To expand on Arkady's insightful post at Slate: We're not big gamers here at our house, but we've really enjoyed Homeworld I and II, visually beautiful and compelling games whose cut-scene storyline is almost moving. Visual, story, and gaming elements combine really well to create an alternate world we can escape to when we want.

But there's a further element - the online Homeworld forum community in which my 14 year-old son participates. In addtion to game-play tips and in-jokes, the forum also includes a wide variety of story extensions - growing the story in size and depth, postulating "what-if"s, debating concepts that can only exist there. There's even a professional-quality Homeworld color comic strip available.

So the story - which began in cut-scenes - takes on a life of its own thanks to the imagination and enthusiasm of those who have embraced it.

Does this happen in other games? Is it a response to a popular game, or a compelling storyline - or perhaps an incomplete storyline which requires filling-in? Does it happen more with games for teens than with games popular with adults?

I'm not sure if exactly the same thing happens for other games, but every popular game has its communities who discuss issues relating to the game. The community that grows around a game tends to focus on the games peculiarities and strong points. For instance communities that grow around massive mulitiplayer online role playing games (mmorpg) tend to focus on fantasy with "fan fiction" and social interaction, even to the point of holding guild conventions where people who meet in the game meet in real life.

I would like to briefly post a comment here and let you know that you have an incredibly weak grasp on gaming and should not be writing about it in a public capacity. While I will agree that cutscenes are not appropriate in many cases, stories are appropriate in most.

If you don't like games that have stories, you are obviously a small-minded individual without the ability to see that removing compelling stories from popular games would make them worthless. Halo, which you mentioned in your article, had one of the better stories in console FPS history. It was heralded as having an excellent storyline, and did better for it. If the story were removed from Halo, it would have failed.

I would also like to point out that a storyline does not lock players into a single path. If you actually played games, you would realize that the industry has advanced since 1987. Your choices can impact how a story unfolds. You can play through hundreds of independent stories in modern games (see: MMORPGs), some of which have absolutely nothing to do with the main story arch.

To sum up my criticism: your article is well-written and insightful for someone who doesn't play games, but your ignorance cheeses me off.

Hrumph, I’m not even sure where to start on this one. Oh yeah, that’s where, cut scenes.

While cut-scenes may be story elements, story in game isn’t at all exclusive to cut scenes.

Your blurb seems to imply that all story is cut-scenes and cut-scenes suck. Where as in fact, many games with excellent story allow the player to discover the world around him, what makes it tick, why s/he’s there etc with many snippets that aren’t cut-scenes. Deus Ex and Half life for example, in my book the two games that truly propelled the First Person Shooter genre into using serious story elements. In these games you literally play the story. Granted there are cut scenes, but these do not detriment the overall immersion, rather the opposite, they enhance game play.

Other game genres also benefit heavily from story, horror survival for example (resident evil, alone in the darks etc.). Now while the story might not have the same vampirisation effect that movies have, in so far as stripping away and replacing the way a person feels, without story these such games would be complete flops, there would be no feeling of dread or horror. No reason for the game to be made in the first place.

As for your cynical moments that ‘story-is-a-way-for-publishers-and-game-designers-to-ensure-players-run-out-and-buy-new-games-instead-of-replaying-them’; a great many games use story to increase the life of their game. Be it experiencing the game from another characters point of view or even replaying a game dozens of times to witness alternate endings of methods of completing the games. All I can say is I recommend a tin foil hat.

Granted I will admit that there are games that take cut-scenes and ‘story’ to an obscene level, the latest metal gear comes to mind, but more so exception to the rule then anything else. A game doesn’t fail because it has story elements, rather, the story elements (if the reason for the game to flop) were poorly implemented.

Food for though, games (the online genre in particular) are touted by many as going to become the single greatest form of entertainment of the coming century, and there is no way they will achieve that without story.

The end.
----------
a drunk disgruntled gamer.

I think my (playful, I'd argue) attack on game designers' obsession with telling stories -- and, perhaps more importantly, players' obsession on defining the pleasure of games as the pleasure of experiencing a story -- came off mostly just as an attack on cutscenes. That's my fault, because I wasn't as clear as I ought to have been.

