The Role of Non-Interactive Storytelling in Interactive Media

Cutscenes have recently become, in the minds of many, the "failure-state" of video game storytelling. People complain that a cutscene interrupts the gameplay experience or takes away an opportunity for varied and interesting gameplay moments. It has gone so far that many have claimed that a game fails in its very artistic value as a game if the focus is anywhere else but the interactivity; if it is taken away or belittled for the sake of the story, the game has failed as an interactive artwork.

It’s true that the most memorable moments in gaming are those where interactivity is used or toyed with in the context of a powerful story moment. The epilogue of Halo: Reach, the famous plot twist in Bioshock, the moments leading up to the infamous death scene in Final Fantasy VII… Many interactive artworks have used interactivity to create impacting moments that truly could not exist in any other medium. And that is awesome.

The final mission of Halo: Reach is the pinnacle of
the series' storytelling.  

However, this idea that non-interactive story movement in an interactive medium is inherently bad storytelling has a problem. A huge problem that most people don’t notice unless, again, they take it to its full logical conclusion. Let’s see where it leads.

So the idea here is that the only good way to tell a story in video games is to use interactivity in everything, that everything must be interactive in some way, because interactivity is the storytelling property entirely unique to video games. Applied to art theory as a whole, this is saying that any given artwork must take full advantage of its medium’s unique properties in order to be good.  Any artwork that breaks from its unique properties is not a good artwork.

To illustrate, let’s apply this specifically to animation, as kind of a sub-medium of film. To clarify, animation is not a genre, but a subset of film itself, capable of telling far too many types of stories to be considered a simple genre. Feel free to comment (and good luck) if you want to make the argument that Cowboy Bebop and Disney's Cinderella both belong in the same genre.

Animation is, within the larger medium of film, uniquely capable of wildly over-the-top imagery and very silly slapstick comedy. It is easier for someone to take violence humorously when it is animated because much of the reality is lost, especially if the animation style is exceptionally quirky. It is visually capable of more silly or just plain weird images than live-action.

What would make for a bad animated feature, then? Well for one, animation that tries to look like reality is out; trying to look real abandons the lack of reality animation can deliver, eliminating the entire uniqueness of animation.  For that matter, if the work is expected to take full advantage of its unique properties, the animation had better take full advantage of that fact.  Any frame where characters are standing and talking is wasted, any scene without constant motion and exaggerated movement is doing it wrong.  In simpler terms, Spongebob Squarepants and Ren and Stimpy are objectively better works of art than Death Note, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or The Lion King.

The pinnacle of
animation, everyone.

Let's apply this logic to video games, since that is the whole point of this blog after all.  The unique property of video games as a medium is interactivity.  Thus, applied to this art theory, a good video game is one that uses interactivity in all its facets and never breaks from delivering an interactive experience.  It delivers a constantly interactive and intense experience, and achieves immersion by keeping the player constantly in control, constantly challenged and involved.  Perhaps aesthetics, graphics, story, music, etc. matter, but all are of minimal importance in comparison.  If the game stops with the interactivity to move a story forward, it loses its immersive quality and stops truly being a "video game."

So, according to this, what would a bad video game look like?  Well, like any of these.

To name just a few.

This prioritization of interactivity above all else is not entirely meritless, but I think it's a bit too extreme. The most erroneous aspect is the idea that there's only one way to tell a story well within a given medium, even if that way takes the fullest advantage of the medium's unique capabilities. To say in any artistic venue that one way is the only good way to tell a story is problematic because it discourages creativity and variance, two of the most important things in art. It's essentially telling an entire medium to stick to what it's good at before it even knows what it's really capable of.  The fact is, a good story is a good story.  Sometimes a story in a video game would not have lost much had it been told in a television mini-series, or perhaps a long movie, but that does not make the story bad. Though cutscenes have their benefits, they do not offer anything particularly special to video game storytelling, but that does not mean a good story told by a well-made cutscene is somehow bad.

This idea is really just coming out of the need for video games to claim their spot in the world of artistic media (though some also use it to support the idea that video games should not focus on art and storytelling).  In a previous post, I talked about how, despite the great stories some video games have told, games as a medium are still largely considered to tell worse stories than other mediums, and how this may be in large part due to the fact that video games have explored less of their uniqueness than other, older mediums.  Video games need to explore interactivity and truly come into their own with their ability to effectively wield this unique power, as this is the thing video games can do that no other medium can.  But this is intended to free and empower video games, not to limit them.  As we explore the frontier of this art form, we do not all pack up and move to the newly discovered areas; rather, we expand, settling and exploring the new frontier while still developing what we already know. We do not abandon the older tactics to game development and storytelling as we discover new ones, we use the old knowledge to improve and understand the new, and vice versa.  It is all important.

This is a bit of a heated topic as of late, so feel free to comment or email me with any thoughts, disagreements, or concurrence.  I would like this blog to be discussion-based to an extent, so if you have something to say, please do, and I will make sure to reply, and perhaps bring up your points in a future article.

See you next week, and assuming you don't vehemently disagree with what I've said here, don't forget to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook!