Let Me Skip -
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/23/let-me-skip
Alec Meer wrote:
Let me skip anything that isn’t me playing the game
Alec Meer wrote:
I’m already a lost cause
Alec Meer wrote:
Just do it. It’s just tradition that leads to unskippable, non-playable scenes, and that tradition means games neglect to find more integrated, interactive ways of telling their tales. If it’s not compelling enough for me to be told it even as I perform some other in-game activity, then perhaps it’s just not compelling enough at all. Let me skip, and let yourself skip too: see what your game is like when all uncontrollable frippery is skipped, and if new ways of inserting the information you really, truly think the player needs then occur to you.
By "other in-game activity" he means the "gameplay", i.e. the slicing open of enemies and the gunning down of demons, etc. In other words, the kind of storytelling he's talking about here is the kind found in games like
Drag-on Dragoon 3. I.e. a bunch of people talking while you're going around tearing everything to bits.
Titanfall also did the same thing with its campaign levels. And there's a strict limit to the kind of stories you can tell around the player, without necessarily involving him directly (like these examples which more or less ignore what the player is doing while chunks of story invade the edges of the screen).
And why don't you want to be involved? That's not the future. That's arcade-style storytelling. I.e. minimal storytelling. Let's look at
Life is Strange for a more progressive example of interactive storytelling, where throughout the game you make decisions that directly affect the story. How can you possibly play the game if prior to each decision you skipped every cutscene? Every decision would be a roll of the die, sapped of any merit whatsoever, and the whole game collapses.
The only way forward is to realize that while you are watching a cutscene (of any length), you are still (believe it or not) actually playing the game.