My point ultimately is this: Games are defined by their ability to create a sense of play. Play is an incredibly powerful experience, and it's wonderfully hard to design. Anyone who can do it well is spectacularly gifted. Play is engineered by the construction of rules that set up entirely arbitrary goals that are teasingly difficult to achieve; once we've accepted the rules, we're free to do whatever we want inside that system. That's the thing that is a common thread between all games -- be they chess, hockey, or Halo.

Within the context of games and rules, stories are important and useful. At their best, they're great ways of quickly and efficiently setting up sets the next bunch of rules for the next little game you're going to play. When a cutscene plays in Halo, telling you that a bunch of Lekgolo are hanging around up top a hill and you have to take them out, the cutscene is providing a crucial game task: It's setting out the rules the next challenge you're going to try and achieve. Indeed, this is the pleasure of all role-playing, as the game theorist Roger Callois defined it in Man, Play, and Games: When we accept the role -- when we agree to behave "as if" we were a healing cleric in Everquest, a one-man Splinter Cell, or the Master Chief in Halo, we're agreeing to abide by a set of rules that say we have to behave precisely as that person would behave. Those are part of the rules, and rules are what make games games.

That's quite different from the traditional pleasure of narrative, as I see it. Roleplaying is a uniquely meaningful and powerful human activity ... but it's really nothing like what Hollywood or books or TV offer us.

In my article, what I was trying to point out -- in an admittedly in my less-clear-than-I'd-wished fashion -- is that what makes games games (even games that appear to be driven heavily by narrative) is play. And play is both incredibly interesting and enormously important to us as people, yet amazingly ill-understood. That's partly because we gamers are extremely bad at describing the basic nature of what makes a game a game.

We talk about the "story" of a game as if it games created and used narrative the way movies and TV do. They don't. They use stories, certainly, in the service of setting up the bouquet of emotional incentives, metaphoric meaning, and structural limitations that define gameplay. That's why the narrative/metaphoric elements in a game can feel so wonderfully powerful! But it's quite, quite different from the reason a novel, TV, or movie feels powerful.

To me, the most important part of my article was buried here:

" ... there's still a weird anxiety about adults playing games. Most people still think that video games are sophomoric kid stuff; the ones that have a narrative and emulate the movies seem more serious and, well, mature."

I really stand by this one. Games -- and the pleasures of games -- are in danger of being horribly misunderstood. That's because the non-gaming public is derisively dismissive of games, journalists by and large don't play them. But it's also because we gamers aren't intellectually rigorous enough in understanding and explaining why games rock, how their particular magic works, and what is so incredibly fulfilling about playing 'em.

One of the reasons mainstream nongamers still don't "get it" is because we keep on telling them that we love "the story" in our games, which leads nongamers to think that games will give them the pleasure of a movie or TV or a novel. And then they look at a game and, quite understandably, they think, "hmmmm, as a pure story, that's actually pretty weak compared to the regular movie/TV/book stuff I'm reading/watching these days."

Well, of course it is. Because gamers don't really expect, want, or need GTA or Oddworld to deliver the sort of pleasure we'd get from watching The House of Flying Daggers. We understand that games are a different sort of pleasure from movies or TV. We understand that they're about play.

But we do an incredibly crappy job of explaining this to people. That's partly because American society, driven by its longstanding Puritan work ethic (I say non in a nonderogatory way, BTW) regards play an immature waste of time. Of course play's a waste of time; by definition, it's nonproductive. But it's also emotionally fulfilling and intellectually challenging and philosophically rich.

So to sum up my argument, it would be that: a) Play is incredibly important and cool. b) The best video games -- ones with narrative and ones without -- are amazing, rich examples of well-designed play. But, c) because video games, and play in general, seem a wee bit immature and shameful, and because d) while the architecture of good play is something largely invisible to most people and "stories" aren't (the former isn't taught in schools, and the latter is), e) society -- including gamers -- does a crappy job at understanding how play is created, and instead defaults on saying that the pleasure of a game is the pleasure of its story, even though it's almost always infinitely more complex than that.

