I think it is important to realise that we don’t turn our lives into stories WHILE we live them but AFTER we live them. We do not translate whatever happens to us into a narrative until at a moment of retrospection, typically after the events have run their course. This is another hurdle for the game designer who wants to tell a story in-game instead of between missions as is typically the case. A player may not experience the story at all, despite it being there, until after he finishes playing or during a lullin the game (a long loading, a boattrip with no interaction etc), then and there can the player reshape the events into a story.

Those in-game pauses are anathema to modern games with constant action and eyecandy so telling the story during the game gets harder still.