Since I purchased my Android phone, Game Dev Story ( iTunes | Android ) has been staring me down every time I browse the Android Market. Over the weekend, I was stuck in a car for a long road trip. I was looking for something new to play on my phone when I saw that Game Dev Story was on sale for $2.50. I finally gave in - I love game development, I love simulation games, I'm not going anywhere for the next five hours - I purchased the game.

It turned out to be a great decision. I ended up playing the game not only in the car, but anytime I had an idle moment to myself during the weekend. While the late phases of the game leave a bit to be desired (it eventually runs out of new things to offer as a reward for player progression), it does a fantastic job giving context to a series of repetitive decisions made based on nothing more than a handful of numbers and meters. This context rings especially true for those who are familiar with the game development process and the last thirty years of console game history.

Its greatest achievement is what the title suggests: it is a game dev story. When the player decides to create a new game, the player chooses the genre, the theme, and what parts of the game to emphasize in development. For instance, players can create a Gran Turismo knock-off by choosing the Racing genre, a Motorsport theme, and decreasing points assigned to Cuteness and increasing points assigned to Realism. At the end of development, players name the game and it is shipped. Players then get a Famitsu-style review followed by real-time sales data. During this process, it abstracts the actual content of the game. Players never see screenshots of the gameplay or see comments about the game beyond "the graphics are really good" or "this game is a lot of fun." Like painting mental pictures when reading a book, the player must imagine what it must be like to play the created game. When the player invests enough time into Game Dev Story to have a library of titles developed by the fictional company, the player has created a mental story with events such as the struggles to have a steady bankroll, attempts at game innovation gone awry, and the first time a game sold one million copies. When a video game is able to convince a player to make lengthy series of laborious decisions in order to construct a memorable, highly-personalized narrative on-the-fly... well, that's when the magic happens.

In the push to create game worlds with as much detail as possible, it's easy to forget that the player is often the best storyteller of all.