Perhaps this is an obnoxious take on my part, but video games should, above all things, prioritize the ability of being paused. At any point. Regardless of whether it's during a cutscene, a special animation, or a time-based puzzle. You never know when you're gonna get a phone call, or someone will need you in another room, or you get a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, or you hear your cat licking plastic, or whatever. Other entertainment mediums like books, movies, and music can be paused whenever you want. Why do some games not give you the same luxury??
This is one thing I really appreciate about the Nintendo Switch as a platform. You press the HOME button and whatever game you're playing pauses, period, no exception.
Also something I like about playing old games in emulators, you can always pause the emulator.
Like ideally you want pausing to be implemented at the platform level, and not in the hands of the game developer.
On small multiplayer games it should be possible for a player to request a pause and other players to approve, maybe. Might be a pain to implement though.
A nice thing about the Nintendo Switch pause functionality might be that you can't engage with the game while it's paused. You can't fiddle around in the menus or spend more time looking at a puzzle. It's not very helpful for having more time to prepare for a game task. The developer can still use lack of an in-game pause functionality to make it hard to engage with the game out of realtime. (You can look at screenshots, though, I guess.)
Also: You don't necessarily have time in which you're allowed to be uninterruptible, but you should probably get to have some.
Some people are caregivers for small children or have other similarly intense and incessant responsibilities. These people kind of need to be on-call 24/7, because even if they've talked to a partner about taking breaks, their child or such might suddenly have a problem that requires multiple people's worth of effort.
The rest of you should get to not be on-call 24/7, though.
Yes, there's a chance someone might have an important phone call for you outside of business hours that can't wait half an hour. It could, in theory, happen that one of my loved ones gets fatally injured in a way that will kill them in a short span of time, but also leaves them capable of saying last farewells on the telephone. It probably won't happen, though, and being on-call 24/7 is a huge cost to pay to prevent this sort of thing.
I take walks without my phone sometimes. I make sure I've used the restroom before taking such a walk, and I check in with my roommates beforehand about whether they need things from me, and I go during hours when I don't really expect to receive an important phone call. These same strategies should also work for gaming.
When you're playing a game, you don't even have to actually be away from the phone! You can glance at the number, or maybe enable call screening. If it's really important to answer immediately, it's probably also worth losing game progress over.
