N'Gai,

I'm using my Dell desktop subweapon to write this, my final letter in our series. I could have used my Apple laptop or texted this whole thing over my cell phone. But I wanted to level up my home computer.

Now you've made something perfectly clear in your previous letter. You're a gameplay guy. You're not one of those people who is going to be seduced by a pretty screenshot or tricked by a lovely cutscene. No sir. You demand quality gameplay, not pomp and circumstance. If only the marketing divisions of gaming companies shared your values. I know many gamers do. And rightly they should.

But allow me to pound the terrain at your feet a little to see if you still want to hold as steadfastly to those values. Allow me to praise some non-interactive moments in gaming history.

I'm taking this tack because of a question you asked me. I said I was more moved by Kratos' quest in the first God of War than in the second. You asked me: "How much did you care about Kratos during the gameplay as opposed to during the cutscenes?" You provided a superb analysis of how, in Ico, the gameplay and control mechanics define the characters and develop the player's attachment to them, no movie scenes required. You also praised what you feel is the sole example of story being woven into the game mechanics in the first God of War: Kratos fighting a horde of himself. Here comes my Phoenix Wright "objection!"

I believe that in the interest of defining and praising games as interactive entertainment, a bias has arisen against those moments that are not interactive. My issue is that some of the most powerful moments I can remember experiencing in games occurred in scenarios I literally had no control over. (I'm going to deftly avoid spoilers here, as best I can):

• Knights of the Old Republic: The game's big reveal--the one no KOTOR gamer will ever forget and that stands as one of the best plot twists in the medium's history--occurs in a cut-scene. It's rendered in-game, but it's something the player has no control over. It involves the discovery of who a key character really is and involves a slow pan from behind the character to the front. If the player had control, they might have swung the camera the wrong way and missed the amazing revelation. If they had any control of the character in the scene, they might not have had the experience I had: sitting, waiting, watching the scene develop and having it dawn on me, split seconds before it happened, what I was about to see. The power in the scene is that you cannot do anything about what is happening.
• Silent Hill 2: At the end, after you find out how your player-character's wife really died, you're given only minimal control: you can just walk the lead guy down a long hallway. As you walk, you hear a letter from your dead wife sorrowfully explaining everything and justifying her own murder. You can't turn back during this walk. You can't control the pace at which she reads. You can just shuffle on in shock. (It reminds me of the scene in Metal Gear Solid 3 that I know you liked, when Snake slowly climbs straight up a really high cliff, a trek made long enough to allow Team Kojima to turn the scene into a musical set-piece).
• Killer 7: I'm going to spoil this one flat-out, because who that is reading this and hasn't played it is really going to go to the end? You spend the game using clunky controls to maneuver seven different scarred and beaten hitmen in a series of shootouts against creepy enemies. One of the seven who you control seems like a wimp. He's the rescuer. You use him to run into the field and rescue any of the other hitmen if you get them shot down. But his gun is weak, and he carries a big briefcase that he seems to have no use for. He's quiet and kind of lame. Late in the game you take control of this wimpy guy and make a return to a hotel level, which, if memory serves, is now depicted in black and white. There are no enemies for you to fight; just several splotches of blood to investigate, one or two per floor. You approach the first and a wholly non-interactive flashback cutscene is triggered. In it, you see your wimpy guy gunning down a healthy-looking version of one of your hitmen. You check out another blood spot and see your wimpy guy gun down another healthy version of another one of the hitmen -- in cold blood. By the third, fourth and fifth one, you realize what is going on. His character, who you used to think was the weakest and was the one you never really liked controlling? Well, before the game began, he apparently murdered the other six you've been playing as. You've really only been dealing with his delusions that the others are still alive. You've only been controlling him. And in that briefcase he's been toting? That's where he keeps the weapons he used to murder each of them in cold blood. The power of this comes from the hotel cutscenes. It's an incredible sequence.

I'm not trying to badger you with my more-encyclopedic-than-thou knowledge of games. Rather, I've never previously articulated the emotional value I now realize games can generate by switching to a non-interactive mode, subjecting the player to an impotent state and walloping them with a strong emotional moment. I didn't pay much mind when Gears of War scripter Susan O'Connor recently boasted about a scene in which the game's designers chose to kill off one of Marcus Fenix's commanding officers in a cutscene. She pointed out that the scene rendered the player as helpless to interact and try to stop things as was Marcus, who was pinned under enemy fire the whole time.

