Cut-scenes are routinely treated with the disdain that might otherwise be reserved for something moist and sticky that gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe on a particularly hot day. Cut-scenes are a relic from the cultural imperialism of cinema, hangers-on from the narrative infancy of videogames. They are imported goods from a third-rate manufacturer. Those who create them are wannabes, trying too hard at a has-been medium.
Take the latest salvo fired in this ongoing war, by Jonathan McCalmont at Futurismic. “One of the most disastrous things to ever happen to videogames was the emergence of the belief that being a game designer is a bit like being a film director,” he opines. McCalmont then goes on to advocate the powers of the emergent narrative, suggesting that this is a preferable form of narrative than the limiting and contrived imposed narrative. “Video games,” he concludes, “are supposed to be an interactive medium, and their narratives should reflect this.”
I do not wish to take McCalmont to task directly, as there is much in his post that is insightful, and that I agree with. Instead, I quote from him in order to establish the tone and essential premises with which most of this debate is taken with – that videogames and cut-scenes (along with non-interactivity/interactivity and possibly even new/old) are, or at least should be, two discrete circles in a Venn diagram.
While it’s true that we’ll occasionally get the odd videogame clearly designed by someone who would much rather be creating cinema (and let’s all indulge in another round of back-slapping as we point to the overused example of Hideo Kojima), we need to stop looking at cut-scenes as the foreign “other” of videogames. For some, it seems any given videogame might be made up both of a genuine, pure videogame form that occasionally, without even changing the disc from the drive, spontaneously becomes cinema. This understanding of cut-scenes is misguided at best.
Non-interactive cut-scenes are one strategy of storytelling used by videogames. Interactive play is another. Narrative through non-interactive moving images is not a mode that can be monopolised by film, just as narrative through non-interactive text is not a mode monopolised by literature. Videogames are not just games, and Huizinga, as perceptive as he is, cannot ever hope to teach you all you need to know about the medium. To suggest the cut-scene is somehow alien to what a videogame should be is to fundamentally misunderstand where the cut-scene came from, and what cinema is. If you took all the cut-scenes in a game and stitched them together, would you have a work of cinema? If you isolated all the orchestral music from a film’s soundtrack, would you have a symphony?
It is understandable to want to be critical of the uses of cut-scene narrative in contemporary videogames. I am just as frustrated as the next irate blogger when forced to sit through a ten-minute cut-scene in order to progress through the latest blockbuster videogame. But it is unproductive and frankly downright silly to pretend that at their very essence, cut-scenes are the antithesis to the art of the videogame. They might sometimes be overwrought. They may tend to be long-winded. But they’re just as much a part of the world of videogames as any rule, any fail-state, or any controller.
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Tags: cinema, cut-scene, interactivity
I guess I appreciate this in general, but just saying “cut-scenes are in games and therefore cut-scenes are part of games” doesn’t take me along very far.
Can we argue by example? What are the great cut-scenes that really earn their keep and make a game clearly better *as a game*, for instance?
I’m playing a bunch of Mass Effect 2 at the moment and it seems pretty clear it’d be a radically different game without its cut-scenes. I’m not saying their good (they’re alright), but they set tone in a way you couldn’t in a Half-Life 2 style cut-scene, say, where my Shepard runs around or silently mopes.
So I don’t know… is “tone setting” something we can say that cut-scenes do well that is not well handled by other techniques? Is the idea that certain games, even genres, couldn’t function without cut-scenes a good response?
@Pippin: I almost feel the opposite. As though the game is a good tone setter for the cut-scenes. I have felt more emotionally involved in some Halo, GTA4 and Metal Gear Solid cut-scenes than I have in many movies, despite the cliche stories and scriptwriting of those cut-scenes. The reason I felt more involved in those cut-scenes, I think, is because I had put more into the world of those cut-scenes than I ever put into the world of a movie. Sure, Master Chief is a cliche space marine saving humanity from aliens, but I care more when it is his life at risk in a cut-scene than a generic space marine in a film.
