http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExcusePlot

Hah! Your badness has been questioned. Leader of the free world kidnapped?

John Carmack "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but its not that important."

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Some games have epic, sweeping plots that could easily have been made into an action Miniseries instead of a game. Others just seem to have a plot because people feel a little silly doing things for no reason, even if the real reason they're playing is because it's fun.

An Excuse Plot is, in the simplest terms, a plot that is clearly there merely as a justification for the gameplay, or other form of flashy, show-offy-ness, to happen. In short, the story serves the needs of the gameplay, nothing more. It makes no pretense of intrinsic value, but simply provides some banter so you understand why the purple and non-purple units are shooting at each other.

A potential disadvantage of including a half-assed plot (as opposed to no plot at all) is that it can make the game seem unfinished, poorly thought-out, or childish. However, many developers either do not think about these risks or consider the structure and context an Excuse Plot provides to be worth it.

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An Excuse Plot is not necessarily a poorly written, minimalistic, or stupid storyline, only one that has been written to obviously showcase something else. These are typically featured in games for children such as Super Mario Bros. (though there are exceptions in that series, such as the RPG spinoffs), as a complex storyline would not be something that children would understand. Beware of the Anthropic Principle.

If you want to know how to write your own excuse plot, we've got you covered.

A Super-Trope to:

A Sister Trope to No Plot? No Problem! (not even bothering with plot at all).

Compare:

Contrast Play the Game, Skip the Story (the plot is deep, but the players see it as an excuse).

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Girls und Panzer: Ourai Girls Academy is going to close unless they win a tournament of tank battles. That's it. It is just an excuse to give a reason for the spectacular battles that make up the vast majority of the series and film.

To Love-Ru: OVA 3's plot simply consists of girls going on holiday to a private resort. The episode mainly consists of constant Fanservice.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The plot of Stardust Crusaders is easily summarized: Mum has a curse, find and kill DIO to save her. Have fun watching Jotaro and company travel around the world and kicking the arses of several increasingly bizarre opponents.

Keijo!!!!!!!! revolves around the intense fighting sport of Keijo—essentially, it is a king of the hill-esque sport where you fight to be the only one left standing on a platform. Only other rules: only women can compete, because the only part of your body allowed to come in contact with your opponents is either your breast or your buttocks.

Board Games

The Cheapass Games board game Devil Bunny Needs A Ham has a story, which, in all seriousness, goes as follows: "You and your friends are living pleasant and full lives in Happyville. You are highly trained and well-paid sous-chefs, who have decided to climb to the top of a tall building, as fast as you can. Devil Bunny needs a ham. And he's pretty sure that knocking you off the building will help him get one. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps he is not."

The Excuse Plot for Fight City is about as short as you're going to get. "It's a city, and they fight."

Steam Tunnel couldn't even stay interested enough to finish its excuse: "In the year 2185, in the steam-driven titanium mine deep under the surface of Io... oh, who are we kidding. Steam Tunnel is a great game with no particular basis in reality."

Clue's plot is essentially - "Mister Boddy (or Dr Black) is dead. Find out whodunnit." There is no explanation of who Mister Boddy (or even Dr Black) is, why would anyone want to kill him, or who the guests are and why they're at the mansion. Various other ports DO list motives, but they're all contradictory (and none of them tell us who he is).

Candyland has a backstory about the King being kidnapped by Lord Licorice and only two children from our world being able to find him, with gingerbread men (the playing pieces) acting as guides. Even as a child, did any of this matter when you were actually playing the game? No.

Comic Books

Fan Works

Film — Animated

Surprisingly, despite his acclaim as a master storyteller and his legendary reputation for having anal-retentive attention to detail in his films, Walt Disney firmly believed in using the Excuse Plot in both his short cartoons and feature films, from as early as his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons up to the end of his life with The Jungle Book. To him, gags based on character motivation and context and entertainment were what really mattered. Two of his top animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, verify this early in their book "Too Funny For Words: Disney's Greatest Sight Gags"; "At that time, however, even the distributors were questioning whether gags were enough to sustain a whole film and they started asking for more story. Walt, the greatest of storytellers, reacted in a surprising way. 'By the time you have a story really started,' he said, 'it is time to iris out (end the picture), and you have failed to make the audience laugh.' Obviously, in Walt's mind, the first priority in any film was the laughter, and too much story quickly became tedious. He never forgot that point throughout his whole life, constantly shying away from projects that had more continuity than entertainment."

Disney's The Jungle Book is acclaimed as a legitimate animated feature classic, even though its plot is a wafer thin, In Name Only adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's story. Walt Disney specifically told the story artists to not read or follow the book, and even chewed them out when they had concerns over the simplistic story, saying the characters and entertainment were more important. Animator and story artist Floyd Norman, who worked on the film, summed it up on his blog : "With Pixar's string of successful movies it became popular among animation buffs to quote the familiar mantra, story, story, story. But, I remember it was no less than Walt Disney himself who chewed us out back during the development of 'The Jungle Book.' Because we thought we had legitimate concerns about the films' simple plot line. Well, we caught the wrath of the Old Maestro head on. 'You guys worry too much about the story,' Walt shouted. 'Just give me some good stuff.' And, what was that good stuff Walt Disney was talking about, you ask? Fun, humor, entertainment. In a word, Walt was speaking of gags. 'The Jungle Book' didn't need a more involved story line because we already had great characters to work with. Let the humor come out of the situation, the characters, and the story will take care of itself."