Getting this back to your question about whether the gameplay or the cut-scenes in the first God of War made me care as much as I have stated about Kratos' quest, I need to talk about my own favorite scene from the game. It uses a great blend of interactive and non-interactive moments. The scene comes a couple of hours into the game. At that point I've done many bloody, barbaric things as the puppeteer of Kratos. I ripped people's arms off and stabbed them with their own swords! Just nasty stuff. Fairly early in the game, while the siege of Athens is still under way, Kratos is tasked with rescuing a woman--I can't recall who and it doesn't really matter--from the second floor of a temple of some sort. Normal video game flow would have Kratos hacking up the bad guys and then winning the affection of the beautiful lady. Not so this time. The player hacks up the bad guys and then runs up toward the lady. She has more of a moral compass than most video game damsels in distress and is horrified by the brutality of her rescuer. So in a cut-scene--while Kratos can do nothing--she flees and runs right off a balcony. She falls to her death. Out of the hands of the player and out of the grasp of Kratos, that scene gains its power.

The function of most of the rest of the cut scenes in the first God of War was to deliver information about Kratos' past. Since his past is the story of an uncontrollable lust for power I again don't' might having no control as I watched that story unfold.

I agree with you that gameplay is pre-eminent, but I don't see a fault in the artful use of non-interactive moments to hit certain emotional beats. Now if we were talking about some Final Fantasy-style cutscenes being used solely to express how heroic the hero is, what a great and lovely flower-dancer the dainty love interest is or how awesome the crew's traveling air-ship is, then I'd be calling for the editing scissors as quickly as would you.

I guess I should mention God of War II at some point in this letter. Like the fact that I beat the game. I want to bounce a few things off you about the tail ends of games, without, of course, giving too much away.

Revisiting scenes from earlier games: Don't worry, I'm not going to ruin it for you--not completely. Just know that near the end of God of War II something will happen that will transport you right into a scene from the first game. Now if there's a kind of interactivity you really want me to praise, it's this kind. Consider that the malleability of all video game scenes is an illusion. Once you do something in them, you've played through--maybe, at best, created--an event. Because games and game levels can be re-played, we can re-open those chapters and try to have them play out differently. Invariably, though, they don't change too much and scenarios stay fairly fixed. A game sequel, however, can re-use or re-create familiar assets and literally drop you back to a moment you've already been and let you mess with things from another angle.

When this kind of thing happens in the movies, as in, say, "Back to the Future," you're merely watching Michael J. Fox interact with his past. That's cute and all, but in God of War II you're able to interact with a past you were--virtually--in yourself. It's a neat sort of pseudo-time-travel games can suck you into. Other games that have done this that I can recall are Sly 3, which has you go back and play the "memory" of a boss battle that you would have played in an earlier Sly Cooper game. Late in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas you get to run a mission in Grand Theft Auto III's Liberty City. The most familiar example to SNES-era gamers would probably be Super Metroid, which follows up a prologue with an eerily quiet return to the battle-torn environment that players probably last ran through in the closing, catastrophic moments of Metroid on the NES. I would like to see more game designers exploit this advantage of the gaming medium: the ability to return players to their past and, better, to have them interact with it. It's a magical feeling.

Sequels that say goodbye to hardware: My second-favorite game of all time, the side-scroller Yoshi's Island featured several end-of-level boss battle. The bosses were always based on normal enemies who, when sprinkled with a wizard's spells grew to screen-filling giant size. Yoshi's was one of the final major games on the SNES and therefore one of the last 2D console games Nintendo was going to be making in a while. I'll always take it as a tip of the hat to the old and new generations alike that that final sprinkling of the game made a little Bowser grow not just to screen-filling size, but into a third dimension. While all other bosses essentially stood at screen-right, giant Bowser approached, Godzilla-style, as a giant from the background. He bore right down on Yoshi, who suddenly wasn't able to throw his eggs left, right, up or down, but instead into the background--into a new angle of the playing field. And then the game ended and the Mario world went into 3D.

God of War II wraps with a cut-scene (uh-oh!) that sets up the premise for the sequel. Without giving anything away, just trust me that what is being shown is a situation you'll want to play through, but which you'll know the PS2 could never render in real time. So in essence the game ends with a message: Kratos' adventure is about to get so big, the system you're playing on can't handle it. I think that's a great touch.

