I have a son who’s nearing 3 years of age and doesn’t talk yet. No – don’t worry, this won’t be a daddyblog, I’m just putting down a basepoint here. He’s facing the challenge of picking up 2 languages at once, and to make matters more interesting, the two languages sound really similar, yet are completely different beasts. Does he communicate, then? Oh hell yes. He understands bloody everything told, and in a way, he talks back with clearly understandable feedback towards us. I had no idea kids could reach such levels of empathy and living-along and whatever terms you might want to coin here. Body language is on such textbook-case level it’s almost bordering on eerie. There’s clearly a communicative level of emotions and empathic level of emotions, and they mesh together perfectly. So, while his brain is figuring out the very basics concepts of spoken communication, he’s developed an interim way of communication, and it just now opened my eyes to something quite curious. It might be yet another textbook example for some people, but I’m not educated on that field. My cherry just got popped on this field, an hour or so ago.

The basic eye-opening moment required an additional “ooh..” moment stemming from thinking up an example from polar opposite. I know people who are highly educated and use their brain on levels of analytical depth that’s alien to me, and on daily basis, they use vocabulary no “ordinary” person has to ever face. They are also somewhat detached on personal level of communication. Everything is questioned and referred and quoted for wise words of masters of relevant field. Everything said is important, not mundane. To me, something feels missing when I listen to them.

Maybe lack of words does not mean lack of communicative abilities, it just drives the communication through emotional and empathic pathways. Body language. Slightest twitch of some hidden muscle somewhere which is registered by an ever-observant lizard brain hidden under our clever superbrain capable of analyzing things down to quantum levels.

Using and knowing too many words leads to reduced level of empathy and that curious “automatic” communication. Go even further with words that are inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of my league” and you end up emotionally distant from the ones who are listening to you. You become an alien most people can’t connect with anymore.

Now, games.

First, games that draw you in and make you ooh and aah on the vague feeling of intimacy of the world itself. ICO and Shadow of Colossus come to mind as first examples. They connect with you, which means they’re able to communicate with you even though they are not something you’d talk and converse with. Yet, they manage to deliver the very feeling of soul of the gameworld in a way you accept with open arms, with your defenses down. They pull your walls down, fullstop. Does this remind you of other such games? Which ones are they? Do they have lots of dialogue, or do they have a distinct lack of it? ICO has minimal dialogue, and even then it’s fictional language..

Second, games that feel deeply interesting and urges you to dig deeper. Clear notion of a traditional story, lots of little details, carefully constructed world and everything connects with everything else. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl comes to mind. Half-Life. Witcher. Bioshock. Fallout 1 through 3. Tinkering with things, objective-based gameplay with new dialogue, diary notes and events presented along the way. They tell you things through words coming out of NPC mouth, or by text. Possibly lots of it. Depth of the world is achieved by presenting you with a barrage of information your brain begins to click through, creating coherent forms and shapes that define the world. World is couraged to observed as realistic, open for literal interpretation. Very, very much like reading a book, except you have to fight and solve your way through the pages of it. No “automatic” flow as such.

So, there’s two different ways of communicating to the player what world he or she is in, and how he or she should take it in. They’re very probably better kept separate, and not mixed up. Further from the middlegrounds, better the impact. Mixing them up might tickle up an irrecoverable “that’s not right, dunno why but it’s just not right.” -reaction one can’t justify even if asked. It’s the automatic bits of our brain that dictate how we feel about things, and games should always feel just right with no apparent reason. Apparent reasons come through analytical thinking, feeling of just right comes from clicking with the game, and that’s empathy.

“It was a grizzly scene, possibly a murder-suicide pact – I don’t know what the fuck happened”

A very descriptive quote. It creates vague notions of how it might have happened, what did happen and leaves us curious, and shocked. Evoking empathy and mystery. Very standard event in entertainment industry, yet handled in so many different ways. Most of the time, it emotionally impacts us when we are passive in front of television and let it all wash over us, allowing ourselves to be smothered with scripted-to-detail flow of it.

