First of all, this May marks the 5th anniversary of maintaining this blog. When I first started I wrote under a pseudonym as the internet then was a place where only undesirables went. I wished my person and place of work to remain anonymous, but now the world has caught up with social media and even your grandmother has a facebook account. The new design should better fit in this age of apps and community, and I expect to have more time to share as updates have been light on the ground for the last while due to my being otherwise engaged…

Secondly, for the last month or so I’ve taken on the fulltime role of “Internation Man of Leisure”, awaiting a work visa after leaving BioWare for a second time, being fortunate enough to have been recruited to join the early stages of one of Ubisoft Montreal’s flagship series’ next major outings. All this so instead of my talk of a new form of cinematic narrative being purely theoretical I now have the opportunity to put it into practice, and I look forward to sharing more on the project in the coming years – after just one week I know it’s going to be big.

First, a little bit of background about where I’m coming from. I’ve been working on games now for nearly a decade in a variety of both in-game and cinematic roles, with the in-game side mostly focussing on player control, cameras and animation-system design relating to gameplay, whereas the cinematic part is about pure art and storytelling, getting information across to the player in as efficient a manner as possible.

At the time of the presentation, our team was wrapping up the final stages of production on cutscenes for Mass Effect 2 and here’s an image of the wall behind my desk.

This was a deliberately blurred picture (so as to not give away any spoilers) of our workload as it stood, with only the last few bugs remaining and each of those lines there representing anywhere between 1 and 7 individual cutscenes, many of which we now know post-release were well-received cinematic experiences. However, with such a heavy history of in-game animation design, I feel that with games like ours and the recently released Uncharted 2 among others, we’re coming to the limits of where we can go with pure cutscenes in our games.

Uncharted succeeded with its seamless transitions into and out of cutscenes, as well as the sheer high quality of the characters and acting, and ours with the logic behind them that decides which sequences (and how) to play depending on choices. As animators, we didn’t know whether your player-character was male or female, what their face looked like, or who you’d brought along with you on your team, not to mention the myriad choices that you can make throughout the game that will determine the outcome of particularly climactic scenes. After this point I can see cutscenes only limiting our progress in terms of developing storytelling in games, so I’m interested in exploring alternative methods that will allow us to truly develop stories for our medium rather than continually within the pre-established constraints of film – which are essentially where cutscenes lie.

The Problems With Cutscenes

When researching this topic, I began by initially trying to define exactly what a “cutscene” is. I’m sure when we’re all watching one we can tell that it’s a cutscene, but we have had so many variations of them over the years that it’s difficult to define them in a pure sense. The first and most natural idea that springs to mind tends to be “whenever the camera cuts”, but this is not the case as we often have no cuts, particularly during “designer cutscenes” whereby the camera simply transitions to a location to show the relationship between the player and the subject.

Next is to assume that player control is removed entirely, but as we’ll see later there have been many attempts to include some level of interactivity during cutscenes that doesn’t detract from them being cutscenes. The creation method is irrelevant – we have different terms in the industry such as Cinematic Cutscenes, Designer Cutscenes, Ingame and Pre-rendered, but in the end what really matters is how the player perceives the result, of which length is a sizeable factor.

Below is a great example of a cinematic sequence from Resident Evil 4 that follows all the “rules” of what we typically consider to be a cutscene, but because of its short duration the player doesn’t consider this a cutscene, and instead just another cinematic moment that contributes to the overall feeling of the game being a cinematic experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Defining The Problem

As such, a better approach is rather than to define what a cutscene is, instead to define the problem, so hopefully we can concentrate on simply attempting to overcome the issue rather than arbitrarily abolishing cutscenes themselves which has been done in the past to greater and lesser degrees of success.

Control and choice is restricted, if not removed entirely.

One second the player is running around, making choices and personally involved in many aspects of how the story or adventure is progressing, then the next they are force-fed exactly what we as developers want them to see and experience. This is fundamentally against the nature of our medium, and greatly restricts their experience for the duration of the cutscene back to the levels of the older medium of film.

Cutscenes make a clear division between the gameplay and the story.

The visual difference between cameras (and often character fidelity) in gameplay and those for cinematic cutscenes negatively reinforces the fact that most of gameplay involves little to no story progression at all.

Cutscenes are opt-out.

Once a cutscene is triggered, often without the player’s consent or choosing, his or her only option is to exit the cutscene. This brings with it issues of missing important information after the point of exit, and more importantly highlights the fact that we have a major problem here. If we have a design element in our medium that consistently requires we add the option to skip it entirely, then surely there is something fundamentally flawed with some aspect of that element?

