The Quick-Time Skinner Box

"They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some boxtops. They write the script with one part missing. It's a new idea. The home-maker, that's me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here, for instance, the man says, `What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?' And he looks at me sitting here centre stage, see? And I say, I say --" She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. " `I think that's fine!' And then they go on with the play until he says, `Do you agree to that, Helen!' and I say, `I sure do!' Isn't that fun, Guy?"

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

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I recently played the adventure game The Wolf Among Us. While the game itself will be worth its own separate post, it also served as my first practical experience of so-called 'quick-time events' or action sequences which prompt the player to mash a certain button within a short time-frame.

Long story short: I hate 'em.

Not that their growing popularity surprises me much. Adventure games, whether text-based or the 2D point-and-click interactive, exploratory detective stories we all err, no, most of us some of us still know and love are a forty-year-old genre, possibly the oldest in computer gaming. Even if they don't go the full 'action' route, the few surviving examples struggle to stay fresh by incorporating some kind of extra gimmick like controlling multiple characters, a gratuitous gunfight here and there, etc.

Last year I referenced a statement by Aristotle as to the importance of decision-making to illustrate a fundamental distinction between good and bad game design... or rather between the design of games and non-games. It is not enough for the player to re-act voluntarily to on-screen stimuli. A good game induces the player to act, to choose between different courses of action - best exemplified by the various strategy genres. Even more linear styles like adventure games at least rely on the player formulating a logical* sequence of events in order to advance the plot.

Quick-time events carry none of that weight. They're pure, brainless twitch, to a greater extent even than what normally passes for twitch-gaming. In a first-person shooter, as dumbed down as they are, the player would at least need the spatial and situational awareness to time a jump over that oncoming van. QTEs instead present you with the most shamefully simplistic psychological conditioning. There is a button. The button makes good things happen. Bad things happen if you do not press the button.

Press.
The.
Button!

Even laboratory pigeons would scoff at the lack of intellectual involvement there.


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* For at times a very loose definition of 'logical'  - yes, I'm aware of how nonsensical adventure game puzzles can get.