How on earth do you communicate the emotional magnitudes of such event to a player who sits comfortable on a sofa with a piece of knobby plastic in his hands? Throw blood on screen? Meh. Five-eyed tentacle monsters the size of skyscrapers? Bah. Basic videogame tropes, and they have lost much of their impact. Only games that manage to pull a good left hook on the player are those with something new and plenty of borrowed. Dunno about blue, we really don’t have to go to color grading here.

Do you do it by player character narrative? A voice of the character you’re playing? But it doesn’t sound like you! Are you audience or player character or something in between? It’s a detachment from gameplay in itself. Basic narrative voice? Basic, works, but has to be played beforehand really really well so it won’t become one of those annoying gameplay breaks. You know them, I know you do. Most of the time we get to see a fancy CG clip with near-Hollywood production values. How does that work, then?

“Ah damn you, stupid cutscene,” *clickclickclick* “AND WHY CAN’T I SKIP THE DAMNED arfg meh” *foreheadslap* and off you go, distracting yourself by clicking around a random pornsite in teh intarwebs, ruining your life forever, cocaine, etc.

Developers poured sweat, blood, money, tears, long hours, lost marriages, haggard faces and years worth of therapy sessions to those cutscene / narrative break moments and what do you do? You throw a tantrum, you selfish prick. Have you no heart or sensibility to those starving and homeless? No, wait — it’s not your fault! My apologies. I should have added narrative design to the list of good sacrificial traits us developers have, but then I wouldn’t be writing yet another blogpost that stinks of a bitter lemon a very fat and unpleasant tourist has sat on for hours.

Exhibit B:

Developer conclave, the masters with tallest chairlegs, sits silent under a pendulum axe that swings nigh-on their worried brows.

Lords of their realm are not pleased with their latest offering, the majestic tour de force through worlds imagined by their masterminds, and they have summoned a wrath on their homes. A Mandatum carved in black obelisk has been tossed amids the conclave, and lest they follow it, they will be banished from their realm.

Their gods are gods of coins, and coins they need to create worlds, and worlds they need to create to summon more coins for their gods. Vicious circles surround them, and the Mandatum has words that glow red:

“Sequel must be made, and Sequel must replenish the faith of all who follows us; Sequel will set us up as lords of imagination, and this world will follow us to those we create. Sequel must have thriceworth explosions, ten sacks more guns, and in hearts, it must taste bitter and sorrowful, yet caring and full of springtime hope”

Conclave has banished the scary-speaking and shallow designers, for they were aliens to them. They have new ones, young and snappy and filled to brim with new ideas, yet new ideas worry conclave, who already shit worry-shaped bricks out beneath their lizardly tails.

“How do you, young and snappy and filled to brim with ideas designer minds, would approach this quest? How, shall we reform our words, will you fulfill this bloody Mandatum we have received from the angry skies?”

The new designers, their hats full of their head, with their heads too big for their hats, reply:

“We shall rethink teh whole thought of moving pictures, teh very soundness of it. We will bring you a new prince of emotions, of new pedigree of teh empathy itself!”

The conclave, as if made of one mind and of one body, buries its many heads in its colourless hands, and shits some new bricks.

Designers scurry amidst the trained monkeys, peering over their hairy and scrawny shoulders, asking this and that. They are like mosquitos, sucking a drop of ideas from there, another from elsewhere, and so it goes. They look at the world monkeys are creating, on deeper level than mere head-lines and key-words and idea-boards.  They see the ethereal and surreal and unreal character take his babysteps, reaching out to his buddies amidst the ravages of war, in the torn land. They are empathic creatures, and they are moved.

“Something is here. Something wicked has cometh. Be still, my heart! What is it made of?”
“It is sad. No, it is hopeful, but has not found resolution yet. It is a story in itself. How do we tell teh story with no words like teh words we are written in?”

They confer. They look back at old moving pictures, and see how moving and marvellous they are. Yet, they were not of the same world, in the end – they were of another. Detached.

How to attach them? Something new is needed. Did they not have the world already, a beautiful world that interacts with you, a world that touches you back and reacts when you shoot at it? Their eyes opened up, and they sang a song.

Hi-ho, world is not of heartless  personae-less AI-animatronics;

Hi-ho, world creates the stories it weaves it leaves for us;

The AI-animatronics teh monkeys have bred are teh answer, thus;

[chorus] Me so horny, ahunka-hunka-hunka!

