There was a similar article a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128216), where I defended the cinematic approach as well. The argument mostly isn't against cinematic narrative, but against badly executed cinematic narrative. In the book "The Art of Game Design", the author explains that a game should be an experience designed for the player. And as you say, the form in which this experience is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the experience.
> And as you say, the form in which this experience is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the experience.
This eclipses and outweighs what I would have to say.
I think the author of the article, in those terms, was saying that the experiences created by recent games are often, and more and more, far inferior in quality; I've followed the correct sequence of buttons, I am rewarded with a scene of my character doing awesome things. If done well, I might even feel a tidbit of attachment and of feeling that this was the result of my success. But it's not the experience of being a super-spy in a high-tech facility. It's the experience of seeing a super-spy do stuff after I complete my homework, and I will have more homework to do so the super-spy can go on to do awesome things.
The problem is that these lower-quality experiences still sell better, often because they abuse certain hacks or dopamine bypasses of the human brain, without necessarily reaching all the way through to what makes an experience fun and pleasurable for the player.
Of course, to make such an argument successfully, you first have to convince people that humans do not always act optimally rationally, and then that humans do have such "hacks" and twists that control what they want and do (which in turn requires an audience to be convinced that brains control actions, not "the soul" or some other immaterial entity). Think that's a high bar? It's not even the start.
The existence of human irrationality is the easy part. The hard part is arguing that an experience involving choices is inherently higher-quality. The fact that Thief gives you plot-relevant choices doesn't make it any more the real experience of being a thief, except in the trivial sense that real life feels like it involves making choices. Likewise for all those examples. If you want to claim that the experience is lower or higher quality, you need an argument for that beyond your own subjective opinion (which is naturally biased in favour of games from your childhood).
Yes, this. It's hard to make arguments about quality of experience when every step of the way there's many uncertain variables and your best evidence comes from personal experience (that most likely wasn't shared by the person you're trying to convince).
