The heart of any good story is conflict -- conflict with another, conflict with oneself, conflict with society, etc. -- and with conflict comes the element of empathy. With which side do you most closely associate? This often happens quite without conscious thought; something within you comes to life, and you make a decision. However, some video games make this more of a struggle than it needs to be.

For straightforward storytelling, it's hard to beat the cutscene. You get the cinematic approach: dialogue, camera tracking, shifting viewpoints, sometimes narration, arguably everything you need to provide full immersion for the viewer. Unlike watching a movie, though, the player can simply choose to skip the cutscene, moving the story ahead in time to the next important plot point, at which time you take direct control, and the story becomes yours entirely, through the viewpoint of the inhabited character. But without the intervening story, the connecting emotions are lost, and the resulting gap is simply too large to bridge with empathy. Unless one is willing to sit through all the cutscenes as they're presented, then there is no way to keep the thread of the story, and therefore no reason to continue to feel for the characters beyond some basic level of association via the expedient of simply controlling them.

Another increasingly common way to tell stories in video games is to have events play out during the action itself, requiring you to be in the right place at the right time to catch important plot points and dialogue. This can feel more immersive, but can also be somewhat frustrating if you somehow manage to miss what's being said. This is arguably the best kind of immersive tactic, and by directly implicating you in the action -- even without the dubious benefit of dialogue choices -- there's a good chance that you'll feel more empathetic with the character you're playing. Ironically, however, this method sometimes serves only to distance you further from the action. By making you the agent of action, where the story's progress is entirely up to your movement through the game, the story seems to exist outside of your character's desires. You're given direction by the other characters, but have little personal stake in what's going on other than to accomplish the main goal: to complete the mission at hand. The problem with inducing empathy with this mechanic is that the game has to either assume that the player is already invested in the stakes of the story, or that the player will feel nothing for what's going on.