Okay, quite frankly I'm getting sick of people placing cutscenes into videogames. Cutscenes, I might add, that are not skippable. You're a videogame developer, not Pixar. Your job is to make videogames, interactive media, not movies.
So when this videogame developer was interviewed for new Scientist, I welcomed his words:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328555.300-a-different-way-to-game.html
For those of you who can't read it, the jist is simple: videogames with a model of a real-world system or some part of a real-world system. It is through the player's interaction with that system where they learn and get emotionally invested.