CUTSCENES and INTERACTIVITY
In game storytelling

Final Fantasy vs. Doom 3

Cutscenes in Final Fantasy are really important, not only for the storytelling but for the overall "game" experience. The same happens in Max Payne, with no "comic" cutscenes, would the game have the same feeling?

However using, pre-fabricated elements from other arts and insert them in a game could seem, a lot like "cheating". In Film you must be able to tell things through a composite audiovisual. You can use everything from text, to photography, paintings, music, and comics. But any of these pre-fabricated elements must be mounted into a new film set were no one will be prevalent upon the others. For example music can?t carry all emotions and meaning of a sequence. Music must be mixed within a complete film sequence, must be only one part of an all. Music serves as an emotional guider in the sequence, not as a producer of emotions or even as an intensifier. In a way, music must be transparent as all the other components, and then let form an overall experience.

So if we translate, the use of music in film to the use of cutscenes in games, we should have something like: cutscenes must be used to guide the emotional storytelling experience, not to produce or intensify that experience.

Comparing Final Fantasy X, and Doom 3. We can see differences.

Final Fantasy uses cutscenes to tell the story, to produce emotions and in the end they come to be almost the centre of interest in playing the game.

In Doom 3, cutscenes are used to introduce us to the playing sequences, to prepare our emotional mood for what is to come interactively. The interaction is more interesting than the cutscenes.

Psychological Study of Videogames

Based in personal observation and some psychiatric talks. Most games seems don't reach the low tension spectre of emotions. This low tension area is divided in two areas one negative and another one positive, the first one goes for "miserable" and "sad" to "depressed" the second for "calmness" and "tranquillity" to "serene".

We started a study with real people to find out if this is true. We started the preparation of the experience 2 months ago and it will take us some more months. What we find out in the beginning, when collecting games and asking people their emotional experiences (see below), was that nowadays games seems to reach that low spectre, however these experiences seems to be very "cutscene" dependent (like Final Fantasy series).

So we are thinking in moving the experience from the "best sequence in a game" to "the best interactive part of a game". However we still have doubts about this.

The purpose is to find out problems in games now, to find out new solutions that will permit us develop a prototype with new ideas. So we need to decide, if future games we'll maintain cutscenes or not. If cutscenes will be part of games in the future, or if full time interactivity is the only thing acceptable in games?



Collecting Games Questionnaire, launched in game forums and to gamers friends e-mails
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Research on Emotion Game Sequences

We are performing a research on videogames and looking for their capacity on eliciting emotions in viewers and players.

So we would like to ask some of your time and knowledge in helping me. We need to find out computer/video games or game sequences that in your opinion are capable to elicit in the player each of these emotions:

. Happiness
. Anger
. Disgust
. Fear
. Sadness
. Surprise
. Relaxed

To avoid a too much wide comparison universe, we would like to ask you to limit your game choices to the genre action/adventure or game with story, single-player, preferentially 3d. Choose a game outside this group, only if you can't find anything in there and also if you believe that this other game category is really able to reflect that emotion type without any doubts.
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Games/Stories

CHESS - play for the competition with the other

LEGO - play for the pride of achievement

MYST - play to find out the story closure


Games with story must appeal for closure, if not it will turn out a different concept of what is supposed to be a storytelling experience.

I believe that a lot of people are trying to build games with Lego concept behind, the game can have an overall goal but at the same time it will take player to invest in wild imagination to build new ideas.

Continuation of ideas bits from discussion at intelligent-artifice

Emergence is amazing, is delicious but we can't forget the drawbacks. I believe it'll evolve more and more, get used more and more in games and IS, but IMHO you'll need to have a story line to give them. You can't bet everything in the emergence.

In the end this comes to the mixing everyone was and still looking for: Sims + GTA III. San Andreas tried that a lot more with the character management within the game. However, if you had no missions at all, could the character really evolve his "respect" without doing some predefined missions, based in what? In the number of killings performed, number of robbed cars, number of insane car manoeuvres arbitrarily like in real life? What would be the goal for the player, live a virtual life of crime in a virtual copy of our world? With what purpose? What would be the fun of that? Would people really find any reward for playing it?

