Structure is a critical component of all art. Whether it be uses of the golden ratio in painting, the sonata form in music, or the three-act architecture advised by theorists of contemporary screenwriting, the shape of a work is not just a wrapper for the content, it is what allows the content to have meaning. Even those aspects of modernist art that sought to abandon traditional structures most often smuggled in new ones in their places: T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land looked like it was in randomly cut-up “free verse” but was very tightly organised. Free-jazz musicians instinctively impose structure on the fly: here the bass player noodles around on his own for a while; now let’s all honk our heads off for a climax.

Visual art, even a Jackson Pollock drip painting, cannot help but imply structures. In the other, temporal arts, the most apparently formless work will still generally have a discernable beginning, middle, and an end. The need for this kind of narrative shape (though it need not imply a traditional “storytelling” mode) seems hard-wired into us.

Which makes videogames as they currently stand all the more peculiar. Because most players will not see the ending of a large number of games, and the beginnings are on the whole amazingly shoddy. If this is true, they fail structurally as entertainment experiences.

The literary critic Frank Kermode once wrote a book called The Sense of an Ending. Just as important is the sense of a beginning. Novels are celebrated for their famous first lines: Iain Banks’s “It was the day my grandmother exploded” in The Crow Road; or Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” in Pride and Prejudice. Music, too, trades on first impressions: the first few notes of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, are thrilling calls to action. Great movies, too, begin well: Trinity’s run in The Matrix, the sex scene in Betty Blue, or countless pre-credits stunt extravaganzas in Bond films.

And then we turn to videogames and what do we find? I am not going to allow in evidence any scene-setting FMV, I want to know how the *game* begins, what happens when you start playing it. Most often, these days, it is a kind of training mission. Thief: Deadly Shadows or Galleon both prod you along a highly linear scenario in which on-screen instructions and tests teach you which button does what. These instructions are completely disconnected from the gameworld fiction. As I was following the old guy and his daughter up to their house in Galleon, for example, I somehow contrived to fall off the cliff, nearly kill myself, and sprint back up to join them, only to discover they expressed no concern at my erratically superhuman behaviour. It seems bizarre that games which work so hard to establish an atmospheric scenario are so willing to compromise it from the offset.

By contrast, the brilliant beginning of Metal Gear Solid 2, with Snake crouching in the rain on the deck of the tanker, leverages Kojima’s well-known postmodern ludicity by allowing in-game characters to refer to button-pressing, and so it teaches you the basics within the fiction. Halo, too, makes a welcome gesture towards this kind of solution when the decision of inverting the y-axis is contextualised as the fiction of fine-tuning your Master Chief suit aboard ship.

What is notable about these counter-examples is that they are not just training missions, but the genuine initial stages of the games, in which the flow of newbie information gradually fades so that you find yourself already playing the game for real. Contrarily, Deus Ex: Invisible War suffers from an excruciatingly boring first level, packed full of expository dialogue and player shepherding. Overall, training levels, whether self-contained as in Thief 3 or not, are very likely to smudge the impact of a game’s beginning in critical ways. You are not really playing the game per se yet; but nor are you just practising. You are half-way between worlds, half-immersed in a clunky no-man’s-land.

The worst example of a training mission ever conceived has to be the teeth-gnashing initial driving test in Driver, a superb way of punishing anyone who had just given the developers their money. Who knows how many people never got out of the garage at all? But that is only an extreme example of another fact about videogame beginnings. The curious situation appears to be that most videogames are least fun to play right at the start.

This is a structural problem common to many games that rely on power-ups, skill increases and so on to provide a sense of progression. If you are too weak and unequipped at the beginning, the promise of future enjoyment may not be enough to hold a gamer’s attention. Many gamers, it seems, gave up on Manhunt before it becomes really interesting, when firearms appear. I can’t really blame them: it’s the game’s fault for taking too long to reveal its genius.

Nor can I find it in myself to censure the FHM reviewer who, famously, gave Ninja Gaiden one star out of five because he never got past the first boss. It took me more times than I care to admit, too. Farcically, the game actually gets easier after that. The stupidly difficult first level is like a big “Keep Out” sign to the massmarket. Games like Ninja Gaiden and Manhunt appear to rely cynically on the poor consumer’s desperation to get value for money out of a game that she is not enjoying at the start. Rather than revelling in a great beginning, as we should be able to, we are trying to make the tedium of the beginning a distant memory once we arrive at the heart of the game.

Around 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Horace gave some famous advice to storytellers: begin “in medias res”. That is, throw your reader into the heart of the action straight away without wasting time on throat-clearing exercises. It is no accident that great videogames such as MGS2 or Half-Life do just that. Other games, while still explaining controls, at least plunge you straight into adrenalized situations from the word go, as in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where you, as Gandalf, are immediately fighting for Helm’s Deep; or in Forbidden Siren, where you are fleeing a disgusting zombie policeman.

As gamers we should settle for nothing less. We do not owe games our attention; they should earn it. If a game does not begin well, we will be less inclined than ever to see if it ends well.

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