Video Game Cutscenes: The Definitive Review
With Apologies to K. Stuart
It was quite pleasing to read the recent column on the Guardian where Keith lays into cutscenes, given that they’ve been a bugbear of mine for quite a while. I’m pretty sure that given the archives and the correct usernames, you could dig up my own inarticulate and offensively aggressive ramblings on the topic from some twenty years ago. Back then, it had become clear that the cutscene was becoming part of videogame orthodoxy, an absolute and immovable pillar of the medium’s fabric. With two decades of industry under its belt the cutscene is now a distinct discipline, with people having started and lived out entire careers dedicated to making the non-interactive parts of a fundamentally interactive medium. And it’s at that fundament that the cutscene’s mask slips. As Keith points out, why should you allow the non-interactive to invade the interactive space? Instead of being a standard feature of the medium, the cutscene should perhaps be seen more as a failure.
Keith’s entirely welcome assault on the cutscene draws the comparison between early movies and the theatre industry (from which Cinema drew much of its technique) yet he misses the most glaringly obvious corollary. This is one that I was all too happy to deploy in my forum battling days - for the videogame, the cutscene is the equivalent of the dialogue card in silent movies. It is an interrupting placeholder to mask some current incapability, some lack of technology or method. And it remains so; though perhaps for the modern videogame the issue is more one of inflexibility and institutionalisation. The cutscene is so present, and has always been so, that it’s just accepted as being part of what videogames are. Keith also centres his critique around the concept of the videogame narrative, of that orthodoxy that a deeply conservative AAA tier refuses to challenge. In a way, the traditional linear narrative and the cutscene, as the means of expressing the narrative’s significant parts, are inextricably linked. A kind of creative ossification has set both in stone. In his piece, Keith tacitly commits a kind of cultural apologia towards the desperately narrow idea that the valid videogame narrative is one that elicits emotion, and that some parties believe it’s in the attempt to control and ensure the emotional response from the player that mandates the use of cutscenes to universalise the experience. Happily, Keith rails against that conceit, though I think his critique doesn’t go quite far enough. Keith asks for novel, interesting, exciting ways to express narratives in the videogame context, but I think the issue is actually deeper. It’s foundational. And here lies that fundamental problem with the narratives in use - if they require the cutscene, perhaps they are actually better suited to a different, non-interactive medium. Perhaps, just perhaps and perhaps a little bit more, we should be exploring narratives borne to the medium itself rather than attempting to import and impress narratives from prior media into our little niche.
Fair enough, there are exceptions to this rule. A friend of mine was recently explaining how the narrative and gameplay co-morbidities of The Last of Us Part II made for an impactful, unique experience that only videogames can provide, though I could never stomach handing over the time to yet another fucking zombie game to inure myself to its specific charms. The thing is, the kind of work mega-budget AAA narrative specialists like Naughty Dog can pull off after 20 years of dev grinding is almost unique to them. Derivative linear narrative enthusiasts might point to Rockstar as being at a similar tier - but really this fills me with more and more disdain for what is essentially an extremely decadent way to tell universal stories in very old ways. What’s more, to present these as paragons for aspiration rather than virtual white elephants leads everybody astray. Expecting grossly expensive gold standards to be the example all videogame narratives should follow is inviting endless mediocrity. In chasing a simplistic parity with the movies, the arms race is as much about asset budgets as it is writing talent, with those illustrious front runners blowing as much money on modelling, mocapping and voicing their opening cutscenes as the average successful roguelike platformer developer spends on a year of releases. The more modestly-budgeted games simply have to try and do the best they can, which again makes me thankful for the adoption of skip buttons as standard. I’m also wallowing in a kind of hypocrisy too; I champion the walking simulator1 as a fine way to explore traditional narratives, I love the Yakuza titles and actually watch their cutscenes2 and I’m yet to play Baldur’s Gate 3, (which I don’t find funny but I agreed the fuck out of it). I also make no secret about my love of Bethesda open-worlders while despising everything BioWare did after Knights Of The Old Republic, so I can tolerate *some* conversation engines that are literally nothing more than multiple-choice cutscenes in many respects. But the point here is that we, myself included, just accept this status quo to the point where we champion games that excel in a standard practice that in actuality represents a stagnation, and perhaps a very serious one.