Storytelling goal is not to be life like, but to be a slice of life. Storytelling is not a window to life that you can try to enlarge through IS. I believe that IS is more like a bridge to that slice, something that can bring it closer to me, making me feeling it more intensely. Interacting with that slice is in IMHO the goal.

Storytelling is well cared event selections of the real world, expressively worked upon. Life is boring :-), stories are not boring it's not their goal :-). Sure a system like that can turn to be believable, but not in story like framing but in a life like framing. We should then change the name from Interactive Storytelling (IS) to Interactive Life-Like (ILL) :-)

My position regarding IS is more in consonance with

Andrew view at grandtextauto
"Without well-formed experiences - efficient pacing, filtering out the 'boring bits' - games may not breakthrough to a mass audience. Most people just don't have the time to spend hours and hours playing a game for a few moments of meaningful drama. Games will need to be as "efficient" as movies, TV and books in this regard."

Aubrey says: «"Edge Metaphor". It's a precievably logical reason why the player can't leave the designated world space. Understandable reasoning for limitations [..] like Halflife 2's [..] force fields [..] GTA3 [..] islands. It applies not just to world space, but to game system space [..] and story space."»

"Edge metaphor" can be translated into storytelling by the story-line. Like HL2 "you're never in a position to affect the overall invasion" :-). This sentence is our story edge metaphor. We can't break it, if we do the world will become uncontrollable, story will disappear, and it will only rest a playground to be used by players as they like, waiting for some emergent story that can never occur

I'm not trying to knock-out IS, on the contrary I'm also looking for it, however I don't agree or better I don't believe in all the paths to arrive there, firstly because I believe that we have already some types of IS, so we're not discovering the wheel. Also I'm not a believer for "branching", "intelligent automate story managers", "emergence only" or "build your own story". I'm looking for interactive mechanics transparency that can carry an authored story directly into the player "heart". Looking for interactive mechanics that can give the player a feeling of participation in the telling, of sharing and helping in the act of telling with the "storyteller", not sharing the act of story creation with the story writer or even to be the writer himself.

ideas bits from discussion at intelligent-artifice

Any game that tries to tell a story will use interactivity to develop a shared process with the player to drive story progression in game. So, it's nothing else than an Interactive Storytelling experience.

Storytelling is not really a quantifiable matter. Storytelling stands for the art of developing meaning in the mind player through the creation of events grouping. Putting the player in the position of the events grouping creation and not of the meaning developing is changing completely his role in the relation with the artefact.

Spore. At http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html they said : «"Owning" the content in this way means that all the stories that the gamer creates are much more meaningful. Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user's contribution. »

This is far from true. People want significant stories delivered by others. They are looking for surprise, for learning new visions, different social approaches. The "doing" can't be mixed with the "receiving". Most humans "do" things firstly to show to the others and then feel great for the feedback of these others, with the exception of narcissists. People want to interact with the thing, people want to feel like being part of the thing, and so people don't want to have to build the thing.

Going back to the actual IS games, we can see that we have already interactivity and storytelling. That we can interact with the artefact and at the same time feel surprising sensation of learning new ideas, of being surprised by story content.

Sure, we can improve on this. Having better stories, invest in characters expressivity, invest in virtual body interactions among characters and invest in the developing of new technologies like natural speech.

Graphics - Then and Now

In this video feature we can see an excellent colloquium with Will Wright, Jordan Mechner and Rand Miller, three of the most successful persons in game industry and also three survivors.

Graphics - Then and Now (2004)

Watch for 50 minutes, Will Wright the man behind Simcity to Sims, Randy Miller with Myst to Myst 5 and Jordan Mechner with the original Prince of Persia, passing by The Last Express to the last Prince of Persia Sands of Time.

Conference on Videogames at Bergen
CFP - 18 April, 2005



Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

CONVENTIONS | Game architectures. The analysis of formal, technological and narrative conventions of computer games

SOCIETY | The representations of society in contemporary game-worlds

EPISTEMOLOGY | The epistemology of computer games

BEAUTY | The audiovisual aesthetics of computer games

THEORY | Theories and methods of game analysis

INDUSTRY | Aesthetics and industrial imperatives

Well it seems that the 9.9 Billion that videogames factured were not only from the videogames itself but it accounts also hardware like consoles.

