SCREENSHOT
THE CUTSCENE EFFECT Film in the age of video games • BY PAT BROWN
L
et’s be honest: Video game cutscenes—those moments when control is taken from the user so that story information can be conveyed through a cinema-style sequence—almost always disappoint. Dialogue is often stilted and the voice acting is subpar; character expressions are muted at best and immobile at worst, sticking them firmly in the “uncanny valley” of computer animation, where their almost real appearance makes them instead seem unreal, even revolting; and the blocking and framing is often amateurish. Cutscenes make the pacing of a game uneven, and, above all, they serve as moments of the game that we don’t get to play. I’ll allow that there are some games with good cutscenes (certainly not included among these are the Assassin’s Creed games, for example), but on the whole, cutscenes exist mostly as skeuomorphs, incorporations of a
previous technology that help users understand a new one. Because, by the second decade of the 21st century, we’re used to having narrative delivered to us in cinematic form, as a series of shots edited together, video games include cinematic scenes in order to help us The
whole debate is not about the story
as such, but about the film as a puzzle: In what way has
Nolan
put the film together
in order for us to dissect it?
absorb relevant story information. Cutscenes tend to be bad, in part, because their function is primarily to deliver information otherwise missing from the game, in the most efficient way possible. Emotional content or new experiences are rarely added successfully, which, in my mind, is one important function of a scene in an actual film, and the reason film and television were the dominant art forms of the
20th century. Some might (and have) argued that this reliance on older forms is a crutch on which video games rely too often, and to their detriment. In what follows, I’m going to play the part of the old fogey uncomfortable with the changing media landscape, and complain about what video game cutscenes are doing, in turn, to films. My primary object of scorn will be the recent film Man of Steel. The revenue of the video game industry as a whole has been out-earning domestic Hollywood box office receipts for over 20 years now, and Hollywood is still looking for ways to make films successful in the age of video games. Warner Brothers seems to have found one viable strategy in the success of Christopher Nolan, who has directed some of their biggest hits in the last few years. Whatever you think of the work of Nolan, who co-wrote (with David S. Goyer) and
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