Which is not to say the game is subservient to the cut-scenes or that most cut-scenes aren’t horrible, lazy storytelling (most of them are). But when used effectively, they can take advantage of the gameplay elements to really pull you into the scene emotionally.
“Non-interactive cut-scenes are one strategy of storytelling used by videogames.”
Couple of questions: first, what essentially makes a cutscene about story? Isn’t this conflating the tool with the (um?) intention?
Second, if we separate the “tool cut-scene” from the “narrative cut-scene” how does that change how we see McCalmonts argument? I think it makes his claims significantly stronger and more persuasive.
A lot of the reactions to McCalmont’s piece seemed to be reading him wrong, if I can be so bold as to summarise a bunch of the reactions I saw. He’s coming at the problem from the reverse angle – human brains can hardly resist looking for a narrative, for causal relationships.
Given this insightful (if not entirely foolproof) statement, it sounds more like McCalmont is arguing for a new story minimalism. If you’ve got a story you want to convey in your game, allude to it, dance around it, point at the shadow of that narrative and let the eventual human brain that will be receiving it do the actual legwork. The cut-scene becomes *not* the story, but what alludes/hints/points at what instead is.
That’s how I read it, and I think it’s still the best case for how best to “tell” (and shouldn’t we be *showing* not telling anyway, as per the maxim?) a “story” in a game.
Thanks for the interesting comments, guys. I appreciate it.
Firstly, I think I should just reassert that this piece was written with regard to the tendency to bracket out the cutscene from the medium of the videogame, which is why I didn’t make any specific arguments about the merits of the cut-scene. Pippin, you make a fair point that this doesn’t take us very far, but I think it is a starting point that we would do well to remind ourselves of before these types of debates are begun. I think even your argument that cut-scenes can enhance tone still seems premised on the assumption that the interactive game component of a videogame is more important than the non-interactive cut-scene component. I don’t think that’s necessarily an assumption we should make; a cut-scene may feed into the game-as-a-game, but the game-as-a-game might also feed into the cut-scene, as Brendan suggests. I don’t think it is a question of giving primacy to either but recognising their essential interconnectedness (or divergence, I suppose). So this post was a process of pointing to the cut-scene and saying “this is a videogame,” without any sort of requirement to go further than that.
So Pippin, I do agree that it is worthwhile to unpack the qualities of the cut-scene further than what I’ve done here, but that that was not my project with this post.
Ben – First, I should have noted that just because I referred to cut-scenes as a storytelling device, I wasn’t supposing that that is their only function. They are simply a mode of communication used by videogames. But they are also a story-telling device as one of their implementations, and story is the context I was engaging them with in this instance.
Second, I did note that I wasn’t directly engaging with McCalmont, and that I was using his post only to establish tone. He does seem to be, as you say, arguing for a story minimalism, which I think is a worthwhile point to make. But that is not what I was using him in this post for, and actually fairly unrelated to what I’m arguing here. As I’ve said above, it is not so much about good or bad implementations of the cut-scene, but rather pointing to them and identifying them as “a videogame”.
I’m not sure you *can* rightfully point to the cut-scene as “a videogame” any more than you can point to the close up shot as “a film”, or the technique of the chapter as “a novel”. I think it’s confusing the part for the whole. And being a part *of* the whole doesn’t grant any special status that I can tell.
I think my problem with McCalmont’s article is that while he makes some really fascinating and interesting points about how emergent narrative and gameplay works and is fun, he seems to make the assumption that ‘all’ videogames ‘should’ be emergent. At least, that’s what I get from one reading. He certainly wouldn’t be the first person to say as much, at least.
And to slowly tie this back into Dan’s article, I think my problem with that is that personally, when I play videogames it is typically because I want to be told a story. And I think cut-scenes are a very powerful tool that can help a game do that. Certainly, a game does not ‘need’ cut-scenes, and certainly I could not defend the vast majority of cut-scenes that are pace-breaking and horribly written. But when they work, they really really work. At least, they do for me. I’m not lying when I say some of my more memorable gaming moments from my life were cut-scenes. But they were only memorable because of the context of the game. The same cut-scene as a scene in a film or tv series would not have the same affect on me, I believe.
