I like to think of myself as a smart purchaser when it comes to video games. They cost so much money to a college student that I just can’t help but carefully consider almost every one before adding it to my library. I have an old CD case my brother wasn’t using that I’ve filled with all of my game discs, and browsing through it, I come across titles that almost nobody can disagree with. Sure, every game has its opposition, but most of these are widely celebrated, critically acclaimed accomplishments and / or fan favorites. One of my favorite games, however, is Need For Speed: Most Wanted, which definitely had some significant backlash, but stayed in a safe place in my heart for the duration of this negativity.

It had one great moment that sprang to mind as soon as I thought about beginning this article. The beginning of the game opens with a few minutes of cut scenes, with the player’s car (a boner-inspiring BMW M3 GTR) zipping about the fictional city. You, from the driver’s seat of the car, meet a cute girl who also likes the race (sigh), a crooked cop bent on taking down street racing, and your soon-to-be arch-nemesis, some douche calling himself Razor who fucks with your car before a race, resulting in your concession of the oh-so-sweet vehicle and arrest shortly thereafter. At the beginning of the race, however, is this great moment I mentioned. In this particular cut scene, you are chasing after Razor in your BMW, and the game merges from the cut scenes you’ve been watching to the gameplay you’ll be experiencing without a split second of hesitation.

I think of two specific games when I try to come up with examples of seamless mixtures of gameplay and exposition. At least, those with more moments like the one I just mentioned. Many of them strive to pull off at least a few, but which games spring to mind when I think bigger than ‘moments’ and start considering ‘total game experience?’

Portal is an obvious choice. It’s a particularly unique title already, as an FPS puzzle game, but it has something else special, which I will get to after this brief message. I don’t know if Portal fans hate it being called an FPS, but I’m not sure I care. It’s in first person, and there is a gun in my hands which I shoot. That something special I just mentioned has to do with the game’s choice of perspective, too. Portal is low on story, but heavy on exposition and narrative gameplay, and the immersion inherently involved when placing the player in a first person perspective is a massive help when trying to achieve this mixture.

GLaDOS purrs and roars at you while you hop around, firing tears into the fabric of space and time, and the game’s narrative is nearly perfect, despite the story essentially being ‘We don’t know why or how, but you are an expendable part of an experiment and if you want to live, escape this building while the AI overseer tries to stop you.’ That, truthfully, is pretty much all you ever find out during the game. Oh, the cake is a lie, sure, and the player character is a clone, but as far as plot foundations go, the first part of my sentence, ‘we don’t know why or how‘ is the most significant. It means the storyline is basically sweet fuck all; the entire narrative is spent finding clues to the rest of your situation, but never truly reaching an explanation for it.

The only thing keeping Portal from ascending into the video game equivalent of Nirvana, Valhalla and Heaven combined is its load times. Next to a game like Mass Effect, Portal’s load times seem like something only a budget development team would agree to. They are especially glaring and a seemingly unpolished draw on the game’s immersion because of its achievements elsewhere. The gameplay is solid, the narrative is surprisingly well written despite (or because of) its missing storyline, and the seams between the two are nearly nonexistent until you come across a load screen. What the fuck was even happening in the minds of the people that said yes to loading screens? If Portal had done with elevators exactly what Mass Effect did, the game would be the stuff of legends, as its last remaining discs were ground into a fine powder, sold on the black market, and eventually snorted by Asian businessmen seeking to imbue their body with the power of fucking incredible.

My colleagues were quick in the early stages of this article to pose a few questions about load times, and here are the two most important for me to answer: “Isn’t it silly to expect something like that of every game that is considered to be great? And don’t Mass Effect’s elevator sequences still limit immersion somewhat?” The man deserves some credit for bringing these things up, because without addressing them, I think I’d have left my point of view in a weak state. I’ll answer them in order.

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