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The Digital Library is published by the Digital Games Research Association - DiGRA. Free for educational and research use; commercial use or redistribution restricted and only by permission. |
In Defense of Cutscenes
Abstract: The technique of cutscenes, as typically found in story-based action games, is placed within a wider discursive problematic, focusing on the role of pre-written narratives in general. Within a theoretical framework raised by Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen and Marie-Laure Ryan, I discuss the relations between the ergodic and the representational, and between play and narration. I argue that any game event is also a representational event, a part of a typical and familiar symbolic action, in which cutscenes often play a crucial part. Through cutscenes, the ergodic effort acquires typical meanings from the generic worlds of popular culture. Keywords: Ergodics, narrative, rhetoric, representation, genre, popular culture. |
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