Film — Live-Action

Literature

Animorphs #44, The Unexpected, creates a story where Cassie is knocked out during a battle and winds up on a plane to Australia. Among the fandom, it's semi-seriously assumed that this whole plot was contrived just because Scholastic wanted a book with a kangaroo on the cover.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: The plot of the novel revolves around Christopher trying to find out who killed the dog Wellington. However, the only plot developments come in the first and last few chapters; most of the book consists of The Catcher in the Rye-esque ramblings and detailed descriptions of mundane, unrelated events.

Moby-Dick is nominally about Ahab's quest to hunt the titular whale. However, most of the book focuses less on the actual plot and more on detailed explorations of the history, science, and philosophy relating to whaling, much of which is also used as metaphorical commentary on human society.

Live-Action TV

In earlier seasons of The Red Green Show, there was generally an over-reaching plot that they tried to work into every segment of the show in some manner or another. In latter seasons, this practice was dropped, with the main plot of the episode only appearing in a few segments and otherwise being kept out of the recurring sketches like "North of 40" or "Handyman Corner." One of the most notable instances was the "No Duct Tape" episode, in which Red was still seen using duct tape in such segments, even though the plot of the episode was that Possum Lodge had run out of duct tape.

The Channel 4 hidden camera series Bad Robots has an excuse plot at the beginning explaining that the malfunctioning electronics in the pranks were created by a robot who gained sentience to punish humans for mistreating their electrical appliances. No story progression after that.

Into the Badlands: The whole Post-Apocalyptic Feudal Future with No Guns Allowed is really just an excuse to have a Western Wuxia series.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 has a setup involving a guy trapped on a space station with some robots, and he's the guinea pig in a mad psychological experiment where his captors try to drive him insane by forcing him to watch bad movies. It's really just an excuse to have a guy and two puppets watch bad movies and add funny commentary. The theme song actively discourages you from thinking about the plot at all.

Pinball

Tabletop Games

There was a popular Planescape module called The Great Modron March where the event in the title begins decades before it is supposed to, and the PCs are supposed to help the modrons. They'll probably never learn just why the event is happening early, and there are a variety of hooks as to what motivation they have (like being hired as bodyguards by people interested in it) but Word of God admitted that the real reason the PCs are going to want to help the modrons is because it's just so cool. (And admittedly, it is.) Of course, the actual reason was somewhat serious, but it was part of a plot of a different module (which could be used as a sequel to this one if the PCs do find out. Primus, the ruler of the modrons, had been murdered, and his throne usurped by a "mysterious shadowy entity" who ordered the March early to search for something. The entity was actually Orcus in his guise as the undead demon Tenebrous, who was trying to find his Wand. Orcus' return became the main plot of the epic two-part module Dead Gods.

The plot of Battletech, feudal nobles in space fighting wars with Humongous Mecha, seems intended to create a situation to justify the use of mechs in warfare. But then the writers went into why they use mechs to conquer planets (instead of say, nukes), how they can conquer an entire planet with just a few mechs, and how the wars got started, plus the need to introduce new factions. And it all snowballed into a complete Expanded Universe.

The plot of Star Realms: You want a space empire, destroy the other player to do so.

The backstory for Gorkamorka mostly exists to facilitate the players' warbands driving around in the desert beating each other up.

Monsterpocalypse has a backstory and Character Alignment system that mostly exists to justify having giant robots slam Cthulhu through the Empire State Building while a Martian tripod steps on downtown Tokyo in order to more effectively fight a giant radioactive bug.

Theatre

Pretty much all Cirque du Soleil shows use this. There's generally a plot, if you read the website or the program, but mostly they're simple excuses to put together a bunch of acrobatic acts. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; they're really good acrobatic acts.

The Play That Goes Wrong is based around an amateur drama society attempting to put on a lavish production of a forgotten 1920s murder mystery, The Murder at Havisham Manor. Of course, this is just a Show Within a Show, and the real draw is to watch the chaos unfold around the hapless dramatists as everything that can go wrong within a theatrical production does go wrong.

Visual Novels

The plot of Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru is kickstarted by the death of the main character's grandfather and how the only way he will become chairman of the school is dressed in drag. Don't question how the criteria for chairman has a paradoxical clause that they must be alumni and the ethical questions that follow, all that matters is that you get a Harem disguised as Yuri.

The subgenre of "Nukige" (抜きゲー), literally meaning "Fapping Game", is basically this with the flimsiest of plots to set-up intercourse.

Radio

The plot in the average episode of The Goon Show had no actual relevance to what happened, with several episodes existing simply as a 20-minute lead-up to a terrible pun.

Web Animation

Gaming All Stars: Video game characters all live together on Earth. Oh no! The villains want to capture characters (By trophifying them) in a display of power. Heroes team up, villains form alliances and stab each other in the back. What's this? A Physical God has played all the other bad guys like a fiddle, then traps the heroes inside the moon and starts an apocalypse, because thats what nasty villains do For the sequel series, it's good guys allying themselves against villains who specifically want to torment humanity for the thrill of it and little else.

Fan Film Quake the Movie: Escape from the Bastille opens with the history of the infamous Bastille of medieval Paris, revived in the distant future as a prison for alien POWs. Ultimately, however, this is not explored further and serves just as an excuse to show the warriors of Quake III: Arena fighting the Strogg from Quake II.

Web Original

Western Animation