on cutscenes, endings, and videogame narrative structure

videogames are an inherently non-linear medium. they are ergodic - they require input and effort from the player to traverse the text. they are all, to some extent, real-time - they react to your inputs and change accordingly in front of you. they are not static, nor do they run on their own. in these ways, they are unique as a medium, and this brings many aesthetic possibilities that do not exist elsewhere.

despite this, they also have strong roots within other media - primarily cinema, but also influenced by literature, theatre, fine art, etc. these have influenced the development of game design as an artform, with designers drawing from concepts already proven to be effective in other forms to create their own work.

these structures can be seen everywhere throughout the videogame world. from the cutscene, which borrows the language of cinema to enhance the story outside of the bounds of gameplay, to the three-act storytelling structure, utilised in games from Octopath Traveler to Silksong. in a lot of ways, they have allowed videogames to grow past their initial limits. many memorable and defining videogame moments come from cutscenes or traditional story beats - major character deaths, boss fight reveals, tragic endings. they build excitement or pathos, diversify the play experience, and take advantage of the multimedia abilities of computers to deliver an experience that crosses the boundaries of artforms.

many games challenge this linearity in various ways - player actions dictating the pace of the story, repeating gameplay loops that take place in an atemporal zone, a variety of end states (permanent or otherwise) that change or negate the nature of the climax. however, these still often fall into one of two models - a set depiction of a gameworld that does not change vastly, or one that changes along one of several predetermined paths created by the developers.

these structures, reliant on the overwhelming usage of non-ludic techniques, can at times feel suffocating. when every game conforms to the tropes of other media, it can feel as if our new medium is failing to find what makes it unique. videogames have grown and changed immensely in the 60 years of their existence, but there are still many potent avenues of game design that have gone vastly unexplored by the mainstream.

primary among these is what i call "emergent design". this refers to the practice of building games from the ground-up as a set of interlocking procedural systems that drive and interact with the player and intelligent npcs, in order to create a vast array of wildly different gamestates that transition between each other unpredictably yet consistently. simply put - it is a design philosophy that allows a game to feel truly reactive, not just in immediate feedback but in major impact.

importantly, emergent design allows for narrative structures that break away from the linear norm of other media. it presents a gameworld that reacts to your actions organically, changing in ways both small and large. these changes can be personal, modelling relationships between individual characters, or they can be structural, such as changes to ecology or economy. there is no ending other than death to these tales, rather they turn into complex, world-spanning narratives that never play out the way you expect. when the events of the perceived story are driven directly by the player's actions, stakes are applied to their every move, creating attachment far greater than to that of a prewritten character we are simply controlling.

emergent design is most commonly seen in tabletop roleplaying games - with the power of human innovation, a gameworld can be made infinitely reactive, with completely unique interactions to each play group. two of the main things that drove the application of linearity to computer gaming have historically been the twin evils of low computing power and high development costs. games with many interaction points must be carefully built, curated, tested, and then processed by the machine. myriad amounts of hand-made interactions are difficult for people to make, whilst far-reaching systemic interactions are hard for computers to calculate. however, we live in an age where the ease of making games is rapidly accelerating. tools for game development are becoming more and more accessible and powerful, whilst machine learning augments human capability and automates the busywork. artificial intelligence makes even the moment-to-moment details of interactive gameplay more powerful and accessible - dialogue, character emotions, random events can all be modelled and generated.

this paves the way for one of the greatest strengths of emergent design - the persuasive rhetoric of systems. all media communicates ideas to their audiences in unique ways, with different media being better suited to convey different patterns of emotions and ideas. procedural rhetoric is the pattern unique to game design - the method by which games model and dissect real-world systems, detailing their functions and analysing their impacts in different situations, letting the player immerse themselves to see every impact of cause and effect. the more detailed the system and the more points of interaction they have, the better the game can communicate - thus, by divesting themselves of prewritten structures and embracing emergent design, games can engage with more sophisticated ideas and explore them in more persuasive ways.

this is not to say there is no place for elements of linear design in games. no game can be truly endless, and knowing when to put a premade stopper or starter on interaction forks can enhance their impact - cutscenes introducing aspects of the world that existed before the player, written unavoidable tragic endings for certain characters, side-stories detailing long-ago events. but we should allow the primary traits of the medium to stand first and foremost and speak for themselves, not as mere underlying gameplay loops that allow prewritten elements to tell their stories in a language unsuited to the form.