Philosophy III : Cutscenes and Storytelling

Fuck cutscenes.

Cutscenes are a pointless waste of everybody's time.

Okay, qualifying statements.

Cutscenes aren't completely useless per se, but only in small bits at a time. As in, over five minutes and you've hit time-waster status.

Now, you might need more than that to exposit things at the very beginning/end of the game, and maybe some longer things around the three-quarter mark where stuff starts to get climactic, so I'll go ahead and allow say four longer cutscenes in the whole thing.

Theorem:

Video games can be broken down into three categories: toys, games, and interactive storytelling.

Toys are the games that provide players entertainment and/or time-sinkage in one way or another. Tetris, Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry

Games are the games (shush) that provide players a competition and probably a reasonably-unique skillset. Super Smash Bros., Halo, Starcraft

Interactive storytelling are the games that provide players an experience impossible to emulate in a different medium. Silent Hill, Heavy Rain, The Path

The problem with cutscenes is that they are, by definition, non-interactive. Some level of interaction is mandatory for finding videogames entertaining. That's why we play videogames instead of watching a movie or a show or reading a book. Some plot might be necessary for cohesion, but many games overdo this way too much.

Toys and Games are almost entirely fun because of good gameplay, and regardless of how good the storytelling is, I'm not having fun if I'm not playing. Also, if I ever beat the game and decide to play it again, I'm not likely to watch any of the bloody things. Here, cutscenes do nothing but fill time I could've been using to play the game. For these reasons, cutscenes should always be skippable! This is the single simplest thing that instantly increases a game's replay value for me. (Kingdom Hearts II's excessively long opening can be done in under an hour if you skip all the bullshitty inaction bits about somebody pretty much irrelevant (holy CRAP that was probably my least favorite opening sequence in any videogame ever))

(How do I reconcile this with how much I like jRPGs? Well, the developers separated the gameplay and story so completely that each half-hour of talky bollocks between the parts where I get to do stuff are like taking a break from the game to watch a bit of the anime starring the same characters. FFXIII is good because the anime it shows between playable bits is pretty good, and the combat is pretty much fantastic. Also cutscenes are actually reasonably short. And skippable.)

Interactive Storytelling Experiences (ick, cumbersome pretentious name), on the other hand, are all about the story. The reason that cutscenes have no place with them is because they're completely devoid of interaction. If you have really interactive cutscenes (and not just binary pass-fail quicktime events) then they're not cutscenes, are they?

Mass Effect 2 has very few cutscenes, but a lot of dialogue. The key here being the di; there's almost always a back-and-forth between Commander Shepard and the NPCs, between the player and the game. And while most of the different options change buggerall, it's extremely satisfying to be able to tell your obsessive fanboy to fuck off, or to hit on the sexy Quarian down in Engineering. That is roleplaying. That is how to get me to care about characters in an interactive medium, dammit. It's not that Commander Shepard is a badass who's tired of your disingenuous assertions, it's the player you said "fuck you reporter, your face is so punched."

Also, horror games will always be scarier than horror movies. It's way more effective for shit to jump out at the player when he's playing than it is for shit to jump out at your character during a cutscene. And some games manage to scare players shitless without even being horror games (Demon's Souls).

In short, in a game I want to play, there's no real need for a narrative at all. Give me an excuse plot: a kidnapped princess, an ancient evil about to return, a meteor hanging overhead, whatever. In a game that's about the story, if there's only one immutable story, then make it a book movie tvshow whatever. If it's an interactive extrrravaganza, then story should exist only as was created between the game and the player.

And this should go without saying, but Rouge will have no cutscenes whatsoever.