The real crime that we commit by allowing the cutscene to continue as the prime narrative vehicle is in excluding the possibility of alternatives. Given the general trend of narrative media to fall into increasingly inflexible structures over the last century, we exist now in an era where sensible heads recognise there are only three root stories or whatever, or sixteen character archetypes or thirty-two hero journeys and so on. Narrative is quantised and quantified, it can be taught by rote as manufacturing skill. As such, the modern narrative has found itself having to weave between satisfying a kind of post-ironic poststructuralist postmodernist fulfilment of genre stereotypes (but with a twist!) or driving headlong into the peril-creep of eternal tension, brooding conflict and the constant churn of mini and maxi cliff-hangers, both aspects being features of nearly every successful prestige TV series of the last twenty years. It feels at times as if some series are tweaked and tuned for tension and drama and, ultimately, audience stickiness, like race engines. It feels like a mechanical discipline more than an art. It’s perhaps then little surprise that an entire authorial mode, one that’s aggressively shaped by the selective pressure of capitalism, finds such a standardised home in the videogame cutscene. What the cutscene does is conserve this general trend towards homogeny - it’s already commonplace for movie, TV and gaming critics to demand a story must have a beginning, middle and end, that characters must have an arc, and that some satisfying aspect of this arc must be completed within the artefact in question. And when the structure is standardised, it’s a simple matter of commercial interest that leads to standardisation in tropes, arcs and so on. In this sense, the videogame just plays along with the other kids, happily gambolling through the same hoops as if the medium deserves no better. The cutscene works fine! It’s not broke, don’t fix it! And this is the crucial point - by readily shaping itself to the status quo to appeal to the markers for success in prior media, it’s easy to forget that the general case that videogames exist in, the interactive continuity, is the broadest, most fertile and most capable medium ever devised by humans.
There is a fun assertion that I was taught in my media studies days that the march of technology3 has generated successive media where each new medium is more capable than the previous. To elaborate; the idea is that movies supplanted theatre because every stage play can be contained with a movie, but it’s trivial to create a movie that cannot ever be contained within a stage play4. You just need each frame to be a different shot and that’s it. No theatre can move its audience’s viewpoint twenty-five times a second, nor can it change sets, costumes, actors, lighting at the same pace5. Of course you can show any movie you want on-stage in a play, but the play itself cannot ever free itself in the way movies discovered they could be within thirty years of their birth. But do ask yourself this question: which medium can easily contain all movies? It should be blindingly obvious to you, but it’s the interactive continuity of the videogame6. So in this sense, we’re still incredibly far away from even recognising this fact as a cultural norm. To a certain extent, the general panoply of cultural critics still contains enough hostile, non-videogaming senior members to gatekeep its accession, even if the commercial case was made decades ago7. And this is where the cutscene wreaks the worst of its havoc. It’s a wing-clipping method of grounding the videogame in the formalism of its incumbent predecessors. We can think of the classic post-PlayStation cutscene - a Kojimascene if we must - as homage, as an aspirational clamour to prove the medium’s worth and validity. Yet when studied in any real depth, the unavoidable truth is that we have no fucking idea where the boundaries lie with interactive continuities. Citizen Kane earns its place at the top of many critic’s trees by being a kind of all-encompassing catalogue of the movie’s capabilities. Aside colour, multi-channel sound and the virtualised viewpoint8, Citizen Kane contains the full range of camera, framing and editing techniques that are still in use today, some eighty-odd years later. You can even argue that the virtualised viewpoint is actually represented in Citizen Kane’s camera pans that shift from matte paintings and models seamlessly into sets and real actors, so really it’s just colour and sound that’s bolstered the capabilities of the movie since 1941. Even things like the split diopter are present, as is using montage across a range of intentions, from juxtaposed symbolism to narrative flow. This is why I always smirk whenever anybody claims a title is ‘videogaming’s Citizen Kane’, as I can safely bet that by the criteria I’ve just laid out, it really fucking isn’t, because we’re nowhere near. The medium is far deeper and more versatile than we can imagine. That’s not to say that future games won’t contain Metal Gear Solid’s formalisms and conventions, but they won’t be quite the same encyclopaedia for technique and form that Citizen Kane represents for motion pictures with sound. I mean, the upper limit for videogames in some sense is 1:1 parity with the real world, that a videogame will arrive that models the Earth perfectly. But even then the medium can stride beyond that verisimilitude into the super-real, the deliberately non-real. It’s a complexity with an almost Mandelbrotian fractal depth, of which we have collectively explored far less than we’d initially expect.
