Games and narrative

I suppose there may be spoilers.

I suppose I should start this post off with my definition of an art form. An art form is any medium which purposefully conveys a narrative, which determines what has the capacity to be art. Now, this is not my definition of art itself, which would have to be much longer and more convoluted. The idea of art is tied into too many different facets of humanity and is too varied from one person to another to have any real definition. What is art is what we think is art. Arguing what is or isn't art is as pointless as arguing what is or isn't God.

Based on that definition, what can or cannot be art is based on whether or not you can tell a story with it, and telling stories in video games has always been a daunting task. In most forms of media, the author has complete control of their story. They can write, film, edit, paint or do anything they want to convey some narrative to their audience. Of course, the audience will interpret this story in any way they want, but the author has complete agency to put anything in front of their audience they want at any time. There is no way for someone to stand up in the middle of the film, turn the camera around and look at the crew; it's a one way street.

The great question when considering video games as an artistic medium is how can a developer tell their story through this game. In fact, this was the crux of the argument that Roger Ebert made when he decided that video games could never be art. He was operating under the assumption that, in giving players part of the control within the game, the developer was giving up authorial control. It would be impossible to tell their story because the player could, if they wished, make their player character sit in a corner for three and a half hours. No story would be told simply because the player did not want it. This is my example, not his, but it does illustrate the point he was trying to make: players control the game and, therefore, the story, which takes away from any message that was trying to be conveyed and saps any artistic merit. No matter how we feel personally, this is a valid concern. Though no one would ever sit in one spot for three and a half hours (I hope,) it is possible to play games in a way that the developer didn't intend. The developer has little to no control over the camera or sound cues, making it difficult to time everything just right to create any sort of meaning for the player.

The most ubiquitous solution to the control problem for game developers is the cut-scene or cinematic. Cut-scenes, in case you are interested enough in video games to read this blog but not enough to actually play a video game, are short sequences where the player can no longer control their player character and pre-rendered animation relays plot information to the audience. The camera, the characters and every other part of the world follow predetermined paths that the developer set. They always take place in the middle of a game. Cinematics are a broader category which include cut-scenes as well as beginning and ending animations. Nearly every game for the past ten years or more have used cut-scenes and cinematics to tell their story simply because it is much easier. If you take control away from the player, you can tell any story you want without worrying about the player simply wandering in the other direction. However, cinematics and cut-scenes in particular create a much more troubling problem than developer control. The way cinematics are used today developers aren't creating games, they are creating movies with interactive bits in between.

Of course you need gameplay to make a video game, but it goes deeper than that. For a video game to truly be a video game, the gameplay needs to be the centerpiece; it needs to convey the narrative. If you watched a film but all of the information about what was happening came from a live play right next to it, you wouldn't be watching a film you'd be watching theater. The same is true of video games. Without the majority of the story being in the gameplay, you are playing through meaningless little set-pieces which lead to another cinematic which advances the plot. The cinematic, the short animated film, is the driving force while the gameplay is supplemental. It should be the other way around.

Some game developers seem to understand this. For instance, Valve never uses cut-scenes and uses cinematics sparingly, and only as a means to quickly recap what has happened so far to the player. The Half Life series is famous for keeping the player in a first-person perspective at all times. They effectively use this technique to create a real sense of dread about what is around the corner as well as force the player to really inhabit the role of Gordon Freeman. Freeman doesn't even speak throughout the game. Irrational also uses cinematics sparingly in their fantastic game, Bioshock. The game is all about control, as I will get into more if I ever get around to reviewing it, and Irrational uses cinematics to play with that idea. Whenever the character is not in control of his own actions, the player isn't as well. The only sequences which are cut-scenes or cinematics in the game are the intro, when the player character first chooses to harvest or rescue a Little Sister, the famous Would-You-Kindly reveal with Andrew Ryan and the ending cinematic. All of these, with the exception of the end, are out of the character's control, so it is out of the player's control through the cinematic. It is a very clever use of the device.

However, these games are largely the exception. Most games use cut-scenes as checkpoints which make it so that the player is performing tasks which are loosely tied to the plot until the next section of the story can be revealed. The Uncharted series, for instance, often falls prey to this. They are extremely fun, to be sure, but the gameplay is all set-piece with the story being revealed through cut-scenes. Again, this is not to say that the game isn't fun or even isn't good, but in a lot of ways it isn't a game. Of course, this is taken to an extreme in the Metal Gear series. Hideo Kojima is known for using ungodly long cut-scenes to tell his stories. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is especially bad. The beginning cinematic lasts somewhere around eleven minutes and thirty seconds and many of the cut-scenes are longer than five minutes. This is not counting phone calls.

If video games are to advance as a medium, developers will need to realize that cinematics, specifically cut-scenes, are not the answer to their problem. They need to tell their story through the game itself. This is easier in first-person games, of course, because it is easier to trap a player a room without it feeling too contrived. Still, the movement needs to be made away from the staid cliche of the cut-scene. Developers need to decide what makes games different and use that to tell their stories. Movies aren't just filmed plays; video games shouldn't be interactive movies.