Clive you have an interesting point, but you are missing the whole idea behind why "cut scenes" have started appearing in console and even computer games.

The problem is that most console games are not multiplayer and interactive. Playing a console RPG is by nature passive as you wander a set landscape and encounter monsters and beings at intervals controlled by a passionless computer. Playing an RPG around a table with friends means you have other people to interact with and work with and a human being deciding what you are going to run into so the environment tends to be dynamic and responsive. Sadly a computer can't at this time be as flexible as a human when creating and maintaining the gaming environment. To compensate for this the game companies have made games that are really interactive movies. Your mission is to navigate between the cut scenes and experience the story. Sadly, this does tend to be very passive (and is a primary reason I usually don't complete any console RPG although I love playing them). The recent appear of "mini-games" inside many console RPGs is another attempt to compensate for the inherent flaw in computer gaming.

Now its true that MMORPGs don't encounter this problem quite as severely as you do have other people you can interact with, but many people I have talked to who play online RPGs do complain that eventually you run out of quests to accomplish and things to try. Some people find just being there and spending time with friends to be enough reward for continuing to play, but many others quit or move on to new games seeking the level of interaction you find when you play in person.

The big problem here is the lack of personal interaction. All of these game types are much more dynamic and interesting when played live rather than over a computer, but with today's society it can be prohibitively hard to organize a group to meet regularly. The console games are a barely adequate subsitute.

I think that another reason why "cut-scenes" are in such heavy use (to be very general about it) is that non-interactive sequences are much better understood, easier to deal with, and easier to implement than interactive ones (and I am not talking about minimally interactive story sequences). Traditional narratology is more mature than games. But games have so much potential, that they can accomplish anything a narrative can plus a lot more.

To be really blunt, we implement non-interactive scenes because we don't know how to do it in terms of the pure game. The pure game has its own narrative, which I feel can be more meaningful than narrative in the traditional sense.

The game industry uses the hollywoodian storytelling device as a crutch. Every time it happens, it works against the development of games from maturing into a medium of its own right.

I'm not saying narrative-heavy games are any worse than pure games. But video games do not have to lean on the pure narrative so much. I think there are a lot of new and wonderful things to be discovered by exploring what is possible in the pure game. Many narrative-heavy games seem to limit this potential.

I really loved the storyline to Madden 2004! It rocked! Also chess has the best cutscenes. And don't get me started on Snood. I still can't get over that last plot twist!

This was a terrible article. How does tetris set the game play? "whoops, I let the odd shaped bricks get to high"... Come on, just admit you have no sense of what games bring today.

So there are cut scenes to dictate what is upcoming, but these games are capable of online play. Get some buddies and go up against other real people. So what you say is buy a game, play it and throw it away (poor comparison to a movie) is not the case. In my office, there are a group of guys who will go online and play online games from when Xbox Live went... Live.

What about PC games, you make no mention of any of the RPGs(Old school World of Warcraft, etc.) that are out there. And don't forget to mention the MMOPRG's (Everquest, EQ2, World of Warcraft). Then tell us that our money is wasted because of "cut-scenes"

I can't believe I wasted this much time posting this. You, sir, are a n00b.

I think it's important to differentiate between the different kinds of narrative that go on in a game, before you can make any kind of generalization. THEN, you can discuss about whether different kinds belong in games or not, about how each can or should be best executed.

One type of narrative is that generated by the player as they try to solve the problem posed by the game. A player can describe the climatic moments of a car race, of a one-on-one fight, or even of a game of Pac-Man, with references to how they were about to be defeated, until this happened and gave them the brief opportunity to react in that way, and they did, and won. Or something. The point is, the unique aspect of games is this kind of narrative, the one you create as you go about the game, the "stories" about how you beat the bad guys, about how hard it was, about how close they were to getting you. Even explaining the setup of a Warthog Jump is a form of this kind of "story". This is what games are about, this is what is unique to games, and often a good game is one that is flexible in allowing you to generate many such stories, either by clever use of AI or by the design of levels and of combat procedures that allow you to beat a level in many truly different ways.

