Read this guy: http://www.joystick101.org/story/2003/6/19/15443/0550 I think it''s time to, once and for all, bring this debate to the real issue: The Cutscreen. Coined Term: The Narrativist. As a Narrativist, the cutscreen is a tool for presenting the game''s story. Taking from movie direction, characters give dialouge regarding elements of the plot, and follow there development arcs and advance the story. Narrativists tend to lose track of time, and the cutscreens get lengthy. Coined Term: The Immersivist. Favoring gameplay, the Immersivist completely avoids the cutscreen. This creates problems as without a means for passing story, the story has to suffer. Characters will lack significant development arcs, specifically the player''s character. In response to the link I provided, I''d like to question what this guy is trying to get at. Its obvious that he takes the Immersivists point of view, but he seems to go pretty extreme, suggesting that there should be no story whatsoever. His argument seems utilitarian, in that as part of game creation, we need to maximize the number of FUN units that the game provides, and to do that we need to eliminate the story and the non-interactive cutscreen. So lets open the debate. 1) Obviously games need gameplay and lots of it. To avoid the Cutscreen, theres the Half-Life example, but can we figure out something so that we don''t have to kill the story? 2) Cutscreens can get LONG. Metal Gear Solid 2 found the line, stepped on it, flipped the bird, and kept on going. Whats is the limit? What puts the Zelda games in a different category, that it can have long segments of Dialouge, but doesn''t drive us up the wall? 3) If we could find a solution to the Cutscreen length or alternative problem, whats the limit to the story? A shallow story certainly solves the problem of allocating Mission Objections, but how much Deep story is okay before it to hits the line? 4) If story is ultimately bad, why? Is there something beyond the cutscreen that makes story bad, and that games should avoid text onscreen at all cost?

I think it all depends on the genre. Saying there shouldnt be a story in an RPG is ridiculous. People get more frustrated with cutscenes when its in an action game, where story doesn''t make up much of the experience. When was the last time you gave a rat''s ass about the story in an FPS? As far as I know the story for Quake 1 was kill zombies, Quake 2 was kill aliens, CS was kill terrorists. In cases where the cutscenes are necessary for character/story development, the story and the characters must be INTERESTING and at least some of the cutscene must be interactive (Chrono Cross comes to mind).

They are all tools to be used by designers. I personally feel a balance should be struck. I also agree that the genre is the major determinant. What would Final Fantasy be without cut scenes?

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X2: Official Site

Don''t get me wrong, I like cut scenes in moderation. But some games like FF7 have so &$@*! cut scenes that the actual GAMEPLAY seems to disappear. Ideally, the cut scenes will happen because of something I do, rather than "oh I hafta do all this to get to the next cut scene".

Lufia 2 I think did cut scenes that didn''t really feel like cut scenes, because it was just a buncha guys talking to each other like usual, and it didn''t annoy me. (Of course I haven''t even finished playing it once yet. This might change the 20th time I hafta go through the wedding scene. ) FF2 on the other hand kept throwing in all this crap with people "fixing" or "modifying" the airship, which basically just meant a seemingly long period of time where they all jumped around and made funky noises. (The airship sequences were the only ones that really annoyed me there, although I notice the bad translation a lot more than I did when I was a kid heh.)

Here''s what I think would be interesting. You know those games where you hafta sleep in a tent or inn to refill your HP every time you turn around? (FF2 comes to mind.) How about if every so often when you''re doing this, your guys sit around the campfire telling stories about their pasts ("Well when *I* was a kid, we didn''t have them newfangled airship thingies!"), or commenting on things in the plot ("Y''know, if *I* was King Fred, I woulda stuck that Rufus character in the dungeon years ago."), or stuff that really has nothing to do with the plot ("Man we better hurry up and defeat this guy, I gotta go home and plant some crops."). I think with that it''d be easier to understand the characters so when it comes time for a big plot development you''ll understand why they do what they do, and it''d cut down somewhat on the amount of cut scenes needed to understand everything going on in the plot. I''d much rather have a lot of short little cut scenes that don''t interrupt the flow than a couple of really really long and annoying ones that make me forget what the hell I was doing.

Personally i think cutscenes are awsome. My fav game of all time the original command and conquer wouldnt feel the same with out some one talking to you and telling you whats going on the only thing that could have been better is if tania was naked in them

I enjoyed half-lifes level of story. The environment and dialog tells you what you need to know, so there is at least a semi-plausable reason for things being the way they are, and since you are in a research facility, it makes sense for things like teleporters, portible partical cannons etc to exist. I don''t like the story of most RPGs because they focus 100% on the cliches(for ex the main character falls in love and the single villian captures the love).

I''d love to see an RPG where the villian acted intelligently, where goons don''t automatically fail everything and foil the villian''s plans, where the villian is neither a supergenious or a brute, etc. It would be nice to see a RPG based around a villian finding Peter''s Evil Overlord List: The Top 100 Things I''d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord.

Also, the more story the game has, the more dynamic it needs to be. I don''t like being railroaded down a single path, or even one of 2 paths, or one of 10. I don''t want to be able to say "Okay when I move toward the lever to save the lady the bad guy will pop out and order all of his incompitent goons to stop me, and I will kill them all and he will escape unharmed while I am helpless to stop him". With all the research done into natrual language processing and natural language generation, RPGs should be a lot more fluid. Of course, not many people like to type, so maybe NL input can wait for better speech recognition, but the NPCs etc should definitely generate their speeches and the responses to them imo.

You won''t be able to do without them when your game reaches a certain complexity level. Players need room to breath after periods of long active engagement. It''s just the way the human mind works, and there''s nothing you are going to be able to do about it.

Cutscenes provide this break (for if you were to do this in a level, wouldn''t you be creating the perception, and perhaps fact, that your level was boring, then what kind of designer would you be?) and allow for exposition of the game story, which in a passive, narrative mode, provides closure for the player about some aspect of the gameworld they just interacted with, and sets up necessary information (foreshadowing) the player will need to engage fully with the next challenge sequence(s).


Now, if you are doing the HULK SMASH version of game design, then very little engagement is required, you just go smash or shoot. But that is a low res mentality activity, is not part of the greater segmentation of this changing market, and will probably only sell in significant numbers to the adolescent male who can''t get laid but loves eye candy market. More and more players are older, women, differing ethnicities, and intelligence and income levels.

These market realities require us to utilize the tools that are proven to be effective in providing a higher and more enjoyable entertainment experience.

Even Chris Crawford''s new book "The Art of Interactive Design" tells us that highly reactive response from the player is still not the definition of interactivity. And until you do create input/process/output loops that are not simply sophisticated reactions designs, you aren''t really creating interactive entertainment are you? And if you aren''t creating interactive entertainment, you are creating linear entertainment with a bunch of choice loops along a linear plot through line of action. In screenwriting, we call this subplotting.

The difference I have found is the difference in relevance of the branch. Screenwriting allows no inconsistencies in driving the action forward or dimensionalizing the character(s) for it''s subplots, whereas in a game, you may go down a tunnel for miles to find only powerups and a big boss that may have had no relevance in advancing to the end of the level.




Adventuredesign
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Genius is the ability to do what the talented find impossible.