The Sandbox: The Trouble with Cutscenes

Video games aren't movies, but they sure can be intent on acting like them.

That laboriousness is another part of the problem with cutscenes — they’re usually not very good, at least compared to the movies/TV they’re mimicking. Though more and more high-end talent is getting involved in gaming, when it comes to writing and voice acting, the average video game cutscenes are still mediocre at best, and often much worse than that (again, “MGS4″ stands atop this heap), and their middling quality further highlights their inherent wrongheadedness.

How to fix this? The best solution would be for video games to tell their stories in a way that’s suited to their form — through the action itself. 1998′s “Half-Life” and its justly praised 2004 sequel made great strides in this direction, as did 2007′s superlative “BioShock,” mostly by integrating the plot development that’s normally relegated to cutscenes right into the interactive environment via “scripted sequences.”

Rather than jumping out of the game’s normal vantage point and into cinematically constructed material, those three titles keep their first-person perspective — and, for the most part, the player’s ability to turn his or her gaze in whichever direction desired — during staged moments. Keeping a consistent POV means maintaining your connection to the protagonist and your immersion in the ongoing fiction, something furthered by all three games’ refusal to break up their continuous stories into traditional levels.

By preserving their central you-are-there illusion, “Half-Life” and “BioShock” managed to enhance how engaged you were with the storyline, making you feel like a full-time participant rather than a part-time spectator. They’re not perfect — too often, being able to turn your head or walk around while canned dialogue drones on proves to be just a clever way of masking the fact that you’re still watching traditional interstitials. But they are small steps forward toward a day when games will tell their stories without having to borrow tropes built for other art forms, a hopefully inevitable future where characters, plots and themes will be developed not through tedious pseudo-films, but from the controllable action that’s the very reason for playing games.

The Sandbox, a column about the intersection of film and gaming, runs biweekly.

[Additional photo: "Half-Life 2," Valve Corporation, 2004]

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