> a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction.

Yes! I look at it like this:

If you're telling a story about how you played some game, for many games, the story you tell is just the narrative within the game itself. The games I care about are the ones where the stories I tell about it are my stories.