What's Wrong with the Cutscenes-in-Games Debate
When it comes to game design and cutscenes, everyone has an opinion, even your friendly neighborhood Game On grumbler. Case in point, I've had a read through Martin Herink's think piece at Gamasutra entitled "The Problem of the Cutscene" and with respect for the effort and agreement on several key points, I'm not sure I can get behind the fundamental premise.
First, what's a cutscene? According to my Macbook Pro's dictionary, it's "a scene (in computer games) that develops the story line and is often shown on completion of a certain level, or when the player's character dies."
Close enough for jazz, so let's start with the impetus behind the article. Herink's purpose in writing the piece hinges on his rejection of the notion that the "problem" of the cutscene is one of "structural functionality."
...rather...[it] appears instead to be a question on the propriety of decisions made by designers regarding issues of perspective relatively easily resolved in the framework of editing, rhythm, and aesthetic expression.
Right away I'm put off by that last bit, which even Herink acknowledges in his next sentence as "rather cryptic." It certainly is, mainly because those terms are incredibly vague, but also because they're too nonspecific to serve as persuasive contrast. Of course the resolution to game/cinema discord involves proper editing, rhythm, expressiveness. Proper, as he explains in further detail shortly thereafter, as a function of integration, proportionality, and proximity to (before, after, etc.) specific game goals.
Another way of describing "structural functionality," in other words, a subversively all-encompassing phrase-concept which poses serious problems for the implied dichotomy in the opening argument.
But let's move past my gripe with the thesis and advance to a more fundamental issue: the question of what a cutscene actually is in relation to gameplay.
According to Herink:
...a cutscene means an injection of purely contemplative material into a fundamentally kinetic experience...the game is meant to be an interactive experience.
I think I understand what Herink's after here, but disagree with his choice of terms, which are misleading. Cutscenes aren't "contemplative," i.e. "meditative" or "expressing or involving prolonged thought." (What a strange choice of adjectives!) What's more, I would argue that cutscenes are in fact fundamentally kinetic. In today's multi-dimensional game environs, game directors use a melange of cinematic techniques to advance traditional linear narratives. These scenes are typically non-interactive (as Herink notes) compared to interactive gameplay, but -- and this is much more than merely a semantic quibble -- both are always intensely kinetic. That is, they both depend overtly on various kinds of motion (literal, figurative) to achieve a desired effect.
As we've seen in recent games like Metal Gear Solid 4, cutscenes -- like multi-angle viewable DVD video -- can also be substantially interactive. If you haven't played MGS4, I'm talking about the way the game lets you "edit" the flow of visual information in realtime during lengthy mission briefings in all kinds of ways, including optionally abandoning the primary mise en scene altogether.
Now I wouldn't necessarily identify those interactive embellishments (PiPs and zooms and camera swaps) as gameplay, but those scenes are importantly distinct from non-interactive ones because you actually have the ability to change the apperceptive narrative flow. No, you can't alter the physicality of the world, knock things off tables, push over chairs, shove characters out of the way, or make them behave any differently, but you can dramatically alter the way you visualize each segment. And as any filmmaker or psychoanalytic theorist (or policeman taking witness statements at the scene of an accident) knows, what you see and how you see it is everything when it comes to assembling and reflecting on an event.
The very word "cutscene" implies a kind of rending of the veil, an interruption, a fissure in an experience that is, at least traditionally, supposed to be primarily interactive. Cutscenes are also a chance to engage in a kind of narrative tete-a-tete with players. You go, then I go, then you go, then I go, etc. More accurately: You play and explore and deconstruct my linear narrative, I realign or reorient or re-structuralize it, you pull it apart again, I put it back together, and so on.
And what's wrong with that? Who said games were supposed to be 100% interactive? 99.5%? 87.56%? 50.1%? That gameplay should be seamless and without authorial interruption (in the form of a cutscene)? Who can call that not a subjective choice, but an objective rule? Face it: Nothing about game design, either theoretically or philosophically, requires that the very best most progressive games somehow avoid the sort of authorial intervention cutscenes and other forms of realtime intercession like event triggers impose on the player.
How does one differentiate between something that's "mostly a game" and something else that's "mostly a movie"? To paraphrase the late British historian J.M. Roberts from his History of the World, it's a little like talking about an "educated person":
Everyone can recognize one when they see one, but not all educated persons are recognized as such by all observers, nor is a formal qualification (a university degree, for example) either a necessary or infallible indicator.
In other words: Everyone can recognize a game or movie when they see it, but not all games or movies are identified equally as such by all observers and in all contexts.
For instance, I've seen several people reject Metal Gear Solid 4 as a "game" and describe it instead as a kind of "interactive cinematic experience." Most critics on the other hand accept without questioning the "game-ness" of Hideo Kojima's action-stealth opus. No one asks (seriously) whether it belongs in the games and not the movie section at the local retailer.
So how do you get at what works and what doesn't? What's the magic ratio? How do you figure out what's not enough or too much of any of it?
Go to film school. Get a degree in literary theory. Study the historical and contemporary impact of different media techniques on consumers. But in the end, you'll always come back to needing a system that's congruous, that jibes with its own lofty parameters, that's unremittingly internally consistent.
My friend and 1UP editor Shawn Elliott is fond of calling that, "an experience that doesn't violate its own grammar." I think that's exactly right. Not one system to rule them all, importantly, but a mandate that each game have an internal symmetry, or as a writer might put it, an approach that feels "earned" throughout.
Moreover, that means we as gamers owe it to our hobby (and our capacity to not be obstinate lunkheads) not to hop on anti- or pro-cutscene bandwagons or gripe that someone's not "innovating" when they borrow from another form of media like film or literature, but to consider instead whether a given device or mechanic works in its own right, and in synchronicity with all its contextual elements.
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My praise for an interesting, even philosophical article about the gaming experience.
I can't speak to the latest generation (PS3, XBox360, Wii) of gaming designs, but I can to an anecdotally important play feature in my beloved Resident Evil 4 for PS2.
Several cut scenes in the flow of that game are integrated with play. For example, a cut scene in the latter third of the game has hero Leon Kennedy having to dodge a quite unexpected (at first play) knife that is flung his way.
A measure of the interactive and kinetic content of the experience is the following: no one who wasn't ready for this unexpected attack (mid-cut scene, remember) survives the knife throw.
Having one's character die in the middle of a cut scene is about as powerful a reminder of the kinetic potential of such "interruptions" as anyone could bring to the discussion.