Rockstar and the ethos of interactivity
Game design is in a knockdown, drag out fight with itself right now, and I doubt most gamers realize it. In one corner there’s interactivity: it’s what makes games games, one of their distinguishing characteristics. In the other, narrative. Sometimes they get along. Sometimes they don’t.
Rockstar is an epicenter of the mainstream gaming landscape, so it makes sense that they’re a focal point in this conflict as well. The GTA series eats, sleeps, and shits freedom. This is a game that allowed and encouraged more play (in the best sense of the word) than almost any other game that came before it. There’s a reason GTA III was so popular, and I suspect it has little to do with the story and more to do with the freedom to hop in any vehicle you can see and turn it into a flaming vessel of chaos and destruction. That is powerful! You can’t deny it. To the majority of gamers, it was also new. GTA popped a lot of freedom cherries.
Taking into account your average video game narrative, the stories and storytelling of the GTA series are clearly a cut above the rest. The desire to tell these stories, which I’m sure Rockstar wants to make the quality of at least a good primetime TV show, and to tell them in ways which their fans will instantly understand and be drawn to, is partly the sources of the conflict.
Plainly put, cut-scenes are boring. I know this opinion is not monolithic, or perhaps not even pervasive. But make no mistake: these two elements are at odds with one another. The open world of GTA is enthralling, but it makes the linear, hands-off story seem about as fun as Paul Beumer’s somnolent marches through war-torn France. These sequences squelch the freedom that GTA doles out so liberally in every other aspect of its design and creates dischord between GTA’s embrace of interactivity and its cut-scene driven plotlines. Some other games have done away with them and it’s worked out pretty well.
My perspective on this issue is clear, but I’ll go ahead and make it crystal: non-interactive cut-scenes and plot elements in GTA need to go.