There are plenty of factors that can completely derail your gaming experience halfway through a game. Awkward controls, idiotic A.I., or a lack of any kind of story can completely kill the mood. But for me there’s nothing worse than painful exposition delivered through unskippable cut scenes.

I’m not sure why writers and game developers feel that it’s acceptable for me to spend my gaming hours staring at my TV screen listening to some of the worst voice acting known to humankind. There are so many games that are guilty of force-feeding plot by means of stagnant drivel. Even otherwise fun titles can be killed when developers decide you, the player, need to take a time-out from what you’ve been doing—playing—and listen to poorly conceived characters explain why what you’re doing is important for seven minutes at a time.

Prototype is a great example. It features fairly innovative and incredibly fun gameplay. Your character is dropped into an open-world, painstakingly rendered replica of Manhattan and instructed to mess everybody up for the duration of the game. There’s a plot in there somewhere but the game comes down to this: you are a mutant who eats people by absorbing them into your body with some kind of hell-goo. You get to swing goo-tentacles around and flip tanks with them. You can hijack helicopters and crash them into the Empire State Building if you’re so inclined. You’re there to wreak havoc on New York City, to leave no civilian undevoured, to play tag with the military.

But somewhere along the way, the developers of Prototype figured that the only way to make their game even more fun would be to throw in some trashy “cinematic” cut scenes to develop their “plot.” They hire some struggling actor to choke out the worst lines ever written, delivered by the character you’ve been steering all along. They make you despise the very guy you’re forced to empathize with. Granted, all your “empathy” consisted of was sitting on his shoulder and making him kill everyone, but still. He was a perfectly acceptable avatar for my virtual aggression already. I didn’t need to know about his feelings. 

Most of the best games reveal their plots with subtlety and care. The gamer doesn’t need to be spoon-fed the storyline in obnoxious chunks because it’s already woven into the world of the game. That’s why Half Life 2 is still one of the greatest achievements of modern gaming. It shows rather than tells. Its few and brief moments of straight exposition are delivered with well-acted, likeable characters. You discover the world and the plot incrementally, drawing clues from your environment and the events that unfold around you.

Even games with huge worlds and a lot of plot manage to engage their players without clunky cut scenes. Giant futuristic RPGs like Fallout 3 or the Mass Effect series allow exposition to become part of the gameplay as the player controls their character’s dialogue choices. You get to ask questions directly, discovering the world through conversation with other characters. The exposition isn’t boring because you control it; you ask what you want to know and piece the plot together with your own choices.   

It comes down to lazy craft. Integrating exposition into gameplay takes more work than just shoving it into short scenes. Game studios know they can get away with selling games without much substance, and so they don’t always bother to include competent writers in their process. But the games that will be remembered—the games that can be considered art in their own right—will always have more elegant methods to their storytelling.