interactive experience with a non-interactive one. For instance, when you go to a
movie, do the theater workers ever stop the film, bring up the lights, and direct the
audience to read a book that they handed out? Sometimes text is shown on the screen,
but never in a way that requires the audience to read more than a few words at a time.
Instead, films present a consistent media experience for the audience. Games, on the
other hand, still mix media in seemingly unnatural ways, forcing users who may just
want to play a game to have to read a bit of a book or watch a movie, and only then actu-
ally get to play. Surely there is a better way to tell a story, convey a plot, and introduce
characters from within the game itself that is far superior to out-of-game storytelling, at
least in terms of maintaining a fluid experience for players.
On the other hand, the use of cut-scenes in games has been so prevalent that they
are now an accepted gaming convention, and players have come to expect them. They
have also evolved in how they are integrated into the gameplay to be much better than
simply tacked on, and have been used in games without completely ruining the experi-
ence for players. Indeed, we originally attempted to avoid cut-scenes entirely in my
gameThe Suffering, but found that, since it was primarily a third-person perspective
game, the player was often too far away to see all the elements of a complex story scene
clearly. This was in part because we did not appropriately plan our scenes to play well
from such a distant view, which is not an easy task for a team accustomed to using
cut-scenes and close-up camera views on such events. When we decided to use
cut-scenes, we specifically chose to keep them to an absolute minimum and to use
them only for fairly frightening and intense moments or key storytelling events. In the
end, I feel that the use of cut-scenes in the game was reasonable and did not overly hurt
the game, and certainly no press or fans have complained about it. But to this day I am
not certain it was the right choice. What we gained in having “cooler” scenes we lost in
player immersion.
But including cut-scenes will not completely destroy your game, and certainly
plenty of games that I love have used them. Indeed, lots of media have employed
equally bizarre suspension of disbelief-shattering conventions, such as the total lack of
Chapter 11: Storytelling 211
ThoughThe Sufferingdid
use a lot of in-game
storytelling techniques, it
also included cut-scenes
when necessary.