Another completely different kind of narrative is the cutscene. This is the "context" for the game, for the first kind of narrative. It is the "plot" of the game. It is inflexible. Many game storylines do branch, but they branch into a few distinct, discrete, well-defined branches, such that you get one of only a few endings. It also includes any "back story" that you see or read prior to the beginning of the game.

This second kind is very different from the fluid and infinitely-branching narrative of the first kind (or of real life, for that matter). This is mainly because the second kind is computer-generated (or at least computer-recorded), and computers can't come up with all the neat and infinitely-varied situations/reactions that WE can. Another difference between the two types is that the first, more diverse type, is all about physical actions, combat, and DOING THINGS in the universe set up by the game - it's never about opinions, feelings, and the fundamental progress of the plot. Again, that's because game creators only have time to pre-program a few different plot branches, and until you take the actions that lead you into one or another branch, the overall plot will not progress and you're just doing stuff. Which can be fun, but is not progress or success in the game.

The two can be mixed when a pre-programmed series of events takes place in the world of the game. This is like a cutscene, but you retain physical control of your character. Half-life is very good in part because it does this so successfully. However, the pre-programmed events that lay out a challenge, and your physical actions that determine how you deal with that challenge, are two different types of narrative, and should not be confused for each other even when they happen almost simultaneously, and when one has some influence on the other.

This address,
http://airshowfan.com/researchvideogames.html
is for a research paper that I published on the subject. Stanford University has classes about video games, where we learn and talk about the psychology and narrative of videogames (as well as other aspects of the video game world, like the history, business, and cultural aspects). More information - like other papers, and the many directions of study into what many consider to be the latest truly new art form - can be found at

http://www.stanford.edu/group/shl/research/how_they_got_game.html

http://hpslab.stanford.edu:16080/projects/HTGG

And while I'm at it - Clive, I've been reading your columns on gaming for a while, and enjoyed them a lot. Just never bothered to click your name to try and communicate with you... So I just found out about your blog. Awesome stuff. I plan on visiting it often.

BNM

I have to agree that narratives are intrusive when playing a video game. I think that the draw for gamers is in overcoming challenges. Whether the challenges take on the form of puzzle-solving, resource management, level memorization, destination planning, or manual dexterity, the gamers' reward is in the completion of the current mission or level - small, but satisfying doses of accomplishment. If there are too many cut-scenes, dialogues, or plot denouements, they can soon seem like punishments rather than accomplishments.
I personally find cut-scenes disatisfying because the level of storytelling found in video games insults my intelligence (this is not saying a lot). I think it is arrogant for designers and programmers to create narratives without (at the very least) consulting a professional writer. Instead, their creations become...(in analogy) superhero-genre comics, rather than graphic novels. If games are marketed towared an adult audience, shouldn't the maturity and complexity of the narrative also appeal to adults?
This is not to say that the game design needs to be mature. If a game was equally as open-ended and expansive as GTA, but I had to assume the role of a cartoon banana collecting bugles in a mushroom forest while riding chickens, I would still play.
Honestly, in emulating movies, video games seem to be a medium with an inferiority complex. The adult audience for video games has grown up with arcades, computers, and home-consoles and is primarily looking for a challenging past-time. Many of us still fondly remember no-frills Pong as the godfather of today's games. I'm not implying that games shouldn't have a premise, but if I want a story, I'll watch a movie or read a book. I don't mean this as an attack on programmers or designers - I am in awe of what they produce - I just think they need to embrace the unique identity of their medium.

I really don't think we should define what makes and what doesn't make a game a game. Why, the moment you define something as one thing, you close off the freedom of exploration and creation for artists and game creators. I'm an artist, I prefer more cartoony flair for my work, my teacher in high school dismissed my work as "cartoons" he refused to take it seriously. I felt rather insulted that someone would say that what I was doing was not art, and then turn around and lable mordern art (which i loath) as what real art is. What art is and what makes a good game is solely in the eye of the beholder. I love Halo, Max Payne, and I can find a decent amount of fun playing games like Tetris, or other typs of puzzle games.

