Narrative in Games Part 1: Cutscenes vs Gameplay

Don't worry, in another 10 minutes you'll remember this is a game.

Video games have had a rather mixed history when it comes to storytelling. While many games certainly make attempts at telling grand, meaningful stories most of them tend to exist primarily or entirely inside either cutscenes or dialogue dumps. Despite the fundamentally interactive nature of games their actual narrative tends to be strictly non-interactive - or at best with only slight variance along a small number of discrete paths. As a result many in the gaming community heavily criticize cutscenes in games, claiming that they instead try to mimic films rather than utilizing the inherent strengths of the medium.

So, are cutscenes a crutch that less innovative or skilled developers rely on, or do they have merits within video games?

Separation of Narrative and Gameplay

I think that most of the ire for cutscenes isn't related any inherent flaws, but rather stems from a different problem - a division between the gameplay and narrative of a game.

Ever since the very early days of video games any story or narrative was largely independent of the core gameplay. Initially this was a technical limitation - strict limits on size, computing power, etc. necessarily limited the types of games that could be created and how they could be presented. As technology advanced the limitations have slowly expanded, yet the majority of games don't have much more integration between their narrative and gameplay than early RPGs nearly 30 years old like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy.

While there have been vast improvements in both narrative and gameplay over the decades, narrative is still primarily given in either dialogue or cutscene where the player has no more agency than if he were reading a book. The closest thing we've had to advancement in integration is to have voiced dialogue occur during the gameplay, but the two are still largely if not entirely independent. Why is this?

Part of the reason still lies in practical limitations of games. While it might have started in limitations of technology, today companies are limited by time and money. It might be nice to craft hundreds of different narrative arcs branching off player decisions, but it's simply not a practical scope for a modern game to have right now.

Since the line actually runs in both directions does that mean it still has more choice than most games?

However, I think there is a much more fundamental limitation rooted in the way that both developers and players tend to think about narrative. Up until recently when someone talked about a narrative they almost always meant a crafted, complete, static narrative such as what you would find in a book or movie. This makes perfect sense because those mediums are static by their very nature - once a book has been completed it will remain the same for everyone who experiences it for as long as it exists.

Video games are instead inherently dynamic. To what degree the game changes based on player input can vary wildly, however even minor variations in the details of how something happens makes games much different than traditional media. Because of this, it's important to expand our concept of what a narrative can be.

Explicit vs Emergent Narrative

Explicit narrative is simply the type of narrative present in traditional media. This encompasses all of the unique characters, dialogue and interaction, and scripted events inside a game - to put simply, it is everything relating to the narrative that was explicitly created by the developers.

The problem with explicit narrative is that because everything must be created and accounted for by the developers ahead of time, it is naturally static. Even if there are multiple branching points within a narrative where the player can choose their direction the choices are all static as well. This means that nothing can happen in the explicit narrative that wasn't already created by the developers, so by definition it has a limited scope. No developer can possibly account for every conceivable action the player may want to take (let alone have the time or resources to program it into the game) so the explicit narrative necessarily limits the player's agency in the game.

You can see this in every game that has a detailed, explicit story. I can't refuse the plot in a Final Fantasy game and decide to instead open up a weapons shop, I can't ally with Dr. Breen in Half-Life 2 and decide to help usher in our alien overlords, I can't poke my sword into Deckard Cain in Diablo 2 because I'm sick of hearing about my horadric cube. Even in Mass Effect, the supposed holy grail of player freedom in an RPG, limits the player inside the story - I can't don an eyepatch and kidnap every dignitary I see to random them back for money to blow on drugs and hookers.

Avast, mateys! Electronically transfer yer space doubloons, afore I send thee to Davey Jarg's Locker!

On the other end of the scale, emergent narrative is very dynamic and personal to the viewer. Emergent narrative is the sequence of events that the player chooses to do within a game's mechanics, encompassing everything that happens while the player actually has control.

Unfortunately, emergent narratives are difficult to craft. Because emergent narrative is driven by the player's actions the narrative is going to be different from person to person. This can severely limit the types of narratives a developer can try to create - epic, complex, character focused narratives found in many modern story driven games simply aren't practical to create through emergent narrative.

Emergent narrative does have one very important strength when compared to explicit narrative however: it doesn't rely on empathy.

Because emergent narrative relies on the actions of the player instead of a script the player is engaged in a unique way: all the events and consequences of the player's actions are happening to the player, not a separate character that player is intended to empathize with. This puts emergent narrative in a position to resonate with the player in a much stronger way than traditional explicit narrative is able to.

Reinforcing Narratives

Due to explicit and emergent narrative being based on fundamentally different methods it's difficult to combine the two seamlessly. Not only is emergent gameplay dependent upon mechanics that are at odds with the explicit narrative, but it's a fairly new concept that must be considered carefully when creating the complete narrative for a game.

However, even when separated its still possible to have the two narrative types reinforce one another to create a more meaningful experience than either could create on their own. I've already illustrated how this was accomplished in Final Fantasy VII, but let's take a look at a more recent example: The Last of Us. (For those that haven't played it I highly recommend it, but I will be speaking generally and there won't be any story spoilers).

True to form, The Last of Us puts the gameplay and story in completely separate rooms. Sure there are moments of dialogue and characterization that occur during gameplay, but they aren't actually connected - the player has as much agency over the characters or story as they do over the position of the sun in the sky. But while the two can exist independently from one another, they were crafted in order to reinforce each other.

The story formed in the cutscenes and dialogue give context and meaning to the gameplay. You're not trying to solve some environmental stealth puzzle because it's a level in a game and that's how games work, you're doing it to accomplish a goal in the story. While this doesn't change what you have to do it does change the meaning behind it, giving more weight to success or failure from proper contextualization. This is important for getting the player to invest in the gameplay - having reasons and motivations for what they're doing in the game beyond "that's what you need to do to avoid getting a game over screen" causes the player to have an easier time being engaged in the experience.

Similarly, the gameplay is relied on heavily to flesh out the world and emphasize the tension at any given moment. Where someone watching a movie can empathize with a chased character fumbling with his keys in the lock a player can feel first hand the tension that comes with fumbling around inside their inventory to select the right item. By aligning the natural flow of the emergent narrative to elicit specific emotions from the player, they can draw them into the explicit narrative in a much more potent way that couldn't be achieved through non-interactive media.

So the question remains - if the two can reinforce each other to enhance the overall experience, why do cutscenes and other non-interactive devices garner so much ire?

Mimicry vs Iterative Growth

Almost all games have a combination of both explicit and emergent narrative. Even very open ended sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress generally have a setting (they're dwarves, not muskrats) and even strictly linear story games like Dear Esther let you move around and determine basic things like pace and direction. Despite this fact, some portions of the gaming community have decided that emergent narrative is better for games and explicit narratives (along with cutscenes and other non-interactive devices) are nothing but a crutch that games use to emulate more traditional media.

I can certainly see where this argument comes from. Emergent narrative is unique to gaming, so why would we spend so much time treading on narrative devices that can be reproduced in movies or books? Not only does it not bring anything new to the table but it can often hamstring the player's options within a game in order to fit better with an explicit narrative. There are also dozens of examples where games have created poor experiences due to over-reliance on badly implemented non-interactive devices.

I do disagree with their emphasis on emergent narrative over explicit narrative though. There are already several different mediums that do explicit narrative, and despite the similarity in the basic narrative structure they have enormous differences in how they can be told and what elements are more effective. It's a common claim that movie versions of books lose something in the translation, which makes perfect sense - despite both having the ability to tell similar stories their strengths vary wildly, so a great story crafted for one will of course lose something when recreated in another. When was the last time you read a great book adaptation of a a movie?

"And then this giant robot drags a boat through Hong Kong and beats an alien monster with it! If only you could see it."

Simply because games have a new means in which to create a narrative doesn't mean they have to entirely shed their similarities to other established media. Video games are also extremely new when compared to other media, and building off established techniques that can be adapted from elsewhere is the first step toward discovering the unique strengths and weaknesses of gaming as a narrative medium. Even the shameless imitation of film tropes have merit by showing what can and can't be translated over.

Additionally, if we did try and leave explicit narrative behind we would be losing a major strength of the medium. Although most games keep the two very isolated there are some games that have begun to scratch the surface of ways to combine explicit and emergent narrative without fracturing the experience. Next week in part 2 we'll take a look at a few example games and the methods they used to bring the two together!