A recurrent pet peeve of mine in these sorts of threads is the dilution of "cutscene" to the point of fuzziness. Half-Life 2 is often used as an example, yet few who make use of it reference actual cutscenes in the series, and instead label other scenes as the same.
So, thoughts:
- Scripted sequences are a major component of cutscenes, but they can and frequently do exist outside of them as well.
- Gating is a concept that can exist anywhere, it's merely a device to
physically contain a player in the world. It can be soft (ie wander around in an area with a small exit you won't see at first) or hard (ie wait for scripted sequence to finish, shoot down Gunship to open path), but either way it isn't an intrinsic feature of cutscenes.
- Cutscenes are typically defined as being analogous to movie scenes, where the camera is "narrator" controlled and there is no interactivity. In short, it's a device to
physically contain a player in his perspective.
- Both gating and cutscenes can be used to the same end, that is, to constrain the player long enough to hear story details, but the former has a few advantages over the latter (that may or may not prove useful, ymmv):
- No abrupt jump between player and "narrator" perspectives, seamlessness
- The player is restrained in the same ways he's restrained elsewhere, consistency and universality
- Shows more than it tells, rewards attentiveness and investment instead of patience alone
- Generally advances deeper integration of story and play, whereas cutscenes generally segregate the two
Naturally, you have some scenes that blur the lines a tad. The biggest example in HL2 and the Episodes are when you're struck immobilized and retain camera control (Episode Two in particular does this a few times), but generally the divide is easily discerned with regards to HL2. The differences are important, and we should avoid watering down terms to the point that they cover numerous dissimilar things and offer no genuine insights.