Wait, did I just wander towards context-sensitive AI and world and .. oh, drat. No, forget all that for now. I won’t go there, partly because I still like to entertain the idea of presenting you dear readers with gameplay blogread breaks that possibly annoy you to no end, and if you’re a game developer, you probably deserve it anyways.

So. Cutscenes?

On my part 1 of this probably neverending quest against wrongful cross-use of different storytelling media, I was rather annoyed at how media for passive audience gets treated in media for audience that dictates action and is hardly ever passive. Did I say cutscenes are inherently bad by nature if they are in games? Hell no. They can carry the story forwards, and if they are long and interesting enough, they do turn the player around into passive audience mode. It’s just the introduction and preparation and other cunning juggling of mindgames that gets forgotten, or gets acknowledged with “.. but it’s C priority, look at the schedule and just forget it already.”

Let’s juggle with some ideas. Let’s follow that white C priority rabbit down the hole nobody ever goes.

Traditionally, as mentioned before, cutscenes get slapped in where the transition from place / gameplay event / level to another occurs. It’s introductionary clip, a thematic booster or a plot forwarding device. Nothing wrong with that! It’s external stimulus within the game, as it comes automatically and with no player interaction required. One inherent problem might lay in the natural fact that it’s made to match the game world. It looks the same, it has the same colors and same art direction, even if it has higher production values and better looks than the game itself.

Scenario 1: Marshall Blueberry Got The Twitches

Player trots down an alleyway after clearing it free of giant cockroach combatant drones. It narrows down ahead, but we can see it opens up to a T junction alley between city blocks ahead. Right as the player is about to step to that crossing alley,

something loud and yellow and black and blue screams past his eyes, blurry and totally out of this world. Viewpoint suddenly shoots away, world on screen turns into caricature comic book representation of Your Mind On Cockroach Drugs, with more angles and corners than there can logically be, with colors dancing and the cockroach recon convoy passing our players location, who now is seen curled up in fetal position. We are watching him from high up, as if in astral experience. Loud cacophony fills our ears, wild vivid colors only drugged up demo coders can come up with fill our eyes, and with a quietness that comes so fast it sounds like a bang,

everything returns normal. Black frame or two on screen, regular colors of the world fill our view, everything is 90 degrees tilted. Your character is still on the ground, and you SO did not expect that moment. Oh, right, there was some gas tossed your way during the last skirmish..

Yet, cutscene it was. Thematic, maybe – or if the convoy had some wild caricatures of doomsday machines being transported, it could have been a plot forwarder as well. With good luck, it left the player eager to move along and figure out (allowed to figure out, really) what those drugged up, psychedelic hallucinations actually meant. And most importantly, it threw the player off the safe stand, reinvigorating him. It gave him something fresh to chew. It’s a game, you can go ahead and run with scissors at hand!

It doesn’t have to be the same static looking world you live in, you bitter monkeys.

Scenario 2: TVTropes edition!

Player trots down a grey alleyway after clearing it free .. you know. The same basic premise, right? Just as our hero is about to put his foot into the alleyway, we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE–
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder)
Hello folks, have you been feeling downwards lately? Have you not considered – or have you considered, but never dared to try the radio-activital water enhancer? With pellets of pure uranium carefully hand-casted into cement base, you only dip our Radium-O into your water tank and it will be filled with reinvigorating, life-energy boosting ATOMS OF THE FUTURE for you to drink! Available now from Lol-Mart!
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder. “Returning to live action now!”)
–we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE is shooting past your eyes and oh shit that’s big, those are hardened orbital bunker buster nukes on that platform, and oh wow I’ll just wait this one out, I know I’m gonna run into these baddies again–

And so on. Player is very, very used to all kinds of media. He watches television and movies. Television more than movies. He probably has watched television more than he has played games. He bloody well grew up with it. It was his nanny when he was a toddler. We took a step out of the box only to find old familiar things in new context, but somehow, as it was all so very familiar, it didn’t annoy .. And it was part of that world! Atomic age, with gigantic cockroaches with nukes that go to orbit. Cutscene itself did not serve gameplay function, other than slip a bookmark into the players memory about what he’s done and seen before. He’ll remember that moment, and that’s depth in itself, in a world filled with cliches seen bazillion times.

