Actually they’re usually disguised loading screens.

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I don’t need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls “new art”. I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don’t play games to beat them I play games to see them.

I love PA. Between Gabe and Tycho, I find that as my gaming tastes fluctuate, I can always feel some uncanny sense of empathy with either of them. This particular quote just happens to reflect my recent shift toward games with oft-linear narrative leanings.

In any case, I thought this could apply here, as a cutscene might be that cool animation to reward the player and serve as motivation to keep going. Surely you remember going through Blizzard games just to see those beautifully rendered cutscenes, which are totally not integrated into the actual game, or interactive by any stretch.

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Ultimately I agree with the thesis/opinion that cut scenes remove interaction/immersion/control, and that too much in the way of scripted scenes makes a game feel like it’s on very tight rails. Eventually the medium will figure itself out and find a balance…. maybe by then we’ll get games that claim to have “choice” and offer more than Yes or No.

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And what do you have against IF anyway?

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Seriously; play it and see how long it takes for you to gauge out your eyes and ears in frustration.

But that’s a good point about MGS and cutscenes.
Take out all the cutscenes from MGS and you have a game totally devoid of character.

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To me a cutscene is a number of things. It’s a respite from the action, a short break where you can sit back in your chair and take it all in. It’s also an opportunity for some artistry. Camera movements, how the scene is framed, the flow of dialogue, what elements in-frame are drawing your attention; this is all an art that I appreciate when done well.

On the subject of dialogue flow, I absolutely hate when the flow of conversation is dependant on the timing of your own keypresses. Having lines follow either too quickly after one another or with too great a pause between them makes the whole process seem very mechanical. I don’t see it as a rewarding process, having to anticipate how long an NPC-turned-PC should deliberate over his response, I actually think this detracts from the storytelling experience I came to enjoy. I do agree, however, that where pure text is concerned it should be at the user’s discression, and text that scrolls too slowly is a sin indeed.

Coming back to what I was talking about with regards to framing, I hate being expected to stand still in a cut scene. I actually prefer being made to stand still so I can relax and take it all in, because in games like Half-Life 2 you can often miss nuances in the animation and facial expressions when you’re jumping round Kleiner’s lab like a looney playing with stuff. I prefer being sat still when something important is happening instead of missing things because I was looking thr wrong way. Some people’s argument seems to be that you are forced to slow to the game’s pace, my argument is that I can miss elements I might enjoy because I’m not facing the right way. When I am given free reign I can’t help not use it. For me it’s the equivalent of having a jungle gym instead of a seating area in a cinema. Why would you not fool around a little given the option?

The question for me is not ‘why are cutscenes still used’, but ‘when should they be used’. For everything non-incidental I would prefer a cutscene, because being able to throw buckets at a protagonist’s head while she explains how she lost her mother to heartless, oppressive forces of darkness tends to dull the senses somewhat. I simply don’t want to be given the power to abuse someone else’s creation, that’s what Garry’s mod is for! :P

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I ran WET for awhile, but punkbuster doesn’t seem to get along with the mac client I was using, which severely limited server options. Nothing I’ve tried since has performed well enough to stick with, which is the main reason I bought a handheld – no load times, no patches, and there’s only so much FMV you can bog down a wee little cart with.

Yeah, “mac gamer” may be an oxymoron… but if the single player “games” everyone’s going on about are actually FPS Novels, then it doesn’t sound like I’m missing much. Though I would love to try TF2 one of these days. No money in my budget for an Intel mac, though. :/

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