Cutscenes. Cinematics. Full Motion Videos. Non Interactive Sequences. As long as there have been video games, there’s been story elements forced on the player. Sure, Pong didn’t have them, but Pac Man did.
And as long as we’ve had cutscenes, they’ve been linear cutscenes. It really doesn’t matter if they’re pre-rendered or in-game and real-time, for the most part, they’re all the same: force the equivalent of a linear movie on the player.
Oh sure, sure, throw out Half Life 2 story scenes as a counter-argument: “But those were interactive!” Were they? Does moving a camera around a locked room while being forced to listen to two people talk as if you are there when you’re patently ignoring them actually count as interactive these days? Okay, I’ll give you that their heads tracked you around the room. I can engage my dog in conversation, and I’ll get essentially the same response. It doesn’t exactly come off as interactive.
We could forward that Bioshock pushed forward the storytelling medium of videogames, with its passive player uptake of story elements. While this touches on interactive — after all, the player chose to engage story elements by picking up the tape recorders — it is still essentially a bunch of linear non-interactive sequences that a player can choose to participate in, or not. More often, not only is the player not given any kind of choice or interaction when a “full” story cutscene takes place (they are forced to watch it), their control is whittled down to a camera angle (they can’t even move the camera around the room), and in some cases, they lose control completely (although arguably it is integral to the story to do so). In the end, Bioshock’s story itself is largely non-interactive. You cannot really change what goes on in Rapture. I believe you can get a bit of a different ending if you save all of the Little Sisters rather than kill them, but the story itself remains unchanged.
Mass Effect attempts to turn all of this on its ear by having you engage in an “interactive” conversation, but ultimately, your only true interaction points are the moments inbetween the linear cutscenes they want to show you. In the end, you are a degree more interactive than Bioshock, in that you are constantly choosing your cutscene moments, but ultimately you are still just watching linear cutscenes stitched together. It’s a rich man’s Choose Your Own Adventure.
So how do we further the medium here? How can we get to a state of true interactive cutscenes? One baby step would be to introduce more, smaller unit cutscenes to give the impression of a more modular story. Maybe Fallout 3 has the right angle, what with their 200 endings. Reading up on their alleged massive amount of possible endings, it seems as if they started with about 12 to 20 endings and have been adding little pieces to each one based on your actions throughout their world. But even if they do hit on this proposed solution, I wonder, are all of the cutscenes in the rest of the game going to be fairly linear still? After playing 54 hours of Oblivion, my money’s on “most certainly.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, most of the time I’m perfectly content to listen to or watch a linear cutscene. Squeenix does an amzing job of keeping my interest locked tight with theirs, and admittedly, Bioshock’s story was pretty damn engaging. But for all of the talk about how important story is to videogames, I think we need to take a different stance and distance ourselves from the Hollywood model. We’re not an interactive movie. We’re games. We’re sandbox worlds. Our stories should always live within our worlds, never pulling the player out of the universe we’ve asked them to engage in if we can help it. Sure, Final Fantasy will always be full of movies, but we’ve all been there, and it’s been done.
An old book by Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, touches on the matter of how to beat linear cutscenes, by having virtual actors (known as Ractors) play the characters in your game (or movie) for you. Embedded with millions of nanites acting as motion capture sensors, the actors are rendered in your parlor as whatever character you need to interact with in your scene. As fun as this could be, obviously, this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
An interesting proposal to the Non Interactive Sequence would be to take a small page from the game The Ship, where every person on the server is playing a character, and had a role to play in a murder mystery setting. If the game is crafted where the winning conditions force everyone to play their role effectively, all story sequences would have to be played out by people in character attempting to accomplish their goals. While it is an intriguing concept, this doesn’t seem likely to succeed in a larger context either, as it isn’t horribly mainstream. If there aren’t enough people to play the game with you, you wouldn’t be able to play your game.
