that the cut-scenes do not look as good; after all, they can only play with the number of
polygons that can be rendered in real time. But what may be lost in terms of visual qual-
ity is more than made up for by the overall consistency of the game.
Another strange aspect of cut-scenes in many computer games is their
non-interactive nature, which is indicative of the inability of the designer to understand
the capabilities of the computer as an interactive device. Consider spectators at a movie
or a play, or the nationwide audience watching a television show. The audiences for
those productions are unable to interact with the proceedings in any way: the perfor-
mance occurs and then it is over. On the other hand, someone reading a book, watching
a video, or being told a story is able to experience the medium at whatever speed they
want. Pages can be reread in a book, videotapes can be rewound or fast-forwarded, and a
child can ask her parent to further explain or reread part of the story she did not under-
stand. The key difference here is that the audience of the first set of non-interactive
media is a large group of people, while the audience for the latter set is a single person.
Consider the audience for a computer game. Is it a group or a sole individual? Obvi-
ously, for multi-player games the audience may be more than one, but multi-player
games almost never bother with cut-scenes of any sort. No, the storytelling games that
require cut-scenes are almost all designed as single-player experiences. Why, then,
when the text scrolls by in the mission briefing for a game, is the user unable to rewind
it? Indeed, why is it scrolling at all? Computers are excellent tools for giving users con-
trol over their experience, and since players are usually playing the game by
themselves, who would mind if they read the text at their own speed, as controlled by a
scroll bar or arrows on the keyboard? Similarly for cut-scenes: why can users almost
never rewind to watch the cut-scene again? What if they missed a part of the story they
want to hear, or just want to enjoy the presentation again? Even worse, many
cut-scenes cannot even be paused, only skipped. Perish the thought that someone
might actually want to take a break at some point during a long cut-scene. The preva-
lence of only-skippable scenes leads to a distressing confusion among users from game
to game, as they wonder, “If I hit the Start button, will it pause the scene or skip it?” It
seems that the out-of-game sections of computer games are less user-friendly than
almost any other solo experience medium. It seems likely that game designers may be
Chapter 11: Storytelling 209
Cut-scenes inKarateka
are all handled using the
game engine, resulting
in a seamless visual
experience for the player.