Though nobody cares about your stupid story it’s likely that it’s not entirely down to the audience and their preconceptions of games. There are people who do see games as a storytelling medium, whether they consider that to be their primary function or not.
This is something that Ken Levine went on to discuss in his GDC presentation, he talked about how BioShock had been designed to work on three levels, what I would consider the physical, the intellectual and the emotional.
The first level, the physical, he described as the very straightforward “Where do I need to go, who do I need to kill?”, BioShock needed to satisfy those people who simply wanted to play, to maintain forward progression and be engaged. The second level, the intellectual, is the group Ken described himself as being a part of, those with “… some interest in the story.” People in this group need to be satisfied by the immediate action, but also need some context for their actions. The final group is those people who are deeply invested in the story and background of Rapture (The failed undersea utopia where BioShock is set), for this group “… you have to give them all of that love, a novelistic level of detail.” This is the group for which every detail matters.
These levels are in very simple terms the “What?”, “Who?” and “Why?” of the game. If you don’t know what you are doing it doesn’t matter who you are doing it to or why.
Every level should build upon the previous levels, the secondary and tertiary levels cannot be successfully catered too without first satisfying the primary level; people shouldn’t be asked to fight through the core mechanics of the game in order to appreciate the story; and they will resent being asked to.
The major issues arise when trying to balance the needs of these three levels, to engage the entire audience at once. If the game is loaded with too much exposition up front, those players who simply want to play will be, at best, distracted and at worse feel patronised. Too little depth and a game will be incapable of holding the attention of those who are interested in the story and they will quickly move on to something else. At the same time nobody should be forced to wade through copious detail in order to understand what is actually going on.
I find that often when games attempt to tell a story they overload the core experience with information, rapidly devolving into a succession of over long speeches full of proper nouns. Halo 3, is a game that, for all it’s ability to provide the visceral thrills required by the primary audience, has difficulty balancing these levels. So much exposition is throw up within the first few minutes that it becomes very difficult to follow unless you have been keeping track of the Halo cannon since the first game; a title that managed to cater to all three audiences in a much more successful manner.
There are people who are interested in games for their story, but there will always be people who simply want to be entertained on a physical level, and whatever story a game contains should strive not to get in the way of that.
Nobody cares about your stupid story because you’re telling it to the wrong people.