Once upon a time…

The first video games, in this way, encouraged children’s’ imagination. Sonic the hedgehog did not spend half an hour antagonizing his arch-enemy Dr. Robotnik with cute puns before you confronted him, so, if you were someone with just a little bit of creativity, which most kids have in spades anyway, you tended to fill in the blanks yourself.

Boy, how the times have changed since then. Many games these days have such lengthy cinema scenes that gamers frequently find themselves repeatedly tapping joystick buttons in order to get back to actually playing the game itself.

On some occasions, the stories told by these games are so exceptionally compelling that one tends to forgive and forget. Last year’s seminal Metal Gear Solid 4:Guns of the Patriots on the Playstation 3 is one of those examples. Sure, depending on your tolerance for philosophical mumbo-jumbo and ruminations about the meaning of war mixed in with snapping fools’ necks and sneaking around military bases, even it could get a little boring. You’ve got to admit, though, that seeing protagonist Solid Snake’s psychological torment as he went on one final mission, increasingly ravaged by his fast-degenerating cells, was a sight to behold.

Still, considering just how pedestrian the average action game’s story is, cut scenes are usually not very interesting. Many developers are obsessed with creating loads and loads of these scenes simply because they now have the power to imitate Hollywood. But why is the industry so taken with mimicking what someone else is already so good at?

What developers instead need to do, and there is increasing evidence to show we are moving toward this encouraging trend, is promote the unique interactivity offered by the gaming medium. In no other place can you find the possibility of giving your audience such an amount of control over a story. Great movies, novels, plays or short stories can have multiple layers of meaning to reward discerning consumers, true. And we’ve seen experimental playwrights stop stage plays in the middle of proceedings and offer audiences a choice of what they would like to see as an ending.

But this is actually limited compared to what games can do, and only in the last few years have developers begun to understand. I remember playing Metroid Prime on the Gamecube in 2002 and simply being blown away by an extremely simple concept. Retro Studios, who were behind the sci-fi adventure, left it almost entirely up to you to decide how much you wanted to know about the extremely deep world they had created. Outfitted with a computer scanner, your character Samus Aran explored a quasi-abandoned planet, hostile alien factories and other areas. The scanning tool allowed you to look for what the game called “log entries,” essentially fancy holographic journals that you could read to piece together what had happened to the planet of Tallon IV before you arrived there. It wasn’t the first time something like this was used in a video game, but Retro crafted its tale so elaborately, and left gamers so completely free to decide how much of the story they wanted told, that many designers took notice.

Radical Studios and publisher Activision look like they are about to take this concept to a higher level with the upcoming action game Prototype for the PS3 and X-Box 360. Gamers step into the shoes of Alex Mercer, an ultra-powerful protagonist who has no memory of who he is, as he stumbles out of a hospital bed where some clearly nasty experiments have been conducted on him. Emerging in a carefully recreated New York City after escaping, Mercer realizes he has the power to steal bits and pieces of memories of other characters when he attacks them. He sets out on a quest to figure out exactly who he is and what happened to him. The game thus rewards you for using your memory-stealing powers as frequently as possible. Pretty cool, no?

Of course, from its trailers, it’s apparent the game also relies on the more traditional cinema cut scenes to advance its story. So I hope that works out.