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Poor game design choices, or a couple of things the game industry should be well beyond.
If I were to ask your average gamer the current age of game design, most would probably answer "something around thirty years" or similar. Not a bad answer, but I think it misses one important point. Mind you, I think game designers miss this point as well, so it's no great sin. While we might have been designing video games for about thirty years, the human population at large has been designing games for thousands of years. From card games to variations on tag to sports, we have a massive degree of collective experience we're not drawing on. A game, after all, is an abstraction that aims to simulate an experience on some level. Video games are no different. If they weren't, we wouldn't have such clearly definable genre lines. Games are made with a particular focus in mind, with certain kinds of cognitive and reflexive skills they want to test. Mechanically speaking, there's little difference between The Legend Of Zelda and chess, or Total War and soccer. The one significant difference is that regular games start with real life as a basis, and the rules restrict what is considered a legal action. Video games start with nothing but a blank screen ready for code, waiting for programmers to define what is physically possible within the game.
With that in mind, there's some concepts that should be common logic to game designers. We've been abstracting reality for thousands of years, so the way it's done effectively ought not to be difficult knowledge for a professional to obtain. Here's a few points a lot of games seem to miss, AAA titles or not:
Do, don't show, don't tell. This is an expansion of the cinematic and literary rule of "show, don't tell", where information is worked into the experience naturally to avoid unnecessary exposition. Video games have the unique opportunity to allow the player to influence outcomes and directly partake of every experience. There's absolutely no reason I should be sitting through very much cutscenes, nor should my character be locked out of events that could provide a learning experience. By allowing a player to "do" rather than be shown or be told, a game designer can keep their attention much more effectively and assist a game's suspension of disbelief.
A good example of this is the Call of Duty games. No matter what the scenario, the player is in control of their character's actions, be they on the back of a truck in a chase scenario or being dragged from the field after taking a wound. It's absolutely fine to make such scenarios artificially more or less difficult; the important factor is that the player remains in the experience. They get to hold on to the tension while the plot continues to move as they observe from the eyes of their character.
A bad example of this is, ironically, more recent Final Fantasy games. I was tempted to place Final Fantasy VI as my good example, because even when it takes control from the player, perspective doesn't shift. Things remain consistent, and there are designated plot events that will happen no matter what you do -- but you still make your choices. The important factor is to provide a consistent experience, and that's what older Final Fantasy games do and what the newer ones don't. The plot is driven by perspective-altering cutscenes that break the flow of the gameplay and player involvement. While cutscenes can be an excellent tool in the right context, they shouldn't ever interrupt the game experience. And frankly, it's probably much cheaper just to build the animations one needs into the core game rather than having a cutscene animated separately.
Video gaming is the perfect second-person narrative medium. Most of us would've had some "choose your own adventure" books when we were children. The character is never established because that character is you, and the books make that clear. That is second-person narrative perspective. A first-person narrative perspective is when a story is recounted by the person who was involved in those events. "I smote its body upon the mountainside", or "I watered the wine". Third person is when a narrator explains the actions of characters that are not said narrator, such as "Alex took note" or "Alex totally fucked his saving throw". Essentially, a second-person narrative is one that narrates your own experiences back at you. Adult literature can't do this. Cinema can't do this. Only games can do this for an adult audience.
A lot of games make the mistake of being first-person or third-person narratives. That said, some games are those things and it's certainly not a mistake. More often than not, however, games fail to convey themselves as effectively or as eloquently as literature or cinema under those perspectives. They're just not built for it, because a third or first-person narrative relies on preset psychological attributes as defined by the character. With a game, one can seldom take into account the finer details of a playerbase's psychology. Even with a clearly-defined, linear story and obvious, preset goals, a video game character must be someone the player can slip into to some extent. This can be done through various levels of characterisation, but game narrative tends to fall apart when the protagonist is too clearly defined.
An example of a game that does this well is Mount and Blade, a medieval combat game where the player take the role of a warlord. There are no cutscenes and there is no exposition. The player must do or die by their own skills and wits, and therefore their "character arc", such as it is, is defined entirely by their actions and how other characters in the game react to them. While the game could stand to have much more well developed secondary characters, it's an excellent effort for an indie title and is a game in the truest sense. It doesn't borrow heavily from cinema or literature, allowing the medium to work under its own merits.
Games that do this badly are far too common, but the Uncharted games are prime examples. They're excellent at being cinematic, and meld that with good gameplay and amusing character interactions, but that's essentially all they are. As much as the series succeeds on that level, they're games by technicality; the player gets to fight the bad guys and solve the puzzles, but the games are entirely linear with a third-person narrative perspective. Fun and worth a bit of time, but ultimately lacking in consistent interest given their format as extended action movies. The Uncharted games are certainly evidence that a movie can make a fun game, but they're also evidence that a movie format fails to use the potential of the game medium.
In any case, this is quickly becoming tl;dr. Just wanted to put some thoughts down.
Comments
Very nice little essay.
I never thought about it this way, but it makes sense. When you suddenly lose control of your character in a cutscene, it's cinematic...but a pretty jarring transition gameplay-wise.
Thank you.
I'm a big advocate of streamlining the gameplay and story elements of a game into one experience. In an era of technology where in-game models, textures and animations are extremely convincing, the function of a cutscene is narrowing further. Once upon a time, a cutscene was the only way to deliver facial expressions and to time all the requisite narrative elements for a major plot or character point. Today, though, advanced graphics and game design mean that a game's narrative impact can be tightly controlled even when a player has free control of their character.
You might not notice it, but a lot of games these days use a function where certain character actions or context-sensitive gameplay events trigger a change in music. This is exactly the kind of thing I advocate. Used well, this kind of "invisible" mechanic can turn a good experience into an ascendant one. I can recall times that a change in music has even motivated me to play better, clinging desperately to any hope of victory so as not to "waste" the narrative impact of the experience.
It actually seems like Final Fantasy is improving in this area a little bit.
Having played (some of) the demo of Final Fantasy XIII-2, there are a number of events that occur in the game where it doesn't shift into a different, "cinematic" perspective and the player still remains in control of their character, including dialogues between the party members (which can include dialogue choices during which the player can still move freely). It's not really much, but it does feel a bit more natural and less jarring. Also, it has quicktime events and the like during combat, which I think is a kind of cheap mechanic but it still does at least make the player feel more in control of things even during cinematic parts. Still, it seems pretty cutscene-heavy, but... it's Final Fantasy, so it's kind of always going to be like that.
I don't think that's necessarily true. As I noted, earlier Final Fantasy games weren't so, even if that was a result of technological restrictions. But they also proved that it's possible to tell a perfectly entertaining and engrossing story without elements that would come to define later titles.
Hmmm...looking over that, I have to ask: have you played Bastion? IMO, it's the best story-game (which is different from "the best story in a game" in that I felt like the gameplay and the story were a single thing).
I've not played Bastion, although I hear it's excellent.
Go play it. Seriously, go play it.