Over at the Edge website is a piece about some comments from Danny Bilson, THQ’s executive VP of core games. As is often the case with things of this nature, there is criticism of storytelling in games but no suggestion of a “solution”. To say that cutscenes “are the “failure state” of game storytelling” is both trite and wrong. While they are not the ideal method of in-game storytelling, many games have made the cut-scene work extremely well.
Don’t get me wrong, many cut scenes are dreadful in execution or little more than eye-candy and the more that we move the storytelling into the interaction the better, but there are times when a well-crafted and well-placed cut-scene can be a welcome change of pace.
What annoyed me more than anything was this part: “if I separate the story from the experience it doesn’t blow my mind.” What?! The whole point of a game’s story is that it should be part of the experience. If the story isn’t badly affected by taking it out of the game’s context then there is something wrong with the overall experience.
Stop trying to separate the game from the story. The stories in many films would fail to blow your mind if you took it out of the film experience.
Gamestory needs to be seen as a unique form and the more people see it as separate to the form of TV, film and prose the quicker it will grow and mature.