I need to wrap up now, with nary enough time to tell you that Okami did the thing you were talking about regarding giving the enemy characters in a game control of the same visual and interactive language as the player. You spend the first half of Okami tossing enemies around with calligraphy brush-strokes. Then you fight this one boss enemy. When you draw a stroke against him, an enemy brush crosses it out and draws it's own. It's a great touch, and one that you're right to encourage for future God of War games.

As this is my last turn in this exchange, I'd like to thank you for batting the ball back and forth with me. This was a fun experiment. You're going to get the last word, so speak on whatever strikes your fancy.

I have one request: I would like you to handle one question for me. You raved about God of War II in late February. For a time you couldn't stop playing it. Then you did. Some people complain about the length of games. Some find difficulty a turn-off. Others might think a good game should be savored as long as possible. I'd love to know what you think. Did you think back in late February that you'd be done with the game by now? If so, what went wrong? You or the game? Or is this the way gaming should be? What motivates us as players and what gets in the way of that is certainly a ripe topic for discussion.

It's been a blast...

-Stephen

***

Stephen,

Last thing's first. In my February 22nd post which inspired this exchange, I did say that I wanted to savor my God of War II experience for as long as possible. Seriously, though, real life just got in the way of God of War II. I got the flu, I went to the West Coast for Game Developers Conference, then I came back and had to prepare to move offices. In fact, I've been so focused on the blog this week that I'm still not ready to move. Sigh.

That's not to say that I didn't play any games. I got through a couple of levels of Alien Syndrome and Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters. I beat--sorry, Alex; I completed--flOw. And I've spent a few hours cumulatively with the third installment of my beloved Virtua Tennis getting my ass kicked on Very Hard. What all of these have in common is that they are experiences that are easy get into and get out of. Call it Interstitial Gaming, played between chunks of real life, or GameSnacking. The aforementioned games are perfect for this. By contrast, God of War II, like Okami, or Gears of War, or Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, is a Main Event, a Feature Presentation, a GameEntree, something I have to make time for. And between the magazine, the blog, side projects and the NYC nightlife, I don't always make time to play this second type of game. Maybe we can discuss this further in a future exchange.

Back to God of War II and your defense of cutscenes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you did have some control over the majority of the sequences that you so eloquently described. Like walking down the hallway in Silent Hill 2, or navigating your way to the bloodstains in Killer 7, the level of interactivity is minimal, but it's still present. The scene with the Oracle in God of War, however, is more akin to the dramatic revelation in Knights of the Old Republic: control is wrenched from the player. My argument, which I'll elaborate upon for the rest of my final post is that even the most minimally interactive sequence is generally preferable to a cutscene. And that if more developers explore pushing as many dramatic and emotional moments as possible out of non-interactive cinematics and into gameplay--even the ones that they think can't be done, but in fact probably can, with a bit of imagination and a lot of hard work--we'll get a lot closer to fulfilling the promise that underlies Electronic Arts' provocative question from the early '80s: Can a Computer Make You Cry?

I agree with you that the Oracle's suicide is powerful. Actually, I take that back. In acting, there's a term called "indicating," where the actor plays the end result (i.e. what the actor wants the audience to feel) as opposed to playing the character, and letting the audience members feel whatever they choose. That's what the God of War team did here. The gave the Oracle just enough screen time to let us know that she's horrified by Kratos, then exit stage right, suicidally. The problem here is that the scene only lasts about 30 to 45 seconds. How much of a truly lasting impression can that have when it's sandwiched between gameplay sections that last about 30 to 45 minutes, with a character that we know nothing about other than that we need to save her? Or, put another way, how much more memorable could her scene have been had the developers made it five or ten minutes long? And, no, I'm not suggesting that they take a page out of Hideo Kojima's book and have the Oracle and Kratos engage in a series of philosophical exchanges about violence and justice. There are other ways to do this. (And I'm not knocking Kojima's cutscenes as it's become fashionable to do lately, but that too is a subject for another Vs. Mode.)

How do movies avoid scenes that indicate--that tell as opposed to show--and what can games learn from this? Let's take a sequence from "Terminator II: Judgment Day" that's emotionally comparable to the Oracle's suicide. It's the scene where Sarah Connor has just eluded her captors in the state mental institution. She rounds the corner and presses the button on the elevator that will take her to freedom...when out comes the Terminator, the relentless killing machine who murdered the father of her child seven years earlier, who very nearly slew her, and whom no-one else believes actually exists. Time slows. She falls to the ground screaming, scrambling to get away from her nightmare made flesh and steel, so desperate to escape the Terminator that she ignores the cries of her son and runs back into the arms of the hospital staff. As they prepare to sedate her, the Terminator strides over, takes them down one by one, then extends its hand to the prone and trembling Sarah Connor and says--in a repeat of Kyle Reese's line from the first film--"Come with me if you want to live."