Pretty much, instead of tossing cut-scenes aside because they are usually horrible, I would rather we figure out to harness them properly because when we do use them properly they can do amazing things.
Hi Guys
Thanks for the thoughtful response Daniel, but I think that Ben pre-empted my thoughts.
My point is not that cut-scenes are inherently bad or inherently alien to the medium. My point is that that the human brain is programmed to look for narratives everywhere. Put two or three random events next to each other in linear succession and our brains will try to form a story linking them together.
This means that regardless of whether or not the developers include cut-scenes in a game (or any other kind of exposition… bad writing is not just the preserve of cut-scenes) our brains will fill in the dots and draw a neat narrative line.
Given that all games are going to have a story anyway, it strikes me that reducing the narrative possibilities down to one particular story requires the guarantee that the story the developers want to tell is going to be more fun than the one I am going to wind up making for myself simply because I’m a human and humans are wired for pattern recognition.
If the standard of writing in video games were better then I would happily sit through as many cut scenes as you want. I’d even read all of the books that they put into Oblivion and Dragon Age (because if you’re going to include modes of exposition from film, why not include modes of exposition from literature?). But the truth is that the standard of writing in video games is so low that the stories game developers try to tell are almost systematically weaker than the stories we could tell for ourselves.
So: the way forward, it seems to me, is for video game developers to take a leaf out of the pages of art house directors and learn to harness the techniques that prompt the audience to fill in the gaps for themselves and in their own ways.
The currently ending Golden Age of TV occurred when TV writers realised that they could be less heavy-handed in their exposition. Hint and suggest, rather than tell. Muddy the waters. Link themes. Series like the Sopranos and Mad Men are critically acclaimed because they shift the burden of story telling onto the audience. If you watch Mad Men in the same way as you watch Star Trek then you’ll spend your time scratching your head and thinking that the characters are all really badly and inconsistently drawn. But if you watch it while realising that you have to work out what’s going on with Draper for yourself then the series becomes a lot more enjoyable.
So the problem is not that cut-scenes are bad but that they are employed with entirely the wrong ends. Don’t tell us stories, allow us to create our own!
[Ben: I think that was a slip of the key on Dan's part.]
The key to Dan’s perspective, as I understand it, is this part from the article:
“Non-interactive cut-scenes are one strategy of storytelling used by videogames. Interactive play is another. [...] Videogames are not just games”
The distinction between “videogames” and “games” is one that a lot of people make casually, and a few people make thoughtfully, but I know that in the past Dan has been particularly careful to mark out videogames as a new form, which should not necessarily be thought of as a subcategory of games. An analogy would be, in the early years of film, making a distinction between between cinema and theatre; I imagine it seemed logical for many years to think of cinema as a sub-form of theatre, and the prejudices about what made “good” cinema were no doubt shaped by that.
I have more sympathy than Dan for the idea that we should consider how a cutscene affects the videogame as a game, as Pippin suggested
and as McCalmont seemed to imply[EDIT: Reading the comment above, I realise this was off the mark; McCalmont is talking about narrative more than gameplay]. But it’s important to clarify that what is being judged in that case is the game experience rather than the total experience. It may be that most cutscenes hamper the gameness of the videogame they are in, but bring something else worthwhile to the experience.That said, I find the big popular videogames that cutscene lovers enjoy absolutely infuriating, and downright embarrassing as cinema, so I think it’s a bit early to mount a defence of the cutscene as it has been used to date.
With one possible exception: I played the demo to Enslaved the other day. For the very first time ever, I wanted to buy a game that hadn’t sold me on its gameplay simply because I liked its cutscenes so much. Something about the animation. But in general, I’m not a cutscene guy, and in contrast to Brendan’s point, if I want to experience a story in a game, I want to be actively involved.