What makes a good game is game play, how much fun is it for you to play that game. Let's look at real world sports, I don't watch football, basketball, cannot stand racing. I personally hate boxing because I don't see how we can label the act of two men beating the crap out of each other, possibly causing brain damage, as a "sport". But that is just my opinion. Other people in this world love those sports.

I love a good game that has great gameplay and great feel, and a good story can help the cool factor of a game for me. Otherwise the game can get old real quick.

I speak on this matter with no real proffesional education on this matter, besides 15 or so years of playing videogames. Personally, I adore the stories in videogames. A good plot can add miles of depth to any game, no matter what the genre. For instance, such games as Final fantasy X (and in fact the rest of the final fantasy series), completely rely on an excellent story to make the game one of the most loved series in videogaming history. I believe you also said that Halo and Halo 2 from bungie are good game because they have 'forgetable plots'. I beg to differ on this statement, as the Halo series has inspired 3 fiction books outlining the story of the Halo universe. Having an excellent plot to back up addictive gameplay is what makes a popular game. Thank you.

Hullo.

Reading through the forums on Slate and the comments on your blog was interesting. It made my time at work pass by much quicker. I’d also like to say, it’s a shame your redress is buried in the forums, especially when MSN’s homepage is hawking your story, because you’re much more succinct in that post than the original article.

I’d like a moment to discuss a few points, if I may.

The first is industry standardization of “cut-scenes.” While your original article mentions this heavily, it’s only in your redress that you expand upon it. Like other posters have said, cut scenes have been around for a while, and will continue to be around.

They are an industry standard. It’s a showcase for the gamers not to show their game but to flash their graphics. People have come to appreciate and expect them, even if they are no longer in awe of them as they once were. It reminds me of Hollywood in that respect.

Hollywood and special effects. Games are not driven by their special effects and graphics. Snood and Tetris show this in abundance. Games would not be where they were today without the old school graphics in their pixilated glory. But at the same time, the argument stands: If the industry has the technology, why not use it?

I’ll give you one good reason: over saturation. Take the original “Matrix” movie. Take the original epic breaking fight scene and the first Gap ad. People sat up. People took notice. But by the time McG was ripping it off for “Charlie’s Angels” people wanted to groan and possibly spork their eyes out. At least, I know, I did. It was played out, repetitive, and formulaic.

But at the same time, it’s stupid to ignore the technological advances. Innovate, don’t emulate. Many games have cut scenes because one game started, then another. Now it would be a noticeable absence if they were removed entirely. It is too much of a good thing. But at the same time, wouldn’t you sit up in confusion if instead of a cut scene telling you your mission, you got a little black screen with big chunky pixilated words? It’s not the cut scene that you criticize. It’s the reason why it’s there.

Which brings me to point two: video game and genre and plot.

You frequently argue that video games exist for the sole purpose “to play.” And honestly, that’s what nearly every person who owns GTA is doing. How many people can you honestly say bought the newest installment for *cough, cough* “the story”?

Hear the crickets chirping?

Why then does a storyline even exist for video games? What does it matter what your mission or if you’re fighting aliens or zombies? Who cares, right? You still get to blow stuff up after all. But the software companies care and the gamers do too whether or not they know it.

Video games are genre pieces. Like movies they fight easily into their little categories. You have an RPG to your left, a fighting game to your right. A shoot ‘em up, a strategy game, a sports game, and the list goes on. The characters change, the effects and the gun, but stripped away, you’re doing the same thing. Sad to say, there are only so many different ways to design a game. How many sports game get “old” after just a season? The market has expanded and there is constantly something new. With each installment, you want the play to get better. And if the graphics and story get a boost too? That’s always a plus.

So why bother with plot? What does this give us? Plot is what distinguishes one game from another. The graphics and terminology are all relevant to it. Should a video game play suffer for the sake of plot? No, of course not. I’m sure many people would be content with a little “skip” button built into controllers-- especially when replaying games. However, at the same time, whose to say plot can’t be done effectively through a video game.

This leads me into my third point: Public perception and video games as creative medium.

