought given to any sort of plot. The sequences act just like the segments from Fantasia above (set to electronic music, of course), but there are a few attempts at a story. Both The Mind's Eye and Beyond the Mind's Eye feature whole sequences that have a self-contained story because the story was already planned out by the studios who submitted them. The Gate to the Mind's Eye attempts to form a coherent story, but it's largely lost if you don't read the box or DVD case.
• The animated films of Norman McLaren. Most of his films, such as "Le Merle", "Synchrony", and "Boogie Doodle" have absolutely no story, narrative or characters at all. They used minimalistic animation that aimed for abstract, emotional experiences.
• Norman Normal (1968), a short from Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, doesn't have much of a plot, just a series of scenes from the everyday life of a white-collar pushover named Norman.
• Pigtail Rag is a Short Film by Shawn Siegel that has no real plot. It stars an anthropomorphic pig leaving his apartment building, jumping into a poster at a travel agency and meeting a lady pig at an outdoor concert. That's pretty much it.
• Parodied in The Simpsons, where we see the first appearance of Scratchy in the short film "That Happy Cat." It consists of about ten seconds of Scratchy jovially walking down a street, then stopping at the curb and whistling. This is in contrast to Itchy's first appearance, which is far more elaborate and features an actual (if simplistic) narrative.
• Soupe Opéra: Fruit and vegetables, in a dark room, cut themselves up to form animals. While listening to creepy music.
• Walking is a five-minute motion study of people walking.

• Breakout was originally seen by players as a variation on Pong. With the sequel Super Breakout, the box illustration depicted a man in a spacesuit deflecting a sort of energy ball at forcefield bricks. Even at the time, players had a hard time being convinced that a game like Breakout could represent a hazardous outer space adventure. But then along came Arkanoid which was basically an evolved version of Breakout where your paddle really is a spaceship and you can blast bricks with lasers via a powerup.
• Minesweeper, a puzzle game where you try to determine which panels in a grid are safe to open, is given the movie treatment in a CollegeHumor sketch, which turns minesweeping on a tiny plot of land into Serious Business.
• Unlike its prequel, as seen above, Rolling Sky 2 attempts to have some kind of plot in each level. Some stories include: a puppet trying to escape from his master (Fate), a young boy dreaming about following a star to another planet (Starry Dream & Puzzle), said boy getting sucked into a portal and exploring Ancient Egypt (Pharaohs), two thieves falling in love while stealing a treasure chest (Theft & Theft Prequel), and a clown traveling in a world full of instruments while transforming into a conductor (Fantasia). However, one of the levels, Jazz, has the least amount of plot, playing this trope straight.
• Tetris is given some kind of plot in this movie trailer and possible explanation of its inner workings.
  • Tetris Worlds gave it a shot by turning the Minos (the blocks that make up the iconic Tetriminos) into Animate Inanimate Objects, came up with the idea to have the Matrix (the Tetris game area) take place within "Tetrions", devices which serve as gateways to other planets that can be opened by playing Tetris, and made the plot out to be the Minos using the Tetrions as a means of exodus from their soon-to-be-doomed home planet called Hadar 4.
  • This also occurred in Puyo Puyo Tetris and its sequel, which use a set of characters themed on each of the Tetrimino pieces unique to these games. The seven of them make up the crew of the Starship Tetra; their meeting up with the Puyo Puyo characters become the games' inciting incidents.

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