I want to talk a bit about The Last of Us with regards to cutscenes in particular, as it seems a celebration of the lack of real interaction in a game’s events. While I do not think it’s a bad game, it is also a game in which the player plays no or very little part in the major events that occur throughout it. It is a game in which the player watches events that they are not taking part in and experience in the context of avatars they control only in specific, confrontational instances.
To begin, having Joel and Ellie and Tess and Joel having conversations while playing through the game was interesting and unto itself far more dynamic and captivating than the cutscenes in the game ever were. The character discussions through the gameplay were interesting and could have been elaborated upon to be more than they were. However, these occurrences were always subordinate to the cutscenes, not nearly as developed and full as they surely could have been if the developers did not need to spend extensive resources to develop the cutscenes instead.
It would have been interesting to be able to walk around in the shoes of Joel as he gets nervous, pacing with difficulty around rooms or functioning differently as if in a rage when the characters he cares about go missing. But the design never reflects what you watch, and more than that, the design never reflects what Joel feels. Becoming weaker still has the same effect it always does, putting a red “danger” circle around your HUD, but never actually making Joel less able to do all the insane things he constantly does. Joel’s sadness, anger, worry, doubt, never come across in the gameplay. He doesn’t try to stay behind characters he’s worried about betraying him, he doesn’t aggressively attempt to find food when characters around him claim they’re hungry, nor does Joel seem to be affected by missing out on meals when they’re given to other characters for the good of his somewhat sketchy ability to identify with others and escape his cynicism.
I see cutscenes as a generally lazy excuse for not being able to figure out how to handle a situation well in design. In the case of The Last of Us, the central problem was Ellie and Tess’s AI, and Naughty Dog very clearly knew this, given that these characters are untouchable throughout the entirety of the game. They’re invisible at all times except as voices in Joel’s head during certain gameplay sequences and only become particularly relevant when you’re playing as them or watching them do things that largely would have been more interesting outside of a cutscene. It’s extraordinarily deflationary to see characters preparing for an attack or getting nervous over enemies yet never really feeling this is something that has to do with you, but characters you are watching, because cutscenes are pivotal points at which these events occur. You’re watching them, not interacting as them, and there is little indication in design that the characters you’re watching are actually experiencing what they seem to be experiencing when you play as them.
Cutscenes are generally being processed as content, when they are almost always better as context. The use of a cutscene for the purpose of intimidating you in Dark Souls is interesting because it provides context, the use of a cutscene in The Last of Us is not because it provides content. While I do not think that cutscenes cannot provide content, the content they provide must be relevant to the gameplay. Needing a cutscene to open a door, using them to analyze and make decisions with regards to a character’s intent, are potential uses of cutscenes with content. But the cutscenes-as-content only works if they have some level of relevance to the gameplay, otherwise they are simply repeating the same mistake videogames have been repeating for decades now. I’m going to take a note from Christopher Franklin here and state that if a movie or book’s central idea is “show, don’t tell,” then a videogame’s central idea is “do, don’t show.” The Last of Us is an excellent example of the former rather than the latter.
The key issue in a world of “do, don’t show,” is that the more you show and the less you do, the less likely the player relates to what they’re doing, because the performance is ultimately irrelevant to the larger tonal shifts in the game. Engagement has everything to do with performance in a game and the less the player is performing, the more disconnected from the experience they naturally become. The player transitions at a certain point to being the audience, from an individual initiating to an observer consenting. Play is an active role when engaged in it and watching a play is a distinctly different experience from performing in one. Cinematic videogames tend to refuse player engagement in major events. This stunts a player’s ability to take part as anything other than the audience.
Cutscenes are generally not effective engagement. In fact most of the time they’re not a part of engagement at all, but separation. “These are the bits you have control over, we’ll just be over here telling a story you have no power or ability to engage in.” Engagement requires participation, and the player is rarely allowed to intrude upon the realm of the developer god. It’s understandable as to why; it’s difficult to code sequences which attempt to take the player into account and it’s far less difficult to simply present a story outside the player’s domain. But it ultimately takes away from the illusion of player agency and its meta-narrative becomes the same as The Stanley Parable without the self-awareness or conceit.