Cutscenes - A Powerful (and Misused) Narrative Design Tool - Extra Credits

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Allison's still recovering from a pretty major shoulder surgery and settling into a new job at Relic Entertainment. So, we're going to have a few guest artists help us out over the next few weeks. Today, allow me to introduce Shannon Meisner, who has been kind enough to step in and provide the pretty pictures while we talk about cutscenes. Cutscenes are a contentious subject these days. Some people love them, some people hate them almost excessively. Every site about gaming has at least one forum thread about the place of cutscenes in gaming at any given time. And you really can't even bring them up amongst a crowd of designers or hardcore gamers without starting a debate going. Now, we've stated our basic thoughts on this before. Games are really about gameplay, not about watching movies. Let's be honest, films will always be better at being films than games are. But that said, we often see a very strange argument come up when this debate starts. We keep hearing people say how cutscenes should be done away with entirely, how everything in a game must be done through gameplay, how cutscenes

have absolutely no place in games at all. I don't think that argument's been completely thought through. You see, there's nothing inherently wrong with cutscenes. The fault lies in how we've been using them. The cutscene is a tool. Asking games to forever abandon the cutscene is like asking the carpenter to give up his square, or the painter to never use gray or brown, or the game to never use gray or brown for that matter. You may not like how a lot of people are using these tools, but why would you limit yourself by forbidding them? I know this sort of hyperbolic leap to completely embrace or completely ban things is pretty common practice on the internet, but I think it's worth examining this issue a bit more thoroughly. So, let's look at what harm cutscenes are actually doing, and then examine what the proper use of a cutscene might be. First, the harm, because I think we can all agree there's been some. As developers have had more and more disk space to work with, and game development budgets have ballooned, we've seen some developers focus more and more of their money on cutscenes and progressively less on the very core of our medium, interaction. The Metal Gears and Final Fantasies out there have you spending more time watching than playing. And even games like Heavy Rain seemed to miss the fact that they were much more effective outside the cut

scenes than in them. So, why does this trend happen? Well, first, cut scenes make for great marketing. In-game visuals are looking pretty darn good these days, but a pre-rendered cut scene is still going to look a heck of a lot better than anything we can render in real time. And that pre-rendered stuff makes for some fantastic TV spots and promotional material. So, there's often a lot of pressure to develop these sorts of easily marketable moments. Second, for a CG artist, cut scenes are the fun work. In a real-time rendering environment, artists are constantly forced to compromise the fidelity of their vision based on what the hardware can actually handle. But in a pre-rendered or carefully crafted real-time sequence, the sky is the limit. Over time, we've seen a tendency for art-heavy studios to slowly drift more and more towards being cutscene-heavy studios. Not because of any concerted effort on their part, but just because those studios are filled with people who like cut scenes and genuinely love doing cutscene work. Third, there are a lot of creative directors in the world of games that wish they were film directors. Unfortunately, James has run into a lot of designers and creative directors out there in the industry who are essentially frustrated filmmakers. They still envision narrative in terms of

film. So, when the option to deliver something more like a film comes up, they leap at the chance, often thinking of it as delivering a better narrative rather than losing focus on gameplay. Fourth, cut scenes are often thought of as rewards for the player. Within the industry, due to all the reasons I just listed, we've justified making cut scenes to ourselves by thinking of them as player rewards, something the designer can give the player for completing a level or surviving a tough encounter. And I guess they kind of were once, back in the days where cut scenes were a pretty new thing and there was some novelty to them. Even today, there's reasonably strong user test data showing that this is effective, that some players do grind to get from cut scene to cut scene. But I think we might be misinterpreting that data. I don't think players are that desperate for the novelty of the next pretty pre-rendered shot. I think that in these cases, players are grinding not from cut scene to cut scene, but from story moment to story moment. This is not how the question's usually framed, so that's just my own hypothesis, but I think it might be a hypothesis worth testing. Tragically, as cutscenes have become ever more intricate and detailed, they pull more and more art resources away from the production of the actual

