How Games Tell Stories

The Cut Scene and the Carpenter

Cut-scenes are still the primary way to provide multi-faceted story and characters, offering a narrative bingo of themes, conceits, dramatic tension, plot and dialogue. We first saw them in 1984’s Karateka and since then they have become a standard aspect of video games and on a good day, they can be brilliant at propelling these elements through the game to create a full and complex story. They can go just as far as representing an ideology of game design that says fiction is just as important as having the freedom to choose in a game.

Even simpler than that, sometimes they are just bloody good fun, as Portal scriptwriter, Old Man Murray alumni and tiny genius Erik Wolpaw tells us:

“God Hand has a ton of good cut scenes - a gorilla quietly waiting for a bus and people kicking punks into outer space and so forth.”

“If I'm honest with myself, left to my own devices with a hundred million dollars, I wouldn't make a seamless interactive emergent meditation on this fragile human experiment, I'd more or less make God Hand.”


Likewise, no one knows what the hell is going on in Bayonetta’s cut scenes but they’re still enjoyable. People like to watch explosions and underboob – a fact which has kept Michael Bay’s career going despite some of the worst cinema excesses of modern years.

So if cut-scenes sometimes work, is it simply a case of making them better?

“I think it's worthwhile for game developers to try improving the quality of stories in games, because we can definitely do a lot better than we are doing,” Jonathon Blow told us when we nudged him about the topic. “However, it's dangerous to consider storytelling maturity as some kind of Holy Grail, or to expect that the primary value that a player gets from a game will be provided by the story. If that's true, then why care about games when other media tell stories so much more effectively?[/i]”


Cut-scenes might provide important plot points - he's dead, that's the guy who did it, she's your sister - and impressive set-piece action, but the shift from active gameplay to passive cinematic is often a jarring one, and it can break any suspension of disbelief the player might have developed while playing. On bad days they can even be out-sourced to CGI houses that rarely have any hand in gameplay creation and create videos that differ from the bulk of the game in aesthetic or sentiment or both. The distinction is made even more glaring with the use of new camera angles, cuts between characters, and movie-style letterboxing that breaks the visual link between cinematic and play. But the issue deepens when you’re putting the interactive nature of a game at risk.

Standard cut-scenes will wrench the player out of a system of gameplay by switching from an interactive environment and dropping the gamer into a cinematic parallel world where the role of active participant is abandoned entirely - and often right at very key, climactic moments of the game. When gameplay and story are so noticeably disjointed you’re left with a game where the sense of immersion is on a par with trying to watch Jaws while Spielberg bellows “SHARK” before every crucial scene.