My first 15 minutes with Gothic aren't too promising.

* Supposedly there's a cutscene, but I hear sound but can't see anything.
* Have long boring conversation with random guy. Presumably he rescued me from a shipwreck or something.
* Go walking around. Try to pick up some beer on the ground, can't. Look at control config, none of the listed buttons are good for picking stuff up when tested.
* Give up on beer. Go for a swim. Randomly get electrocuted by gods know what.
* Die. There is no Game Over screen.
* Save game.
* Load saved game.
* Still dead upon loading of saved game.
* Watch my corpse slowly sink to the bottom of the pond.

So... is there more to Gothic than that, or have I pretty much had the Gothic experience?

nope, for you I'm guessing that there will be no more gothic experience, if your not willing to play a game, instead of watching a game play itself, gothic is not for you. If you notice, the world is surrounded by a forcefield, and it gives you fair warning before shocking you.

As for your cutscene issue, I'm sure there is a solution around here somewhere... maybe the search function will help, it does that sometimes.

Not sure what's causing the issue with the cutscene not showing, but one of the other threads here might have a solution to that. To pick up an item (or active an object, or talk to a person) you need to press and hold the action key (defaults are Ctrl and left mouse buttom), then with that key held press the up arrow (or W if you're using WASD); controls are definitely a bit funky at first, but once you've played for a few hours they'll feel completely natural. The thing that killed you is a barrier surrounding the penal colony- you'll want to stay away from it. As for the chat with Diego, if you found it long or boring then Gothic might not be a good game for you; there are plenty of people with plenty to say in the game, and if you want to have any chance at surviving you'll need to listen to them.

To make the videos show up:

Disabling antialiasing in your video card drivers may fix this problem, but that doesn't always work. One thing that does always work is disabling video scaling. This way the video won't fill up the whole screen, unfortunately, but it's still better than seeing nothing at all. :)

To disable video scaling you need to edit Gothic.ini and change scaleVideo=1 to scaleVideo=0. For Vista and Windows 7 you can normally find this file in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Gothic\System (or similar--the folders below VirtualStore reflect wherever the game has been installed); note that AppData is a hidden folder by default, but you can still access it by entering it in the address bar. For XP, or if it's not within VirtualStore, you can find this file within the System subfolder of wherever you installed the game to.

I still don't know what's up with the game that doesn't end when you die. Maybe later in the game you might die near someone who can resurrect you? I haven't had the pleasure of staring at my corpse for hours before.

I just deleted my earlier replies on accident. Going to repeat myself, abridged:

The video thing worked, thanks.

Figured out the controls somewhat - I wish the mouse buttons actually did something, since I need it to control the camera anyway.

Overall, I guess I'm not as much into Morrowind-type games, and I've got too much on my plate as it is - a job and one non-casual game at a time is about all I can take.

There is no resurrection. Everything in this game is either self-explanatory (death = game over) or something you're meant to learn from the manual or through interacting with characters (as you've noticed there is no tutorial). The mouse buttons work, but as with the keyboard controls you need to use them together with something else for them to do something. By default left click is the action key (the same as Ctrl), while right click does the same as Space (I think?)

It's not a very approachable system, but once you get used to it it becomes second nature. They fixed it completely for Gothic II (clicking the mouse or hitting Ctrl on the keyboard attacks directly--no combinations to get things working).

I'm sort of tempted to amass a library of saved games that are all corpses, just because the game makes this disturbing idea possible.

Might make an interesting "You Tube" entry; kind of like "I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper" (if you've been to the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, TX you'll understand - they play this real of similar commercials that they had from like 40 years ago on) :) . There are some strange things with this game - probably due to the small time maker.