Story telling in games

This is something i feel very strongly about in the game world and at this stage of gaming it is still taking the baby steps on perfecting a good way of portraying a good story throughout the length of a game.

To me i feel with the gaming platform and current technology so much more could be tried and done but its very fixed on established rules or guidelines of what a game should be.
Gaming at the moment a large amount of the time is very controlled fixed and in many ways can be summed up  with gameplay followed by cutscene etc but what if that was thrown out and looked upon as something such as how can we approach this in a new way? and example of this is Final Fantasy 13 which is basically has gameplay and story on different sides of a wall its basically a movie but blending in gameplay sections.

One thing im getting at is going from a gameplay mentality to an experience one, thinking of a game as something more than a game to pass the time but something you as a player can connect with and feel a part of it. Some parts to this is making games feel natural to the user in the way they interact but also having a human connection to the game in the way of emoticons so things like life and death have a meaning and a consequence and once that is established a sense of fear will be in place because in most cases you wont want your character to die because that would be it for them.

One game does tackle this which is Heavy Rain and i think we need to see more games taking a different direction to the norm, the norm is fine games like Street Fighter, Gears of War and Call of Duty are fun no doubt but gaming needs to open up a little more to change to have more variety and in essence opening up to new audiences.