Huh, Chrome? Does it default to that for an unknown browser?

You seem to think of games as mainly story-vehicles. But I think that’s what Phil is complaining about, the game wants to tell a story, and the game-play (what he considers the actual video game) is just tacked on as an afterthought. One way to fix that would be to integrate the story more with the game-play. Then, there’s the exact opposite. Give the player some goal to solve before the story advances. That goal should of course be somewhat non-trivial, so “kill a wave of bad guys” does not count. Then let the player figure out how to solve it. I’m no big FPS fan, so I’m using an example from a different genre:

In Thief, in most levels there’s one main treasure you have to steal, and you have to steal a certain amount of other treasures. Which path you take to the main goal and where you go looking for other treasures is up to you. That’s not exactly a sandbox, but neither is it the 100%-scripted game experience that Phil complains about. You don’t know where every guard is right now. You don’t know if/when/where you will fuck up, get spotted and have guards chase after you. I don’t see why FPS games can’t be like that, except with more action rather than stealth. Probably there are some, but I don’t know them.

And in some games, stories just arise out of the game mechanics. I think that 4X strategy games are particularly good at this which is one reason why that’s become one of my favorite genres. As you might already have guessed, I don’t think that story-oriented and narrative-driven games are necessarily “smarter” or better than other games.