Tired Of Playing Movies?

I recently discussed my "for-good-or-for-ill" decision to make "you" the character of the year, accounting for the recent trend in user-generated social gaming. And I've been thinking that this entire "do-it-yourself" gaming trend comes from a backlash against, say, the newer Final Fantasy games and their ilk. What a fall from grace FFVII and VIII have seen -- what once made young teens dream and weep now makes young adults tease and snicker. But in general, if you gathered up the library of the PlayStation 2, posterchild and champion of the last console generation, and added up all of the minutes of full-motion video scenes and spliced them together into a single long video, how much sitting and watching do you think you'd have to do to get through it all?

RPS hero-o'-mine Jim Rossignol recently declared a moratorium on cutscenes -- at least, whenever it's possible to convey information in an interactive way. "Once upon a time cutscenes were fabulous things," he says. "I ached for the CG because it was so beautiful seeing those sprites being brought to life as full 3D models." Ached is really the best way to describe it -- I'm sure I'm not the only one who can recall shredding the plastic off a new game in a frenzy, popping in the CD and sitting back, ready to have the breath taken away. In those days, cutscenes were actually a reward for playing -- accomplish something great, and suddenly see your flat little gameworld richened, so real you could touch it, or so it seemed back then.

And we still delight in that fantasy-realism. Though I sort of disliked this aspect of it, part of Galaxy's appeal is in seeing Mario and his world look brighter, more lifelike, more touchably vivid than ever before. Last night, I finally peeped the trailer for the FFIV DS remake (Squeenix's site has the kinda amazing full version). God, that game is old. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't find it little surreal and breathtaking to see those characters reimagined in this way. But I also got a scalp-crawl from the Crisis Core trailer, so maybe I'm just a little bit of a latent fangirl.

But largely we got sick of playing this way -- having the game tell us when to stop, and when to go. Good god, I generally do not hate video games. Even a bad game is just a bad game; I don't hate it, per se. But I hate Xenosaga. I freaking loathe it. And I hate it because every two seconds I had to sit through a twenty-minute movie, often after only a few minutes of playing something trite, completing a task the game wanted me to do -- walking my character from one place to another. I felt like a puppet; it was really, really despicably unpleasant. And I have a high tolerance for non-interactivity; many others can only tolerate action games.

And this whole "you're in charge" kind of gaming trend is supposed to be the salve for precisely this principle -- often, we all want something different, so why not give us control of our destinies?

That's nice, but sometimes what we want is to be able to surrender control. For some of us, that's the appeal. Sometimes we don't want to create; we'd rather destroy. Sometimes we don't want to collaborate, we want to be left alone. Because of that, we can argue that do-it-yourself gaming is a cure for these kinds of negative impulses. Why should games be about isolation and violence? Well, because we're human, and we have free will, and sometimes we want to explore darker things when we play, and if I'm told I have to collaborate, network, create and invent instead of experiencing a story and a character outside myself, then I'm still being forced, just as bad as Xenosaga forced me. It forced me, man. I was traumatized. You'd think I'm talking about intellectual rape, here. That is not hot.

Maybe having as little interactivity as Xenosaga did is a bad idea, and created a backlash. But on the other end of the spectrum we have something like Second Life, which I sure as hell hope is not the evolution of gaming. We'll probably all disagree on how much control is too much for a game, and how long a cutscene has to be before it's too long, or whether or not we should have them at all. And as I recently said, it's too soon to establish a baseline. We're all so different -- and the game audience is broadening -- that we may never establish one.

But just because we liked BioShock doesn't mean we're all about to become determinists. Maybe -- hopefully -- next year we'll have a really, really great character at number one on the year-end top five list, and it'll be great because of the way we chose, independently, to respond and relate to it. Maybe it'll be great because of how it responded back.