The most convincing argument I’ve heard in favour of cutscenes is that they’re the only affordable way to make some one-time things happen in a game. “We can do the one-off cool things cheaply in cutscenes and put the savings back into improving the core game, or we can try to do everything in-game and run out of money to make any of it good.”
[...] In defence of cut-scenes – Red Kings Dream. Cut-scenes are often seen as obtrusive and irritating in videogames; separating you from the action that’s happening on-screen. Here, the writer argues that they are actually an important part of this medium. [...]
I think Fraser has come quite close in summarising what I meant to do here. Videogames are indeed an entirely new form, despite their origins in previous mediums. Pointing towards the cut-scene as somehow extraneous to the experience of the videogame is the major fallacy I was hoping to illustrate in this post.
@ Ben – I’m not sure my meaning has come across. As Fraser suggests, it might be my fault in not being clear enough. I’m not trying to pull the cut-scene out as a part of a videogame at all. I’m trying to do the exact opposite: the cut-scene is a videogame in the same sense that a button is a videogame, or a rule is a videogame. It might be difficult to talk about them without seeming like I’m separating them off as isolated parts, but I’m trying to describe how they constitute a whole.
A solitary brick is not a wall. But a brick that has been cemented to other bricks is a wall, and we can identify the object both as a brick and as a wall. A solitary cut-scene might not be a videogame (it might be machinima on YouTube, for instance). But a cut-scene in a videogame is still a videogame.
@ Jonathan M – thanks for dropping by! I’m sorry to siphon debate away from your very interesting blog post. I feel like some of the comments here would be better suited under your own post!
As I’ve said, my intention was not to engage specifically with your arguments. As you’ve stated them again here, I agree almost entirely. Games are too blunt, too heavy-handed, and for the most part, too dumb in telling stories. My own position is that narrative architecture and embedded narrative can be the strongest forms of storytelling in games – if, of course, you want your game to tell a story. I do disagree about the desirability of emergent narrative, but that, I think, is purely a question of taste. Some people want to speak (Sleep Is Death), some people want to listen (Call of Duty). Like Brendan, I don’t see much point in limiting the medium to either. I also disagree that “overreading” as you mention it in your original argument exists, but that is a point for a different comment thread!
So, I apologise to have somewhat sidetracked the aims of your post. My project here was only to pick away at some of the underlying discussions on cut-scenes, taking your post as closest to hand at the time.
Dan, are you *sure* you haven’t been secretly reading Latour? Your comments sound eerily similar to L’s insistence on things being defined entirely by their relations.
I am the sort of guy who pooh-poohs cut scenes in their entirety. This is more of an aesthetic thing, and not a true belief that cut scenes do not belong in games. However, the industry needs a detox, if you will, from cut scenes. When we find we can handle games as games and not as “cinema plus you shoot bad guys”, then perhaps having a staged re-introduction of cut-scenes is best. Having cut-scene heavy games also “teaches” game designers that what they are working on is a story and not a set of rules, which is in my mind a bad thing to learn. It’s sort of like the impressionists — they weren’t saying that representational painting wasn’t painting, just that it wasn’t something that people ought to be doing with paint. Since then, representational painting has come back, because the art form has matured.
So it is with cut-scenes. I think there needs to be a movement in the medium to be able to tell stories without the cut-scenes, and when we have sufficient understanding and mastery of this, then we can re-introduce cut-scenes.
I think there are cut-scenes that really are well done, but most people wouldn’t consider them cut-scenes. For example, in Ikaruga when you first start the game, the camera moves around the ship before it settles on the overhead view. This is a great way to engage the player. You can also look at scripted events as cut-scenes of a sort, but where the player is still firmly in control.
What I’m really trying to say is that the people who are against cut-scenes are really talking about the idea that we need to remove them to learn about game design properly, instead of writing design documents that read like scripts for a movie.