This sequence works as well as it does because the majority of the audience will have seen the first film, and writer-director James Cameron has already carefully re-established the original events during the scene where the police show her photos security camera photos of the Terminator from 1984 and 1991. So with the slowing of time and the Terminator's dramatic exit from the elevator, we're plunged headlong into Sarah's subjective experience. And even though this sequence is ultimately brief, it's given enough time to breathe and sufficient emotional beats that it makes a lasting impact.

Now let's extrapolate from Cameron's technique to re-imagine the oracle scene from the first God of War. What if rather than having her simply commit suicide after being rescued by Kratos, she instead runs away from us out of sheer terror, either back through parts of the level that we've already played or into completely new section. By using a combination of regular gameplay, shouted exchanges between the two, and button-press interactive cinematics, this sequence could have drawn out the Oracle's fear and loathing of Kratos, shifting perspective between our desire to rescue her in order to progress through the game and her desperate attempts to escape from the infamous Ghost of Sparta.

Hitchcock once said that the difference between surprise and suspense is the difference between a movie where a table suddenly explodes in a restaurant and one where the audience sees the bomb steadily ticking under the table with the diners unaware of its presence, leaving viewers wondering if the patrons will live or die as the bomb inexorably counts down. In other words, the difference between surprise and suspense is the amount of time between action and reaction. The Oracle scene as originally played out in the first God of War is a surprise: it kills off a character we don't really know and didn't really care about other than as a mission objective; once we've completed the mission and finally meet the Oracle, she's quickly dispatched in the brief cutscene you described.

My (hopefully) more suspenseful version gives the Oracle the time she needs to make a real impression upon us, with the space for several dramatic and emotional beats. And, most importantly, the vast majority of it takes place in the gameplay. I'd still end it with her leaping to her death to escape Kratos, but by using a fuller gametelling sequence to carefully draw out her brief time upon the stage, the end result should be a both richer character and a far more memorable encounter for us gamers. You rightly applaud Jaffe for nicely confounding our expectations with the Oracle's suicide. I'm just challenging him and other developers to go even further than that. So despite your excellent selection of powerful (minimally interactive) cutscenes, I still maintain that story elements and emotional beats that are conveyed through gameplay are far more indelible than those communicated through non-interactive sequences--even if the level of interactivity (e.g. God of War II's timed button-presses) is lower than is usually the case in a particular game (e.g. God of War II's weapon attacks, magic, jumping, blocking and dodging.)

This, then, may end up being God of War II's most lasting contribution to the action adventure genre: showing other developers how to better take advantage of multiple levels of interactivity. I've said before that we "see" videogames with our hands. Extending that analogy further, the way cutscenes are used today is the film equivalent of title cards during the silent film era: even though the audience came to the movies to watch people move, they had to do a fair bit of reading to get the full measure of the filmmaker's vision. Similarly, cutscenes leave gamers watching when they should be playing. Sure, cutscenes can communicate critical information; they allow for dramatic and spectacular sequences that might be too difficult to pull off interactively; they provide a nice breather or bookend to lengthy gameplay sections. But just as silent film gave way to the talkies, cutscenes need to keep giving way to gameplay so that our eyes--excuse me, our hands--are constantly engaged. It could be as simple as triggering the vibration in the controller during a cinematic as Kojima Productions does, or making the credits playable, as thatgamecompany did with flOw. It could be more involved, like the active reload system in Gears of War, which I'm on record as saying is a feature that other developers should beg, borrow or steal. And it could be as extensive as God of War II, which has a base system of mechanics that make up the bulk of the experience, but periodically swaps in one of several other systems; and where the developers have given themselves a broader palette to choose from. I fervently hope that others follow suit.

It's nearly eight a.m., I'm feeling rather sleep-deprived, I'm running late to meet my personal trainer--and my only thought is that this exchange has been one of the most stimulating pieces of writing and sustained thought that I've been a part of in years. It's been a pleasure sparring with you. Finally, I'd also like to thank the patient readers who stuck with us all the way to the end; I hope you've found it as enlightening to read as we found it exhilarating to write.

Cheers,

N.