So we’re left at a very complex and robust AI story system that nobody seems to be able to accomplish, at least this generation of hardware. I’ve heard that AI is very costly to CPUs, and I’ve seen how difficult it can be to craft an AI that is worth even half of a damn. Is the solution an AI rendering card? Graphics certainly didn’t take any quantum leaps until the GPU concept was pushed on the general consumer public. Maybe it’s Complex AI 3rd party software solutions that cost millions of dollars to develop and purchased piecemeal by companies as a turnkey solution?
To be sure, it would take an insane amount of time and money just to attempt a world where the player is involved in every scene of a story, and the story develops in real time around the player’s actions. I imagine Bethsoft is the closest to this goal with Fallout 3, but I have a feeling even they will fall short of the goal of a fully interactive world. Clint Hocking has the right idea with his talk of how to accomplish Immersion, but I doubt that the third in the Farcry series will hit the fully interactive story mark as well, as I don’t think that was their intended goal.
What are your ideas? Do you think a fully interactive story is even possible? Have you played anything that comes to mind with amazing interactive story elements in them?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Fallout 1. There were a few cutscenes, but without them, there would be no story at all. You were briefed on the objectives, and the ending slightly differed based on what happened to the towns you went to, but still – clearly an interactive story. Was “Junktown” destined to be run by a corrupt casino owner or a sheriff who has a general store? Did you catch the fat lying bastard on tape and collect the reward or did you just shoot him up in his office? Or did you ignore the town altogether? The entire story was what you made it – and the dialogue and character’s actions followed. You advanced solely on the decisions you made. If you decided to wipe out a certain group of people – that was it – no more people – no respawns, no broken story, but also no more trading with those people. How you reached the end wasn’t like following a trail of bread crumbs in current what-claim-to-be “sandbox” RPG’s: the places you absolutely had to go and things you had to do were down to three things at three locations – the hardest part (and the most fun) was finding them. The question is, can you still accomplish a feat this broad in a game that abides by today’s standards of graphics and of “immersion”? Personally, I think the problem with game AI is that developers today are trying to simulate a specific, contextual form of intelligence, like you said: with a limited amount of resources, in real-time. It might be quite simpler turn-based (read: Deep Blue vs. Kasparov).
Bioshock had three alternate endings
http://youtube.com/watch?v=f3nBbo-uyZo
i’m not necessarily sure interactive stories are all they are cracked up to be. Looking at Chivalry is Not Dead, a recent short experiment in the sort of thing you’re talking about, the game and endings were dramatically altered by player choice, mostly by dint of having a very short game.
Yet I found myself frustrated because I could not find all the paths, and without a guide, I had no way of locating them. Essential bits of gameplay were lost to me.
If Fallout 3 has hundreds of endings, it’s going to be difficult to find them all, and boring to do so- I doubt most of the gameplay along the way will be altered. So to see extra snippets I’m going to have to basically do the same thing again and again.
If there is juicy story goodness, I want to see it all, not to have it hidden from me….
i think the core question we need to ask ourselves is this: do we want games to be linear, author-written stories (novels/movies) (reactive games) or do we want them to be chance-based systems in “sandbox” worlds (interactive games)? i think there is room for both kinds of games and that we’ve seen them already, without kubrick-esque AI. the linear-novel-esque story-games are so numerous i need hardly point them out. the “interactive” games, it seems, are best represented by MMOs. there’s no need for advance ai when all the players/characters in the game world are separate, actual, meat-players. it’s almost like…*gasp* real life. online-community-based games are fully interactive. some more than others (WoW vs. Second Life), but they provide open-ended game play with a story line.
ps.
i like the suffix -esque. :)
This is why I play D&D.
Seriously, all of you previous posters and readers out there. You should try it sometime.
You’d need advent of ‘strong AI’ to be able to achive this sort of effect. The limiting is because people will break the belief if given the option… In games, people are more likely to do something totally out of their character. So, in a mediaeval setting, someone might say ‘why the hell are you acting like elvis’. A weak AI would wind up with a lot of ‘huh, what?’ responses, especially to popular culture references.
There is only one strong AI in the world, currently. Us.
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