I hope this visit to the outer limits of media fundamentals has illustrated quite how parochial the modern formalism really is. How small the imagination, how deferential the ambition. And it is absolutely that deference that cutscenes represent. All too often, the desire is stated that we want games that ‘put you in the movie’ of some beloved IP, when really the better bet is to be placed into the universe from which the movie springs. As I mentioned with regard to Cyberpunk 2077, the next step for these universes is not bigger budgets for better assets, but to fundamentally redefine the narrative relationship between the player and the place. I don’t want a main story, I want a chance to build a biography - and I want a world that allows the biography to have a richness that any main story can never match. But beyond that, I can tire of the petty narratives of human interaction that dominate our culture and long instead for some wider expanse of exploration and acquisition that doesn’t fall into sociological tropes to fuel engagement. I found a modicum of that kind of abstracted purity in No Man’s Sky, only I longed for total isolation in that vast space. I wanted it to be truly untouched by any previous consciousness, just as its wild proceduralism promised. As with Starfield, exploring the unknown loses much of its mystique when some fucking hut is in the distance on your arrival, and there’s some fucking dude in there already. And again, it’s the appeal to the prejudices of prior media that allows such timidity in falling back. I wonder if a videogame will ever approach something as brokenly abstracted as Zardoz, or playfully iconoclastic and loose as Barbarella. In that post-1960s flush of quasi-psychedelic contrarian media, the idea that a gangster movie could be perverted into something as odd as Performance seemed utterly natural and even normal to an extent. Now it would seem simply wrong. So perhaps all we really need are drugs and the urge to overturn the establishment, for that is precisely what we have now. An established way, a rigid set of formal procedures. Yet I have faith about the possibilities in between the cutscenes, the walking dialogue disgorgements, the expositional audio logs and the curated environmental storytelling of the 21st Century videogame. I can feel there’s something different lurking outside the formally ‘correct’, even if it’s some spectral imaginings of a bored mind. I’m certain there’s a way to open our scope, to push the horizon beyond the realms of mere vision, off into in the musical spheres of the truly, wonderfully, sublimely grandiose. And I’m equally certain that our cosy relationship with the cutscene helps keep that door closed.
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To be fair, the walking simulator is the most fun thing to happen to videogame stories since text adventures, so probably don't deserve to be lumped in - even though they're often happy to lean on the cutscene whenever they feel like it. Though in some sense, they use the cutscene as a crutch for the audience, to inadvertently get them used to a whole new way to think about the value of spaces and the stories within them. I have a hope that if some outrageous Avant-Garde ever manages to transgress the fuck out of the conventional narrative orthodoxy, it’ll be via ultra-disruptive walking simulators.
I unfairly allow this massively contradictory exception to my rule because it's foreign and Sega, and therefore allowed. Also because the high-res costumes in Yakuza Zero cutscenes were just so fucking sweeeeeeet.
Technology and art are forever intertwined. From working out the best rocks to mark stone to devising pigments, through to eggshell tempura, oil paints, synthetic pigments, printing, photography and so on. Not forgetting the media of stone tablet to papyrus to canvas, wood and paper, celluloid, CRT, floppy disk, art has always been fundamentally tied to technological development.
In glorious extremis, think about the idea that a movie can contain any literature by simply scrolling the text or even literally by filming each page of an existing book. A movie can also contain any music, or any musical performance should you wish to capture it. It can even contain any painting, any photograph, any sculpture given sufficiently rigorous reportage. But of course, they must have a beginning, a middle and an end and they really must have a character arc that resolves in the third act otherwise they're utterly invalid and worthless. Oh! How I long for us to stop mistaking the product for the art and the art for the product.
It may interest readers to note that the virtues for which theatre is now prized are those that movies and TV cannot provide - the social sense of intimacy and immediacy and individualism of the specific performance you witness as an audience member.
For experienced noodlers, consider the question: is there a videogame genre that can contain all other genres? Should it be considered less a genre and more a sub-medium? The answer is yes, and I have a marvellous proof of this but once again this margin is too small to contain it. (Yes, that is the second time I have stolen this quote - can you name it?)
The famous and patently false claim by Roger Ebert that videogames "can never be art" is a fine example of this, which hilariously resurfaced on Polygon back in July this year! For me, this debate was settled the second the videogame sprang into existence. I am absolutely a maximalist in this case, along the lines of Brian Eno. He once announced that a woman getting breast implants is an artistic act, because they are contributing to culture, and all culture is art. Where we distinguish is between the worthy and the worthless, the high art and the trash - and that is arbitrary, subjective, highly contextual and absolutely in the eye of the beholder. Art itself is a universal product of human existence, for babies will make marks that please them and there are markings made by ancient ancestors, apparently for aesthetic entertainment, that may predate even language itself. Where we fall down is in mistaking the commodity of art’s value for the social phenomenon of art’s production. And that commodity isn’t just financial. And what the fuck do you fucking mean if you try to insist that Ikaruga isn’t art? You fucking what? What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you fucking seen that shit? It’s fucking incredible. Jesus Christ. What the fuck? I can’t fucking believe this shit. Fuck off, seriously. FUCK.
Essentially, the virtualised viewpoint is the bullet-time of The Matrix, or any swoopy compositing-heavy trip through a Marvel action scene etc, etc, etc.