For better or worse, the quick-time event is still hanging around. As a stylistic convention, some people hate it, and some people don't. Oftentimes, people feel the need to come down definitively on one side of the fence. Remove cut-scenes entirely. Wait, cut-scenes look awesome. Leave them in. Expunge all QTEs from human memory. No, stuff in as many as possible.
He's so cute! Press B! Press B!
The evolution screen from Pokémon Blue was probably the first QTE that I ever experienced. The game could have prompted you with a simple "yes" or "no" when it's time for your Bulbasaur to evolve, much as it does when it asks if you'd like to rename your Zubat something horribly inappropriate.
Instead, your beloved creature starts flashing, leaving you precious little time to decide if you want it to learn Razor Leaf sooner or if you just want the damn thing to look cooler already. It's merely a matter of choosing between a button press and doing nothing, but it works. The decision can be agonizing.
While I sometimes find myself arguing as fervently as the next gamer about the purity and integrity of the medium, more often than not I remain ambivalent. Gamers seldom give such subjects proper historical context. Stylistic conventions don't just appear overnight. Rather, much like Charmander, they start off as something primitive and unrefined. Eventually, they evolve into standard practices that we all take for granted.
In my day, we made movies in a shed out in the yard!
Seriously though, this was the world's first film studio.
Films didn't always have editing. In the days of Thomas Edison's film studio, Black Maria, people did little more than film random things that happened. The earliest footage features men lifting weights and boxing, ballerinas dancing, and patrons getting old-fashioned shaves at the barbershop. A film started when the camera rolled and ended when it stopped: no cuts or transitions at all. The cameraman was the director, the cinematographer, and the editor.
Though film is a modern marvel, we'd all have moved on by now if this were the persistent state of cinema. But thanks to D.W. Griffith (for his cinematic innovation, not his repugnant racial ideology), we've gone from no cutting whatsoever to editing so sophisticated that the average viewer usually doesn't even notice it.
It's all about the process. When inventors introduced sound to the film world, many purists railed against it, hoping to preserve the purity of the medium. What they should have been asking was not whether or not sound was a worthwhile innovation, but rather how they could use it to enhance their art.
Not much to see here.
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Our medium is no different. Though the historical narrative of the form is already pretty tired, it bears repeating. We've come a long way from Pong. Modern stories and mechanics are so sophisticated that it's no wonder video games make more money than any other entertainment medium. It's important not to judge the stylistic conventions of modern media too harshly, lest we spoil a potential innovation tomorrow. Conversely, negativity is necessary as well. We need criticism from gamers, journalists, and developers to keep an evolving medium on the right track.
A perfect example of this is the cut-scene. Though developers often use it to reward players after defeating a difficult level or boss, many now consider it an outdated affront to the signature components of medium. It's a device that portrays the cinematic in a non-interactive way.
In an effort to make the convention more unique to gaming, innovators created quick-time events. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don't. Assassin's Creed 2 eschews cinematics for the most part, using the in-game engine and button-pressing prompts to move the story along. It works during the birth sequence, when you (and Desmond) press buttons to learn how to move Ezio. But why do I have to press B to hug Leonardo da Vinci? What's the point?
Is that a rolled-up codex page or are you just
happy to see me?
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Titles like God of War 3, Call of Duty, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed make interactive sequences even more player reliant by using QTEs during combat: throw a knife at someone's eye or pick up an AT-ST and crush it with the Force. While this is certainly more engaging than pressing X to shake someone's hand, it still feels like a failure on some level. Recently, I played the Endor DLC for The Force Unleashed 2. It features a sequence with a lengthy QTE whose latter half required me to sit and watch. This isn't nearly as exciting as mashing X to pull a knife out of my chest.
The line between token interactivity and genuine engagement is hazy at best. A well-done QTE makes a scene more exciting; using the same device to express mundane actions takes the player out of the experience. I've yet to see a QTE that actually integrated the button presses into something that reflected the game's overall experience, but I'm sure it can be done.
As this stylistic convention — as well as many others — grows and changes, I'm sure it will end up being part of gaming's "invisible editing," rather than remaining a embarrassing reminder of the past. We just have to make sure that we're there to guide it along rather than simply pressing B to cancel its evolution.