Videogames hold so much more power as a medium than books, film or comics. Those are all great mediums in of themselves, and all deservedly will always have a place, but none of them have the power to shake a person to their very core the way a videogame can. There's always been a line between reader and read, between motion picture and observer, between comic and comic-book connossieur. Art has always been separate from us. Videogames break that line, and close the world of art all around us.
At least in theory. The missteps that developers have made in trying to tell a story that takes advantage of the medium's power is astronomical in quantity. They assume player freedom in the answer to immersion issues. Or that cut-scenes are necessary to tell the parts of the story that just plain playing can't cover. That there needs to be a game at the heart of it. That the player must have total power over the story, or none at all.
They don't see what videogames are: life. They are a life to be led, and must be designed as such. Within life, there are things that can be done, things that cannot. There is active participation in matters we cannot effect, and passivity in places where we can make a difference. We have a role to play. And we can learn, because the realities around us are the truths we carry with us. What greater place to make an artistic vision of reality giving birth to truth, than in the life of a videogame?
So for all the failings, the power of the medium speaks for itself. And some, artists who truly understand the craft of expression, will perceive it and take advantage of it. It's my ambition, and it is the ambition of many other people, whether they are past, present or future, because their perception into the reality of the medium is born out of their perception of the reality which we share.Â
Oilers99
This is the reason why I hold Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask to be the greatest 'art' games, they never try to hand you the story of the game, rather they simply present you a world in every sense of the word and let you explore it. They do not let you do things that the designer had not taken into account (if you could kill NPCs the world would end up a haphasard and illogical place), but still give you a meaninful amount of freedom. But it's the little details that make them worthy, the way the characters each have a life independent of your own, the way your house feels like a house, the inn feels like an inn, the lost kingdom feels as strange as it should. Anyway, I feel that you are being a bit to harsh on the whole concept of cutscenes, which generally comes down to how they actually affect immersion. Cutscenes are simply a single technique of many,  they often act as a crutch for those who are not quite capable of utilizing the medium to its fullest, but that doesn't mean they should be written off as evil on the whole, as something that discludes any game using them from being interactive art.
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