runtime game, leading to worse games despite their bigger budgets. The tendency towards cutscenes has also pushed the focus toward narrative, but not in a good way. Now, if you watch this show at all, you know that we here at Extra Credits love us some narrative. But, in a game narrative, as a general rule, the fewer words you use to tell the story, the better. You've got the gameplay, the audio, the environment, even the character design to tell your narrative with. So, you better make sure that every word you use is top-notch and has a reason for being there. Sadly, cutscene-driven narrative lends itself to a lot of ham-handed exposition, or in even worse scenarios, a heavy movie-style script that's far beyond the scope of what the development team can deliver, which then gets cut down to an unintelligible mess later in the development cycle. And then there's all the other downsides to cutscenes that you guys are probably well aware of. The way they tend to break the flow of play, and the fourth wall-shattering disconnect they cause when they contradict the rules of the gameplay. How come that one bullet fatally wounded my character in this cutscene after he just finished soaking up bullets like a sponge in that last boss fight? How come my character can do all those awesome things in cutscenes, but I can't do them in the actual game?

Uh uh why aren't we using Phoenix Downs on Aerith right now? But, despite all the problems that cutscenes cause, and the danger they pose by threatening to shift the emphasis within the industry toward delivering cinematic games rather than solid gameplay experiences, yes, it would be a bad idea to get rid of them entirely. Why? Because sometimes, despite all that, they're the right tool for the job. And when used properly, they can turn a good gaming experience into a transcendent one. Looking at it from a designer's perspective, there are exactly two reasons for using a cutscene. The lesser of these two reasons is when you want to reinforce the powerlessness of the player. Sometimes you want to create a moment where the player's character doesn't have the nearly limitless free will that games can provide. And in that case, having a lack of gameplay mirror this lack of free will expresses that powerlessness in a way that only this medium can. The Return of Arthas or the big encounter with Andrew Ryan are pretty good examples of this. It's a technique best used sparingly, but it's an example of where a cutscene can be useful. But, the true strength of cutscenes lies in their ability to contextualize play. Often as a player, we're totally unaware of how important context is to our experience of a game.

But as a designer, you're always working to put your player in the right frame of mind to enjoy the experience you're delivering. A game's theme is the most primitive form of this. If you've ever played a game with a theme you're not that into, say orcs and elves, and found it pretty boring, but then really enjoyed another game with very similar mechanics but a different theme, let's say space marines and aliens, it's usually because the theme gave you context for how to experience the play. But creating context extends far beyond the overall subject matter. Any of a game's elements can be used to establish context. In most Final Fantasy games, right from the opening screen, the music creates the context for the experience. It sets the emotional tenor for the piece and prepares you for the slower turn-based RPG pace of the game. And this is a place where cutscenes can shine. Think about the opening cutscene from the first Fallout and that haunting narration. War never changes. Now, try to imagine what the game would have been like without that context. If they just dropped you right into the vault as soon as you clicked new game, the experience wouldn't have been the same. Without that context, the game as a whole would have suffered. And there's no way they could have delivered that same context as effectively through play. The same is

true of games like Xenogears or Silent Hill. Both of these games use cutscenes to draw you into the mystery of their world. Or take the opening to Suikoden 3. The in-game graphics couldn't possibly deliver on the vibrant living world the developers had in mind. So, they used the game's intro cutscene to establish that context instead. They presented moments of future gameplay in an art style they couldn't possibly use in game in order to help the players lose themselves in a world that might otherwise have seemed artificial and gamey. Every time the player played through a moment they remembered seeing in that opening, they were reminded that the world they were experiencing was more than just a mash of polygons in front of them. The cutscene added additional meaning and weight to those gameplay moments. So, even though cutscenes aren't about play, I wouldn't toss them out entirely. After all, if we didn't occasionally reach outside our medium for tools, we'd still be playing Space War. But remember, cutscenes aren't there to deliver narrative. They're better used for creating context. And if they're not doing that, well, they may be more trouble than they're worth. See you next week.

Treasure, 100 points.