thinking that they are movie directors and therefore want to create a movie theater-like
experience, despite the extremely different nature of the medium with which they are
working.
Some games are smart enough to allow the users to control the playback of
cut-scenes.The Last Expressin particular springs to mind, with its unique “egg”
save-game feature that allows the users to go back to any point in their game and
re-experience it. The game prided itself on transpiring in real-time or close to
real-time, and hence players were able to turn back the hands on a clock to any particu-
lar time they were interested in and the game would return them to that point, a feature
that was essential for understanding the game’s complex story. Numerous games have
started letting players view all their pre-rendered videos via an option on the main
menu, once they have seen the movies during the course of normal gameplay. This
allows players to easily replay parts of the videos that they may have missed the first
time around. My own gameDamage Incorporatedused extremely interactive mission
briefings in order to make sure the players understood what they had to do on a level.
Players could use the arrow keys to flip back and forth between text and image docu-
ments. During these mission briefings there was also spoken dialog that supplemented
the material printed on the screen. Players could pause, rewind, and fast-forward this
spoken dialog as they desired using tape deck controls displayed on the bottom of the
screen. In this way players were able to read the text at whatever speed they wished
and re-listen to portions of the dialog that they may have missed.
Unfortunately, the only interaction with the cut-scenes that many games include is
the ability for players to skip them entirely. This is essential, since many players will
want to skip over the non-interactive sections of the game, as any playtesting session
will reveal. Forcing players to watch cut-scenes is a totally unnecessary limitation no
game should attempt to enforce. As I explained above, better than complete skipping is
to allow players to skip forward and back through cut-scenes as they desire.
If one stops for a moment to consider the nature of out-of-game devices for story-
telling in games, one will be struck by what a strange concept it is to disrupt the
210 Chapter 11: Storytelling
The Last Express’ clever
save game system allows
the player to turn back
game-time in order to
rewatch cut-scenes or
play parts of the game
again.