I’m a fan of all creative works. I read comic books and I consider graphic novels as a neglected and underappreciated art form. I buck the idea of stereotypical views. Cartoons are just for kids, games, etc. Incidentally, television has done a lot of ground breaking in the idea of bringing back Adult!Cartoons so to speak.

Gamers care about the video games because they are emotionally connected on some point. They may not know how to express it, but visually video games can be a cinematic genius. You can use terms found in movie editing. Whip pans, camera angles, etc. All these work to create appreciation for the video game.

I’m even talking about the little things that gamers appreciate. Imagine the idea of blood in a video game! *gasp, shock, horror* It was different when Mortal Kombat made waves. It was for all intents and purposes cool. The genre is always evolving. One of my favorite twisted fairy tales is “American McGee’s Alice” talk about an innovative starting story line. Whether it’s something as simple as blowing things up in an evil clown car or naming a magic spell after a mythological character, there are many games that have thought behind them.

And that’s not even counting the hours of code.

Games take years, and gamers appreciate that. They invest many waking hours and a lot of money for something that brings them satisfaction and fun. It’s hard to detail exactly what enjoyment someone feels because of it. Honestly, a person would have a better chance convincing a skeptic that a first person shooter is a wonderful way to fight off the frustrations of nine-to-five life than try to explain the plot.

However, my last point and it flies in the face of most of your points. I believe that a game can be an effective medium for telling a story, maybe even more so than a movie or a book.

Years back there was a notion about an interactive movie. The audience would push buttons to see what they wanted to have happened. Majority won and like a glorified/bastardized/life-sized Choose Your Own Adventure Novel you'd see that played out on screen. The idea was to give the audiences some control. Some interaction. It flopped.

Movies are a very narrative genre.

Games are meant to be interactive.

And for that very reason, I think games are off to a good start. Games are driven by their character. In most sequels you see the resurgence of the same characters or relatives. If they are developed in even the slightest manor, the gamer has to feel connected to them. After spending 20 to a billion hours playing this game there’s no way not to (even if you hate the character.)

As a Square fan, I’ll admit that I’m biased. Despite the nature of RPGs to explore you’re doing something else overall. Exploring in a game is not your mode of game play. In Myst, there were puzzles that challenged your logic. In many RPGs, the focused game play is a battle based mode, in whatever form it might take. In shooting games, it’s simply a matter of being shot. You may have a few twists and turns along the way, but ultimately that is not the goal of your game. Besides, the ending is usually straightforward. You win or lose.

If a game can make the story as interesting, if not more, than your game play, that would be something different. Games have endless possibilities, giving the player options to do things that will still let them explore and be entertained. Most all games are linear if you don’t completely shuck the rules. It’s do this, or win this, or beat this guy. What people on the outside don’t see is that it’s not just tedium.

There are subtle differences in missions, weapons, opponents, locales that make the games more challenging. Things get harder as the player becomes more familiar, and that probably one of the principles of storytelling, letting everything come to a climax. Video games understand a sense of conflict that probably more than most movies and books do, even if the conflict is almost always physical.

Games keep the player interested while keeping the story moving. They understand conflict and resolution, by all means, games have an audience that is primed for to appreciate a storyline. Well, that is, as long as they can stop blowing shit up enough to care. ;-) Likewise, you’d be hard pressed to get a non gamer to muck through endless levels just to see the outcome or character development. If someone can strike a balance, it would be very interesting indeed. I think RPGs are probably the closest genre to reconciling the two.

But that’s my long and verbose two cents. Oh, look, quitting time. Yay!

I can't believe you talked about games that try to be cinematic and you didn't mention the Metal Gear Solid series once in your entire article. Have you played MGS? If not, try it, and tell me cinematic scenes in video games should not exist.

Clive you ignorant slut!

An interesting article, and I'm impressed by the response here. You and I have long differed on the value of narrative in video games - I think a few posters in this thread have made some really great points (I particularly agreed with some comments from Bernardo and Gen X), and I thought that your response was excellent, too.

I found myself wishing that you'd made more of the point of the video game experience (or some, at least) as exploration of amusement park worlds, which is very much how I experience them, and why I'm drawn to the genres I prefer.