So maybe it wasn’t exactly out of the box. Maybe it was more like beating and kicking the box into different shape, but it doesn’t matter. Only as long as you can see the box, tiptoe around it, have some whacks at it and generally see ways to make things that go into the box and out again, you should be fine.

- If it’s a radically different cutscene, make it radically fast change because it’s not in balance with regular gameworld.

- If it looks like the ordinary gameworld, present it in much slower fashion as it’s heavily balanced. As mentioned, unbalanced you can whack into the weirdwoods as hard as you can, and it’ll be better for it.

Scenario 3: Daily grind

Our hero is about to embark on the crossing alley, and world pauses for split second. You hear DVD whirring to life. Screen comes back alive, but from a different viewpoint. There’s a big-ass tank-like monster with chipped armour, viewed from almost ground level to emphasize the big guns and bolts and stuff covering it. Lots of shiny bits, flares, DOF tricks with camera that shakes and rattles. A tank tread rolls menacingly towards the camera, which cuts to another angle right when the heavy metal descends on it. We’re shown the full size of convoy now, from aerial perspective. Sound is muffled, a cloud drifts under the camera to further emphasize scale. It’s all very movie-looking.
Cut back to player viewpoint, with player control. If he walks now, he’ll die under the machines. So he waits, watching. Pre-scripted convoy doesn’t care about him, its only function is to hint at future developments of this world war against bloody big insects with guns.

Sound familiar? I won’t even go there anymore, lest this blog gets banned from teh intarwebs for all the cursing.

Traditionally we suffer from too much safety, stay too sheltered and make familiar decisions. Things end up too “financially sound” and “marketable” and “it’s what others do so it’s what players want”. There’s no need to make the whole game artistically different and clever and celshaded whatnot with “unique art direction” with “extravagantly brave colours”. Just include the salt that goes on top of the same goo others are cooking. Little pinch is enough to remind people of the proper flavors.

There’s so much more to be said, regarding generally descriptive moments inserted in the middle of gameplay et cetera, but this is already bordering on too long post. I do smell the part 3 coming in nearish future, possibly with the notion of fading the cutscenes transparent to the player, or something. Until then, do leave comments if you have anything to add or argue.

That funny man-animal who uses my character sheets as insulation between soda and desk, Alvan, hit some excellent points on storytelling and then casually threw the awfully hot ball to me.

Cutscenes, he said. Why on earth do games rely on cutscenes, he asked. Bloody good question, and while I have no literal facts as such, I can only speculate and rant – but since speculation and rant makes better entertainment than mere facts, nobody loses. Also, the subject matter itself is based on things that are difficult to quantify unless you’re Dr. Phil, and even then you might get into arguments.

Exhibit A:

You make a game, say, FPS action wonderfest of sort. It’s basically based on you shooting things. A conclave is formed, features written into stone, weapons of war decided and armies constructed on little patches of paper. But — what now! someone is suddenly startled, points to the sky and calls out – “It’s well advisable to know why you’re shooting!”. You present this groundbreaking epiphany to the masters. From behind the curtains of management a loud “Oh, a backstory is needed, then!” sounds and echoes down the hallways. “A world with a reason, with personae our hero can feel at ease with!”

Klaxons wail, loudspeakers shout go-words! Trained monkeys scurry to their tasks, attending meetings and pushing tasklists and making schedules, everyone with a glowing sense of importance inside their hot and bothered hearts. We are creators of worlds, rulers of immersion, masters of gameplay!

Amidst the scurrying and goal-oriented teamwork, sudden plea is heard behind numerous concept art sketches and level design ideaboards: “How do we progress the story, how do we, pray, tell the player what happened, what his character feels beneath his forged iron carapace, what will happen now? Please, masters, tell us!”

Masters flinch, designers are summoned, and hidden under the shadows of their hoods they confer.

-This iss the best way. Trusst me. A movie within the game. Many moviess. Moving picturres carry worrds. We giev our art to massters of moving picturss and they do us moviess. We put moviess between levelss! Where loadingbarr goes!

Masters stand proud, a path has been found and it is golden, and it will bring them numerous coins of gold.

