With the release of Mega Man 9 I find myself missing the old days of 90’s gaming. It’s true that games have come a long way in the last ten to twenty years, but my heart yearns for the simpler days. One of the main reasons I’m buying a Wii is for the downloaded games. I’m dying to play Secret of Mana again. I’m thrilled they’ve released Chrono Trigger on the DS. I’ll probably pick it up. But I want to ride Flammie the dragon and talk to mushroom people. I’m also hoping they continue to release my favorites, and I’m definitely going to reclaim the Donkey Kong series. Those were such good times.

It’s interesting to see how well received Mega Man 9 is. Older gamers love it because it takes us back to a day when there were no such thing as clunky camera angles. Younger gamers enjoy it because it presents them with a new challenge.

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Jon, from The Clockwork Manual, got in touch with me the other day. As fellow video game fans we hit it off, until the subject of cutscenes loomed its ugly head. Jon was all for them. As a Metal Gear Solid fan he could hardly be against them. I, on the other hand, am vocally anti-cutscene. Jon’s initial email can be read here. He points out some of the defining and memorable video game cutscenes, and wonders how we could ever tell a story without them. My response was as follows.

In the film-making community, flashbacks and ‘dream sequences’ are considered a crutch. It is one of the first mistakes amateur film makers make. It is a weak way to tell most stories, and is usually used as a shortcut, or to cover up weak writing.

There are, however, no rules in any creative media that can’t be broken. Memento used flashbacks brilliantly. Spellbound contains a famous dream sequence. These are great films, and they know exactly what they are doing.

So let’s talk about video games and cut scenes.

In a video game, you have two elements that should reinforce each other: the story and the gameplay. Most amateur game developers, when they want to tell you something related to the story, use a cutscene. Is this bad? Yes. Cutscenes are jarring, they take away our player control, they break our identification with the player character, and in most cases - video game budgets being what they are - they are poorly acted and badly written.

Much like flashbacks, they are usually the ‘most obvious’ way of telling the player something, but rarely the best. Intertwining the story into the game play is a far superior method. Using a ‘breadcrumb trail’ of in-game information to allow a player to puzzle together the story themselves is an art in itself. As an example: the Bioshock audio diaries.
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Before anyone runs to Jack Thompson to use me as an example of games being a bad influence, allow me to explain. Gaming has been a staple of my life since childhood. Back in the days of blips and bleeps and tiny little pixelated characters, I was an unusually impressionable child. I watched movies like The Changeling and The Amityville Horror, and attempted to play some of the more grisly games that were allowed at the time. Like a suicidal moth to a particularly hot flame, I would just keep going back without realizing the potential long-term damage I was doing to my overtly fragile psyche.

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“Hey, whatchya doin’? Playing a video game again? Is that all you do in your spare time? Yeah, I know you have a job, whatever. What do you even have to do in that thing anyway? Shoot people and smash buttons? …And dodge ‘counterattacks’? Strategize—wait, you actually think about this game?”

Really, we’ve all heard it at some point. Playing video games makes us lazy. They’re nothing but simple time-killers akin to watching a sitcom or doodling in a notebook. Truth is, it’s not so easy. Unless you want it to be.

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Beating games is the easy part. What? It is. Following the linear storyline and fighting the end boss, gathering all the necessary items or whatever it takes to unlock the final cut-scenes. Obviously there are some notable exceptions: Nobody would consider the credit rolling scene during K.K. Slider’s songs to be the ending of Animal Crossing. But the fact remains, most games require a bare minimum of effort to get to any of the plot points including the ending.

Side-quests are added in for a reason. A lot of the fun element in games is challenging yourself to get higher scores, better endings, or new outfits. Gamers have also been inventing ways to challenge themselves for decades. Who out there doesn’t have a 100% Zelda: Ocarina of Time save file? A better question: Who out there has actually taken up the three heart completion challenge? Significantly fewer people.

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Is plot important to a video game? Tetris managed without it, Sim City is hardly the stuff of novels, and Sonic revolved around a blue hedgehog and an egg-man. Plot was often consigned to the manuals for earlier games, whilst fighting games, racing games and shooters needed only the thinnest of excuses to send you into the fray.

The first games that featured imaginative story were the text-based adventure games. The first adventure game I ever played was an Atari game called Lords of Time. Featuring excessive amounts of time travel and the collection of several ’symbolic items’, the puzzles were horrendously difficult, but the story implanted in me a love of puzzle games that has never faded - although the genre itself sadly did.
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