"Total sales including hardware, software and accessories was over $9.9 billion"

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/gta4/news_6116499.html

How Games are Reshaping Business & Learning
with James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler
http://www.wistechnology.com/article.php?id=1504

A really interesting conference on videogames learning. You can watch all the conference through webcast here,


Is really stimulating hearing Paul Gee talking about the new capacities of videogames about the future perspectives for using videogames in education. Is arguments and references to the military using of videogames is really convincing. Although I'm still sceptic about this revolution in 2 or 3 years like he says. I'm more convinced about a slow revolution in the next 10 years. Young people can change quickly because they are not tied to strong responsibilities, however society buildings and rules can't be changed at this velocity.

"Videogames are very long, very complex and very hard. Videogames are sized for learning in deep levels."
Here he compares videogames industry with school teachers.
"How do you get somebody to learn something that is hard, complex and long? and take hours to do it?"

"By necessity industry had to be very good at learning"
And here I can compare videogames industry with film industry in the beginnings when they had to transform film spectacle into film narrative. It was trial and error that helped film industry refine film language in order to attain people minds and caught people attention. More than others Hollywood have done it since the beginning their capitalist urge to reach widest as possible audience made of them the most efficient and universal film language in the world.

Gee main argument is that taking into account the deep level of learning involved in the process of playing videogames and thinking about the fact that in "Videogames you can be a "Thief", you can be a "hard ass" or you can be "soldier". We just need to translate that to our university learning environment and think that we want students to be playing as scientists, as doctors, as engineers, etc.

Constance talk about videogames economics is not that interesting mostly because we're already tired to hear about all these fabricated numbers in the interest of videogames industry. She shows a table where in 2003 Videogames Industry out profit Hollywood box office movies - 10 billions against 9.5 billions.

This is uninteresting doing this kind of comparisons, Hollywood profits changed long time ago. They are not selling a movie through movie theatres only anymore. The changes performed in society made people to prefer staying at home than going out to a movie theatre for lots of reasons. And videogames also profit from this sedentary society. If we want to compare Videogames against Movies in terms of economics we need to be serious, and not using these numbers just to make fun and just to impress. Once again videogames are imitating Hollywood. It was Hollywood who invented the Box Office numbers in order to raise people expectations and peoples need to see movies that are doing so well at the box office. With the spreading of these numbers, videogame industry is only trying to call for attention from people who are not playing yet, and saying to them "hey listen, we already out profited Hollywood and if you don't come with us you'll lose your connection with the real world". Constance is being naïf when she says that "videogames are secretly and silently out profiting" without anybody knowing.

If we want to talk about economic comparisons, let's think about movie industry as we think about game industry. A movie itself produced in Hollywood without any merchandise must be accounted for: movie theatre sales + video rentals sales + dvd sales + cable sales + televison sales, now compare this with the videogame that is only sold in the little disc. And we need to be careful about talking of gaming industry and putting in the same bag videogames offline plus online because it seems to me like putting in the same bag movie industry plus television industry.

However after all this numbers and bag of media I came to think about one thing that makes me once again hate these capitalist strategies for selling more and more. Because in the end and in the future we want to arrive at a convergence point where we'll have no possible distinctions between TV, cinema or videogames. We'll have a central audiovisual hub at home and everywhere we go that will permit us to enjoy any type of content all through the same convergent media.

Kurt Squire gives an interesting overview of the gains business can have using videogames and also about the new possibilities for elearning.



Give a look and enlarge your horizons about the "art/entertainment/work" form of the XXI century. This perspective of videogames is only confirming Mcluhan predictions on Automata. "The age of information will compel us to use all of our faculties simultaneously, and we will discover that we are in leisure the more intensely we agree to involve with them, as it was the case of artists of all time" (Understanding Media, 1964)


Info
James Paul Gee - Read his book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy", one of the most important works in the games/education field.

Constance Steinkuehler- https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/
Kurt Squire - http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/