Designers go on about their business, designing core gameplay, weapon balancing, character perks, progress curves, everything their soon-to-be laid golden egg is made of.  A writer is hired, a professional master of words and worlds. He waves his hand over the vistas they have created and behold, a world is born! He writes it down, and he sees it is all good. He collects his coins and goes home to breed and procrastinate some more.

The golden words are spread out to all who make the game.

“This is our world, this is how it must feel like! It is .. Quite blue!”

Trained monkeys nod and add some blue, anxious to see what their world will be like in the moving pictures that bring their gameworld to life. What will it tell them? They concentrate on getting the best mesh topology for their characters, most cleverly blended IK animations and making sure there are no otherworldly invisible collision objects laying around. Reset XForm buttons are pressed, with sweat on forehead and no hands that dare swipe it off. Production is at full blast, and everything depends on this game. It must be the new benchmark in its genre! Hands clench in fists, manhours crunched.

“You have to have the best shaders! You have to tighten up graphics! Wait – that looks good, give it a name! Now, have our swiftest courier to take it to our marketing department!”

The big wheel rolls on.

Movies arrive from the golden lands far across the distant waters. Everyone is gathered in the big hall adorned with fantastical mechanic devices that illuminate the great wall with moving images and fill their eager ears with sound. The movies are good. They watch them all – twentyone of them – at one go. It is a beautiful, war-torn story of lost cause hovering above a brotherhood of men, who only wish to be brothers regardless of color or stature – to bear the burden with your mates in their chipped armours.

Lights flicker back, audience is thrown onto their feet, cheering and applauding. Their Game now has a story, a movie within their play, and movies tell stories! It all makes sense and it all feels so very good.

Game becomes gold, and is shipped to far-flung countries and coins change hands.

Reviews come in.

“Graphics are ace, and DOF and Shaders and Lens Flares are amazing feats of technology! Other than those and nice cutscenes, it’s a basic shooter. 6/10″

Wail, gnashing of teeth. Does not the acclaimed critics understand their words, their story? Are they blind?

No, they are not. You are blind, you wacky bats. You just made a point of having neatly structured levels, clever AI and gave places the same names as your precious and expensive cutscenes have. How did you treat the cutscenes? Are they movies of their own? Connected to gameplay moments player just experienced? Probably somewhat, but it is my humblest of opinions that cutscenes serve no storytelling value from the games point of view if A) the gameplay itself is not treated as part of the same story arc present in cutscenes, and B) the player experience is forgotten.

“No, the experience is there! We made sure the gun recoils realistically and walls topple majestically! Our end bosses are bigger than the end of universe! Surely the player experiences it all!”

You silly clown. Did you prepare the player for the cutscene? Did you stop and think about players role in game, and in cutscene? Yes, his role in cutscene. You strip his soul with gunplay, drive him mental with interactivity, make his eyes sore from effects and his mind dented with immersion, and then there’s AI that’s more natural than your grandmother and WHACKBANG you snatch it all from his hands. You force him into invalid cripple with no limbs. Passive audience, away from all that action and control and hoohaa. Did you consider the gameplay levels as storyarcs? Did you build up the tension, introduce twists, give the player a resolution, a wind-down moment, did you design the gameplay cool-off to force him to bloody stop and relax, leaning back on his seat with his hands off the goddamn gamepad so you can present him a pre-chewed bit of storytelling, fit for the state you just left him in?

No, of course you did not, you monkey.

Cutscenes suffer from their own history. When they were new and snazzy, they were selling points themselves. Remember Diablo 2? I remember more people talking fervently about the CG intro than the game itself, before it was on the shelves.

These days, awesome graphics are  a baselevel expectation. You don’t sell the game with cutscenes alone. Yes, people want stories and immersion. Yes, cutscenes can work in conjunction with the progressing game world, but more often than not, they are more or less slapped between levels with some shared graphical assets to tie them into the level you just played or will play anysecondnow. Your AI buddies that couldn’t find their way out of doorway suddenly become lipsynched and motion captured marvels that put Hollywood to shame.

Now that I got to the whole damn point, I’ll take a cool break and write more tomorrow when I’m awake again. How does it feel, to get cut off just when it got interesting? Hoping for a comfortable arc here? A coherently constructed story? Hahaha.