Practical Game Design

Do all games have a narrative?

An everlasting question. And there is no definitive answer. But is worth mentioning that some games are pretty abstract. Tetris comes immediately to mind, but any puzzle game or brain game is very unlikely to tell any kind of story. In a game such as Threes, the player only needs to slide numbered tiles on a four-by-four grid to combine addends and multiples of three. Of course, comparing those games to narrative rich games (or even to games with an extremely simple narrative, like the aforementioned Space Invaders) might give the impression that they don't have any narrative.

But isn't the player playing those games creating a story in itself? Can the player get such an amazing score in Tetris or Threes that ...