This thread is senseless.
It's impossible to tease out and separate a "story" from a "game."
If you do, you end up with a "sport."
As soon as you turn on Super Mario Brothers, and you see pixelated Mario standing there, there's a story.
Who: Mario.
Where: Mushroom Kingdom
When: day time with seconds ticking down, looks like this is happening on the scale of hours, not years.
What: Rescue the princess.
Why: Bowser took her.
From a sentence in an instruction manual and the graphics on your screen, you are immediately in a "story."
By virtue of you PLAYING THE ROLE of Mario, you are playing a role playing game with an incredibly deep story.
Contrast that to tick tack toe.
Who: You
Where: wherever YOU draw the gameboard
When: whenever YOU want to play
What: beat YOUR opponent
Why: so YOU can win
There is no story. It's a competition. Its a sport. You're not playing the role of someone, you, as in YOU, are playing a game.
In a competition/sport, the reinforcement structure exists and is delivered via the mechanism of "winning." It feels good to beat your opponent, and all actions are filtered through that objective.
In a game (read: role playing game), the reinforcement structure exists hand in glove with a STORY. When you make it to the end of the first world in Super Mario Brothers, your "prize", as it were, is story information: Sorry Mario, the princess is in another castle. Your prizes throughout the entire game are just more information about the world you occupy, to get you to move forward through the story.
To say you prefer the simplicity of Zelda 2 is silly: there are books that are hundreds of pages in length, all detailing the lore of Hyrule. That lore is applicable to the Zelda game youre referring to. What you don't like is being subjected to the lore of the worlds you're inhabiting through exposition--you prefer exploration mechanics. That's also fine. There are games that cater to that, and there are games with tons of exposition.
The reason why people think games are getting worse over the years is because there is only so much cognitive horsepower available to you as a human being, ergo, there are only so many fantasy worlds you can fall in love with and inhabit via your imagination. That's why franchises exist and are successful. I happen to like the Final Fantasy universe. Seeing a chocobo on screen is indicative of 35 years worth of lore--breeding, racing, flying, etc. That lore informs what's happening on screen.
If you put two gray boxes on a screen and gave a controller to me and told me "mash X really fast to make that gray box get to the other side of the screen before the computer," I will be bored. But if you apply chocobo sprites to it, suddenly it comes with an entire universe. You can't just say you "hate story" in video games while simultaneously liking video games that are anything other than pong or madden. The very medium itself is a game mechanic delivering reinforcement through story progression.
