Narrative in literature has two requirements to make it good: the idea, and how you convey

the idea using words. If you don’t use descriptive language, a varied vocabulary and subtlety

introduce aspects, the work would not be good, as you would barely be able to convey the story,

and it would be so boring to read. But if you don’t have a good idea, there wouldn’t be much for the

words to bring across.

With movies, as well as these two elements, you are able to provide the viewer with sensory

input, which you need to use with the previously mentioned features to help convey your story. If

you don’t take advantage of this, and instead have the narrative separate from the audio-visual

experience, then you will be distracted between the two parts as they don’t flow together and help

one another. If you use the medium to help express the emotions of the characters or show the

audience the grandiose of the setting, then you will have a good movie adaptation, as you are able

to take advantage of the medium and do things that you wouldn’t have been able to with a book.

Games add an extra element to the mix, that being interactivity. You get to experience the

story first-hand, as if it was happening to you. You can explore the world you are in and not be

limited into only seeing the shot the cameraman wants you to see. If you treat this interactivity as a

necessity and not as something to help express the narrative of the story, then you will end up with

a bad game, as players would feel like what they are doing doesn’t matter. If there are too many cut

scenes, you are constantly being pulled away from the controls and feel less involved with what is

happening. If the actions of you character in these scenes differ from what you do when playing the

game (ludonarrative dissonance), then you have a conflict of character, making them harder to take

seriously, and making your decisions seem like they don’t matter.

Furthermore, if the cut scenes jump you out of your avatar, to show you what your avatar is doing,

then this causes dissonance, as you have changed from first to second-person. This makes you

wonder if you are supposed to be affecting things in the game, or are viewing someone else doing

so, severely reducing the apparent important of your actions. As opposed to ‘show don’t tell’, you

should allow the player to do the event, instead of just showing them the event happen without the

player inputting anything into the action.

QTEs try to rectify this somewhat, but it often leaves the player asking themselves ‘why

couldn’t the game have let me do that instead’, leaving me to think that the only time you should

use QTEs is in a 3rd person game (so you don’t have the issue of exiting your own body) to show your

character doing something that you couldn’t do in the game engine. A good example of this is a

game called Ninja blade. There is one part in the game where you have a fight with a massive spider.

To finish it off, there is a QTE where you hit a wrecking ball into the air, ride the wrecking ball

through the air, break the chain attaching it to the crane, and land it on the spider after flying

through the air, finishing it off ( the scene can be found here). This kind of QTE works, as what is

happening is over the top, you are caught up in the ‘awesomeness’ of it, and it doesn’t seem to you

that it would have been able to do it had you been in control of the character. These factors

combined allow the player to feel somewhat involved in what is going on, yet doesn’t distancing the

player from the action occurring on the screen.

A solution to cut scenes is to allow the player to stay in control of the character whist the cut

scene is occurring. This way you don’t interrupt the player by taking the interactive element of the

game away, and allow them to experience the story in the way that they want to. If they want to

stay still and listen to what is being said, then they can do so, but they also have the option to look

around and learn more of the story from the environment that they are in whist the cut scene goes

on. An example of a game that did this is Half-life two. As the dialogue between characters goes on,

you can explore the area, trying to piece together

what you find to fill in the gaps and try to work out

what is going on behind the main story being told.

A way that you could get the player to feel

more involved would be to implement physical

feedback into the game, which is something that no

one seems to be looking into. The closest things we

have to it at the moment are rumble packs, and

devices like the Wii mote for the Wii, Kinect for the

Xbox, and the move for PS3 allow for you to use

your movements to affect the game. However, as

your movements aren’t inhibited by the objects in the game (as well as the inaccuracies of the

technology) disconnect you from the game. For example, if you hit an enemy with a sword, the

impact of the sword hitting the foe doesn’t match up with your hand still moving because you

yourself are swinging at mid-air. However, if we could develop a motion sensitive control method

that did cause some degree of physical feedback

(as you don’t want to harm the player), it will

help keep the player feel as if he is actually in

the game, and reduces the possible disconnect

between the game and the player.

In conclusion, you want a game to

combine the core elements together, instead of

having one or two dominate the game, leaving a

specific aspect of to the side and only having it

exist at all is due to it being inherent to the genre. The player and the avatar on the screen to need

to be behaving as one and the same; if you want to do something, the game must allow you to do so

within reason, and you must have the same feelings, motivations and actions to the avatar or you

will ask “why is (s)he behaving this way?”. Instead of having the story force fed to you, you need to

be able to consume the story at your own pace. The desires of the player must come before the

desire of the creator in a lot of areas, as the player needs to feel like he is in control of the

experience, and a lack there of causes dissonance. The way you tell your story in a game must be

different than if you were telling it in the form of a movie, just as the way you tell the story in a book

must be different from the way you present a film. Each of these genres have differing features, and

the way the story is told must be changed depending on what options you have available in the

genre to benefit fully from the medium you are portraying it in.