This brings me to the definition that cutscenes are essentially “Imposed Cinematography”, whereby we as developers wish to impose narrative or progression information required to continue, or to ensure that the player experiences a part of the game exactly as we wish them to. This is the heart of the conflict between developer and player where, unlike other older mediums, we perform best when we play to our strengths and require participation from the player rather than purely imposing our creative will upon them.

Montreal International Game Summit 09 – Blogcritics Interview

It covers a few points I missed out of the talk and some thoughts on ME2′s romance custscenes. Having a long enough break from the project I’m now playing through the game with fresh eyes, and seeing everything in context I’m most happy with the Thane romance but can only see the green guy on Youtube as I’m not playing female.

Click here to view the embedded video.

iPress is my first full CSS conversion theme for the blogging platform WordPress (I used to start with someone else’s and work from there), which began life as an iTunes-based asset-management tool for our thousands of mocap files, but with our own internal tool’s creation it later became simply an exercise in copying the layout of Apple’s music program as accurately as possible.

What you have here though is a CMS (Content Management System) visually replicating iTunes 9, with helpful archive pages following the same sortable list format that makes is so easy to quickly navigate hundreds of mp3 files. If you’re a fellow WordPress user, head on over to the download page and give it a try.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the launch trailer, and I count some 75% of the shots here were done by the Montreal Cinematics team. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still nervously await the ultimate litmus test – the ever-critical girlfriend…

Cutscenes are a divisive subject amongst videogame developers. We rely on them as a relatively production-safe solution for imparting exposition and story progression, to give the player objective location information, and to reward achievement and successes like level completion. However, they cut more than just the camera. The flow, immersion, and most of all, interactivity uniquely enjoyed by the medium of videogames all take a hit for their (often unskippable) duration.

In their defense however, attempts to forego their inclusion can result in a weaker visual presentation and take us further away from an emotional connection with characters and story. Additionally, a quick scan of screenshots previewing upcoming games illustrates our growing reluctance as an industry to present titles from the in-game perspective, where cameras are rightly skewed towards gameplay.

This talk explores various techniques used by games over the years to create a cinematic look outside of the traditional reliance on cutscenes, with the pros and cons of each, finishing with suggestions on how these might be combined in the future to offer cinematic moments while keeping the player in the game.

Takeaway: Techniques alternative to cutscenes for imparting interactive story and cinematic moments in games.

Intended Audience: Game Designers, Writers, Animators and those involved in storytelling.

Should you be attending the conference please stop by at 2.45 on Monday afternoon. If at least one of my observations is taken onboard then we might just reduce our reliance on cutscenes for storytelling.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note the cool Mass Effect 2 N7 shirts I and a few others are sporting – just a shame it looks like such a sausage party…

Choice example at 1:35pm -  still as true as ever.

Your videogame developer association is at a crossroads. The senior board staff are leaving left, right and centre and member apathy is at an all-time high. You’re looking for something, anything, to drum up passion once more in 13,000+ strong community where the vast majority of members are signed up automatically by employers often without their knowledge, or only to recieve industry-related discounts. What you need is a controversy – one so great that it will get folks who had never even considered themselves members calling to arms, becoming the hottest gossip in studios around the globe as the soap-opera plays out in real-time…

In step Dr. Timothy Langdell, a masterstoke of invention in a creative industry run on heroes and villains. This surely fictitious character was supposedly a board member on an association to advocate the rights of game developers internationally, yet was continuously embroiled in litigation with the most defenseless small game-related companies unfortunate enough to approach his trademarked “EDGE” brand. This was a developer/publisher with a claim to over 700 games backing up that brand, yet had not released a game since the early 1980s, leaving confusion in the marketplace (and therefore a legal leg to stand on) impossible. Such a stickler for legality, Doc Dastardly had been exposed time and time again using others work for his own financial and status gain, ranging from game, comic and television works in no way connected to him, to stooping so low as to pass off a 15 year old girl’s artwork as coverart for his incoming “products”.

It was this last practice that drew the ire of most IGDA members already frustrated with his ongoing suit against a celebrated iPhone game developer, signing Cease and Desists as IGDA Board Member, further damaging the reputation of the organisation. To which end, over 2000 members including myself signed a petition to oust him, or at least call a meeting to do so. A meeting was called, (to decide how to call a meeting), after which the meeting was set. In some semblance of decency, Little Langdell resigned a week later, but not without kicking and screaming on the IGDA forums and comically failing in updating his online store to support his case.

So there it was – a villain vanquished – the members feel empowered and are now looking to the next challenge in resurrecting the IGDA’s status – the character served his purpose. But the story continues. Langdell, it appears, is not so fictitious after all, and lives on beyond the board. You can follow his continuing comically incompetent capers here…

[Unlike the subject, sprite image used with permission of the artist]