Expanding a bit on Arkady's point, for me, the cut scene is as much reward as narrative installment. Typically appearing after a long boss battle, I feel like I've earned a break and a treat. The cut scene, particularly if it's beautiful (and the Square/Enix stuff is a good example) or enriches the atmosphere or propels the story, feels like a prize to me, a trophy. It's the same sort of little satisfaction as when you've slain three Gorgons, got the Hexagon of Trump and stuck it in the lion's mouth, causing a covering slab to slide away from the mouth of the tomb with a satisfying grating sound.

I do think that this narratology/ludology thing gets overpitched as too clearcut a dichotomy. Videogames offer a gameplay experience that might be comparable to chess raised to the Xth dimension. Again, sorry to bore you by repeating myself, but to me, the best games are kind of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating all of the major art forms - writing, music, acting, cinema, set design, sound design, etc - but allowing *interactivity*. In the theater or cinema you watch intently, in the videogame, you run up onto the stage and see if you can find a jewel in the bird's nest perched up on the laurel tree.

The exploration of virtual space is a huge attraction to me, and as much as people argue that games aren't about good graphics, I think that good graphics can make the experience of virtual space an infinitely richer thing.

Cut-scenes flesh out the space, orient you through it, calibrate your level of anticipation or fear. Keep you immersed in the virtual space, instead of letting you go back to answering email and balancing your check book. That you find them a distraction from the gameplay is just a reflection of your approach to gaming - to me, they're gravy. Or lagniappe. Or something.

I've been playing RESIDENT EVIL 4, which, obviously, loves its cinemas. But, for the first time that I can remember, you'll kill a boss, and will be kicking back to spectate at the unfolding cut-scene, when suddenly something will happen, and you'll have to mash buttons frantically to avoid the boss's surprise agonal attack.

It keeps the gameplay moving, and makes the cut-scene compelling, but on the whole I'm not sure if I particularly like it.

Anyway! Stop being such a noob, Clive! Play some games, dammit!

J.

This satire in Salon today is a propos, and hilarious!

Awesome comments here -- Jaze, GenX, others, this stuff rocks. Sadly, I'm too slammed with assignments to fully respond. But I'll definitely be taking more kicks at this can as time goes on ....

This one will be a lot shorter. Sorry again for how long that last post was.

All I wanted to say is, I guess differentiating between the interactive aspects and the non-interactive narrative is important, but the point (which I did not really address) is the value of each kind. The interactive kind, well, is what makes a game a game. But the discussion is over the value of the non-interactive part.

It's easy to show, by example, that non-interactive narrative is not necessary for a great game (Tetris). But, you know, some people like it. I guess it's an arbitrary thing, up to each individual: Do you like the interactive nature of the game so much that it is as rewarding as possible without having a "story"?

Randy Decker and GenX make some good points about this. Games may not fundamentally be about telling stories, but if what you're doing is placed in some kind of context, it becomes more immersive, more "important", and potentially more exciting. Sure, you may not think about "why" you're shooting at this tank or fighting this wizard during the more intense moments, and you usually remember a game's more interesting challenges for what you had to do (not why you had to do it), but still, a story just adds a nice dimension to a game.

I myself am a HUGE Metal Gear fan, because of the crazy stuff you discover about the plot as the game progresses. It's just fun, even if it's a kind of fun that is almost divorced from the game play. And sometimes it does affect the game play in cool ways, like when you're running around naked near the end of MGS2. You could think of it as "The challenge is: you have no weapons so you absolutely must not be detected, and must cross this area quickly enough before your sounds give you away", burt you do end up seeing it as "I'm NAKED inside a place full of armed guards, I have to get across it before I start sneezing, and someone who is usually very serious is talking gibberish into my radio". You don't remember it as "the part I didn;t have weapons", but as "the part I was naked". A story also lets you place yourself into the character more, since you allow yourself to be convinced you are controlling a person who interacts with other people and creatures, rather than controlling a meaningless entity in a computer's imagination.

So no, I don't mind the cutscenes. Even the half-hour ones that Metal Gear games have.