Unskippable Cutscenes & Other Pure Evil

I often say that if a single-player video game isn't worth playing twice then it's not worth playing at all. That might be a slight exaggeration — surely "game worth playing exactly once" does lie somewhere between "game worth playing twice" and "game worth uninstalling" — but honestly, if I get to the end of a game and I don't want to do it again, it probably wasn't very fun. In my opinion, one should be able to enjoy a game multiple times, twice being the bare minimum.

Surely, some people will disagree, and their counterargument will most likely go something like this: "After the first time, you already know how it ends!" Well, yeah, it ends with me winning. If your experience with a game is spoiled because you already know the end of an underlying story, which probably exists only to provide context to some otherwise meaningless depictions of violence, the game isn't a very good one. It's supposed to be a game, after all, not a movie. Do I like story-driven games? Sure. But a game needs to be fun for reasons other than its plot twists. Otherwise, it should have been a movie, and anyone who likes it could have watched a movie instead. Moreover, if there's a game whose plot is the primary appeal, it should have a plot that's good enough for an eventual second run. Lots of people like to watch a good movie more than once, right?

But let's say the plot isn't so great that I want to see it and hear it again. Let's say I'm about to play a game a second time because the actual game was fun, or because I missed a few optional objectives the first time, or because my high score isn't high enough. If that's the case, I shouldn't be forced to see and hear the story a second time, and since no reasonable person would ever disagree with that statement, I don't understand why any video game developer ever thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea.

I recently finished L.A. Noire. Played well the first time around, this game might not warrant a second play-through, but I missed plenty of clues and botched more than a few interrogations, so I decided to go back for the five-star ratings (and a few achievements) I missed. And it would have been pretty fun if I didn't have to watch every single cutscene a second time. Why can't we skip the cutscenes in L.A. Noire? I have no idea. I've heard that cutscenes in Max Payne 3 are unskippable because the game uses that time to load, but L.A. Noire has separate loading screens, so I doubt it's the same situation. So, disguised loading screens aside, why would a game ever have unskippable cutscenes? It turns out that there are no good reasons.

Sometimes we wonder why and how a serial killer would decide to brutally murder dozens of people. That a human could do something so senselessly awful is almost beyond comprehension. Two possible explanations come to mind: either the serial killer is very simply insane and his or her actions are the result of a mental defect, or true evil exists in the world and it lives inside that person. Unskippable cutscenes are a much lesser crime than repeated homicide but the same two explanations apply and I can't think of any others. The developers of a game must be crazy (or profoundly stupid) to think that a person playing the game for the second time won't be annoyed by the inability to opt out of re-watching something as pointless as a cutscene. On the other hand, if they do know that such a restriction annoys players, the only reason to implement unskippable cutscenes would be to annoy players and that's pure evil. Surely it's a lesser evil than murder, but the evil is still pure because the only conceivable objective is to cause suffering.

Whether it's intentional or not, the unskippable cutscene often acts as an irritating punishment for failure. In games that forbid players from opting out of having a mediocre story shoved down their throats, there always seems to be a difficult boss fight (or a difficult something) preceded by a long and boring scene that's only entertaining once. And you end up seeing it fifteen times. If that's not bad game design, I don't know what is. Fortunately, none of the cutscenes in L.A. Noire are extremely long and no particular part of the game is likely to be repeated numerous times (since nothing in the game is very challenging and there's an option that allows awful players to skip action sequences). Still, there's no reason for unskippable cutscenes, especially since the concept of skipping a cutscene has been around for approximately as long as cutscenes have existed.

I guess the developers think their story is so important that we shouldn't attempt to enjoy the game without it. They think they need to save us from ourselves by preventing us from "accidentally" missing something important. Sometimes, a story is important enough that it shouldn't be skipped; if I saw someone skipping cutscenes while playing Alan Wake for the first time, I'd probably recommend that they just play a different game. But that's no reason to take away options.

This is one of those things that would cause us to boycott a game if only we had an ounce of self control. Unfortunately, we don't. It's unforgivable, but it's still tolerable enough that the developers and publishers are unlikely to suffer financially as a result, so they won't learn any lessons no matter how much I complain.