Skip the Cutscenes: Why It’s Time to Abolish Them in Video Games | Games

aAt the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, right after Snake crushes Liquid Ocelot, there’s a never-ending series of cut scenes. Well, that’s not strictly true. do end – 71 minutes later – I just haven’t seen that much of it. I understand that the game’s director, Hideo Kojima, is an avid film fan and took a lot of inspiration from movies, but I don’t care. Those are minutes of your life that you can never get back.

I also don’t like the 20-minute cinematic scenes that pepper Xenoblade Chronicles and Final Fantasy, or the hundreds of non-interactive scenes that detail every plot point in an Assassin’s Creed adventure. Taking away the player’s freedom and forcing their attention for extended periods of time is unnecessarily aggressive, and I think it’s time to abolish the practice altogether.

The origins of cutscenes in video games were both technical and situational. Games in the ’90s couldn’t render scenes in real time, and a lot of the narrative talent in games came from film, using tools they knew. This interestingly mirrors the evolution of film. In the 1920s and early 1930s, narrative film was heavily influenced by theater. This makes sense, because the early film industry drew most of its talent from theater — actors, directors, screenwriters, technical staff — and these people brought technology with them.

The camera tended to stay still with long takes between cuts, observing the action like an audience member. Filming took place on purpose-built sets, not on location. Acting was somewhat staged and theatrical, as performers were accustomed to exaggerating their movements and emotions to be seen by an audience 18 rows back. Early film audiences were also familiar with the conventions of the stage, which helped them ease into the cinematic experience.

But as film evolved into a medium in its own right, new and intimate ways of telling stories emerged. With the invention of the dolly and crane, the camera transformed from a spectator to a moving observer in the world. Actors discovered that small gestures and facial expressions could communicate. From German Expressionism to the French New Wave to the American Auteur films of the 1970s, new storytelling techniques emerged, along with many of the lighting, direction, design, and special effects conventions that are unique to cinema. The medium came into its own.

This process is happening in games too. We see it in increasingly sophisticated fields like environmental storytelling, UX/UI, and narrative design. But despite being a medium where interactivity and immersion are everything, we’re stuck with cutscenes. Look at some of the biggest, most moving narrative games of the last five years — The Last of Us, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man — and most of the emotional moments happen in non-interactive, cinematic sequences that take control away from us. Like children, we’re not entrusted with participation; we’re expected to just sit back and watch the show.

The argument is that sometimes, we need to craft the emotional development of a scene at exactly the right time to deliver the emotional element of that scene. In that case, we’re making the wrong kind of scene. If a mature interactive medium can only tell an emotional story through non-interactive sequences, something is wrong. This is frustrating, because Valve made great strides on this issue 25 years ago. The narrative sci-fi shooter Half-Life contained no cutscenes or cinematic sequences at all. Characters (scientists and guards at the Black Mesa facility) gave in-game exposition as the player explored, while at the same time the increasingly unstable environment told a tale of destruction and suspense. Valve did it again a decade later with the Portal games, combining amusingly chatty robot antagonists with a world where signs, symbols, and voice announcements conveyed all the rules and background details the player needed to know to be intellectually and emotionally immersed.

Game designer Fumito Ueda largely avoided cutscenes in his classic adventure games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, instead immersing us in vague, mysterious worlds where the player creates their own mythology with so little information. Indie studio thatgamecompany’s 2012 masterpiece Journey featured silent characters in a desert wasteland but still moved thousands of players to tears. Campo Santo’s game Firewatch forged a rich mystery out of the Wyoming wilderness and disembodied voices heard over walkie-talkies.

In an age where in-game realism is near-photographic, relying on cutscenes for dramatic, cathartic effect feels even more incongruous and alienating. We get to explore and exist in incredibly vivid worlds, surrounded by characters capable of expressing a wide range of emotions thanks to a combination of performance capture, cutting-edge AI and physics. And that’s all it takes. These are dynamic, immersive worlds. As a player, you only need control of weapons, vehicles and a highly sophisticated progression system to take part in the story.

Or the story can simply exist in the background, as something we experience or experience second-hand. It’s an interactive version of direct cinema. From Software’s works are great examples of this. There are cutscenes, but they’re short and usually used to introduce a new enemy or show the player a moment of reaction from the world. Otherwise the story is evoked simply by moving through these bleak, gothic landscapes. Author and historian Holly Nielsen says:
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Recently, “I’ve spent about 300 hours on Elden Ring. I can’t really tell you anything about the world, characters, or story other than a vague sense of atmosphere.”

A few years ago I interviewed Bethesda Game Studios head Todd Howard and asked him what the most important part of telling a story in a video game was. “You have to find the tone,” he said, after a long silence. “We look a lot at old John Ford films and the way he captures space. Ford’s shots make you feel a certain way. There’s a thing called tone. As a designer, you have to know how you want the player to feel. Find something outside of the game that has that tone and just stare at it.” Yes, this is another example from a film, but Howard isn’t talking about The Searchers or the Rio Grande story, he’s talking about the feel of the space that Ford created.

Tone. Atmosphere. Feel. These are different words for the same concept, arguably the basis of post-cinematic theory of mainstream game narrative. In an immersive environment, the story isn’t something the player sees but something the player enters, a space of discovery rather than performance, a playground rather than a theater. Stories should be open to broad and bold interpretation, and may even be entirely optional or subliminal. If they do happen to take control away from the player, it should be in radical moments employed sparingly, like turning the camera away or darkening the stage.

Cinematic cut scenes are tyrannical fakes. It’s time to eliminate them.