ok this makes me feel old and snobby as heck but i lowkey resent the incursion of "lore" into games as this particular way of referring to certain narrative elements. as far as i can tell this is a games-specific usage, emerging into mainstream gamer lingo around 10-15 years ago, to designate things like the books in oblivion & skyrim - narrative material that's more or less totally unrelated to anything the player does, just there to flesh out the game's pathologically overembroidered fictional world.
one thing i dislike about this sense of "lore" is that it artificially separates backstory/exposition from plot, ie the stuff that is happening to and around the player in the story's present. as a deliberately chosen narrative pattern (ie by people who are new enough to the medium and grew up loving it that they think lore is something that makes games better, just by existing, the more the better maybe even), lore's obsessive detail demands attention, insists on its own importance, but contributes to nothing but itself.
lore also portrays narrative as just another form of "content": narrative as data, dry and dissectable and pinned to a card with its genus species typewritten beneath; narrative as wallpaper; narrative as platform-food (the fandom dot com wiki SEO empire, it hungers); narrative as anything other than unique untameable intersections of storytelling, play, thematics, aesthetics, etc.
i tried websearching for the history of this usage but search engines are so broken now, and it's a tough concept to search for anyway (most engines think you want to read all about lore for this or that specific game) so i can't really trace it as a gamer-anthropological concept, but i would love to sketch this beast's face in sharper detail that i may conduct a ritual public slaying.
to counter in the affirmative, then: game narrative is a process, both as we author it as creators and as we experience it as players. backstory is archeology and forensics and the epistolary novel, but none of these render it dead or an artifact of pure data. every story deserves to be treated as something that is really happening, because in the interactive medium it is actually happening, to a human player. i think this language mostly devalues everything around it. let's just speak of stories and the different ways we tell them.
I don't feel any particular way about the word when it's used as a catchall term for "stuff seeded throughout a massive setting that we can tie back into and build off of, which may not be relevant now or ever but it's There." But as often as I hear it used that way, it still gets my hackles up when used in certain contexts, and especially when it's used to describe things in the game setting as though they're real.
This is distinct from treating the story as though it's really happening, because we participate in things that are happening to us and by their nature they can't be isolated to our perspective or controlled. A thing that just exists can be pared down to a limited perspective. I can believe my coffee cup is an ancient artifact and you can't stop me. You can say these old things over here are ancient artifacts and I can decide they're fake. Write down all the information about them--no opinions, just pure facts!--and I bet I can find plenty of evidence to support my position. So what if you can do that too? You're deciding what you want to believe, just like me.
When players talk about lore and debate the accuracy of this or that factoid, they're sometimes expecting games to treat them as the ultimate arbiters of what story means without imposing any external perspective. Like "immersion," it easily becomes a demand to never remind players that games are creative projects made by real people with preferences and personalities, and that sometimes those people even Have Agendas (creative vision and a desire to communicate something specific through their work).
In this mindset the story should not feel like a story. It should feel as though the setting is a fully-formed world, and if narrative designers and game writers are doing our jobs correctly we should--at most!--be peering into it through a portal on the wall and carefully, accurately recording our observations. No opinions! Just pure facts! It is very unprofessional to break kayfabe and admit that we made this shit up out of our own heads for purposes that may not be limited to providing the audience with an experience as close to a bespoke standing ovation as possible.
This is how you get players confidently claiming that writers on a video game series Don't Know Their Own Lore and should just let community loremasters (people who remember a lot of facts) write the story when there's a minor discrepancy or a change they don't agree with. It's also why marginalized writers joining a game project are often immediately scapegoated for any story decision players don't like; naturally they have an agenda, and they're ruining the lore like an evil wizard warping reality in their own image. The real writers--the ones who know their only job is to serve the player Content--obviously figure out how the story should go by opening up the big leather-bound book in the studio basement that contains everything that has ever happened or will happen in the game world, and then cross-referencing it all until they've extrapolated what really happened. If it doesn't ring true, they must have gotten it wrong.
Some people just don't know how it actually works; I've had to explain to well-meaning players that I can't just go and ask the narrative team the answer to a random question because the answer doesn't exist and they'll have to make it up, a process that usually involves group review sessions. Those people get it, and what they're typically asking is not "get me this information," but "tell me a story." Some writers are very good at immediately coming up with something compelling and spinning it out on the fly, but that's its own skillset, and most people working on large collaborative projects don't happen to live at the crossroads of being good at off-the-cuff storytelling and not getting in trouble for making shit up to tell players on the spot.
There are other people who just genuinely like finding things out and noting them down, even if the information isn't relevant to a game's story otherwise. They're mostly fine, although they sometimes get frustrated when writers prioritize storytelling over lore accuracy.
But the player who really, really loves narrative as pure data--who wants "lore" to be the objective random trivia of a setting and nothing else--is not making an innocent assumption about the writing process or interested in having an origin and backstory for everything from nettles on up. They believe they've made a bargain when they purchase a game: Okay, I know it's not realistic for you to have tailored this experience to my exact tastes. But it had better not be not for me, either.
It's unsurprisingly similar to the bargain some reactionaries apparently think they've made with real life--it's fine if facts don't explicitly validate their worldview, but they had better not contradict it. They had better not validate people who don't agree with them. Raw facts they can work with; they can build their own story on top of it. They will smugly sit for hours and argue only that it's absurd to believe meaning can be more or less accurately derived from inconclusive data, even if it means sacrificing their own deeply-held position.
As players, they haven't paid money to be a virtual isekai protagonist just for some jackoff cog in the development machine to try to push themes and emotions and ideas on them; if everyone's interpretation of the relative importance of things in a setting is equally valid, and all anyone has to agree on are the plain facts, the story's not not for them. And since they typically believe every game developer's job is to provide seamless escapism, lore that contributes nothing is everything they want.
