I just discovered this thing called Blogs of the Round Table. Each month, they have a topic (about game design) and anybody with a blog can address it and join the discussion. This month's topic is: "How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay?" (http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/). The assertion is made that denouement in video games is frequently either missing or contained in a non-interactive final cutscene.
What is denouement? It is a word that has far too many vowels in the middle. The etymology of the word has to do with untying knots, and the meaning of it can be described in english as "tying up loose ends" in a story. In the denouement, the murderers are revealed, everything is explained, people die and/or get married as needed, and, in the case of most sitcoms, everything returns to be exactly the way it was at the beginning of an episode. A "good" denouement, though, is supposed to demonstrate the consequences of everything that happened before it, so the sitcom example might not apply.
There are several things about the normal structure of games and the concept of a denouement that make them less than compatible.
Interactivity means gameplay, and gameplay implies the act of solving interesting problems; on the other hand, denouements can be thought of as the revelation of interesting solutions to the game plot as a whole. So it is natural that on a game's timeline, there is usually a very slim intersection between plot-related gameplay and a denouement, right when the interesting problems turn into interesting solutions. (I think this points to a set games that can - and sometimes do - have denouements that are satisfyingly incorporated into gameplay: mystery adventure games, where the player's character usually resolves the plot through standard adventure gameplay)
So, gameplay turns into cutscene right at the moment the denouement comes. This is usually, but not always, dissatisfying (the Fallout series, for example, have endings that have been well-received by gamers: a series of cutscenes that show specific consequences of the player's choices at different points in the game.) But denouements sort of feel like cutscenes even in non-interactive media: they are very expositionary; they take the focus away from action or dialog, take the control away from the characters; they often change the unspoken dramatic rules() and mess with time flow by compressing it or jumping around to the "interesting" bits, like a birth or death or marriage of some characters many years after the game.
This sort of thing - especially the messed-up time flow - makes it difficult to make a denouement that is playable in a sensical manner under the same gameplay rules as the rest of the game. One could make the denouement interactive in a different way than what the player had been experiencing before then, a sort of denouement mini-game, but does the player want to do that right before finishing the game (and usually right after getting through the climax)? In fact, does the average player want to have to do *anything* after beating the final boss?
They might not; partially just because that's the way they're used to doing things - beat the boss and go home - which alone is no reason for things to stay that way. But also because the natural flow of a game is different from the natural flow of a story: a game's flow is shaped by a difficulty/learning curve, which (ideally) ramps up steadily until the end, and by the end makes the player feel like they've learned a new skill (namely, how to play that particular game); a story is shaped by an action curve, which rises, climaxes, and then falls again. So, the glaring difference between the two shapes - the falling action and denouement - is typically made up for in a final cutscene.
Because of this discrepancy in flow structures, anything interactive that does come after the climax of the action will likely feel "optional" in a way, not really part of "finishing the game". That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it's something to keep in mind: if you do have an interactive denouement in your game, it shouldn't feel like one more chore to complete before you get to the end; rather, it should be more like an interesting thing that comes *after* the end, sort of like an unlockable for beating the game that increases the replay value.
I think one of the most obvious (and also the most appealing to me) ways to include an interactive denouement in a game is to let the player explore the world after the game is over. I always get frustrated with RPGs that do the opposite: they kick you out to the main screen right after you beat the game, and if you want to explore for any reason, you have to load an earlier save and hope that it wasn't somehow restricted in gameplay because you were so close to the end already (I'm looking at you, Magic Pengel!) It's not difficult to imagine being able to go back and talk to all the people you helped out (or hurt) in an RPG, and see how their lives turned out, or to go through environments you've been to before and see how they've changed since you saved (or destroyed) the world. This doesn't just apply to RPGs though: in any sort of game, the designer can imagine how the resolution of the main plot line would affect the existing levels (or what have you) and let the player go back and re-experience the "resolved" game. A big part of that would probably be revising the gameplay rules to remove part of the conflict, partially to lower the difficulty to exploration level and partially because, well, the player was supposed to resolve the conflict by finishing the game.
Bonus thought:
When talking about games, denouement doesn't just have to apply to the plot or story of the game. Since gameplay is inherently about conflict and problem-solving, we can expand the definition of denouement to be about the resolution of any part of the game structure. For example, picross is a puzzle game where you are given a grid of cells and have to figure out which of those cells are colored black and which stay white. When you are done coloring in the black cells, they make a picture. This can be considered a denouement in that you get a meaningful resolution to the problem at hand. Also, if beating a puzzle game unlocks some sort of "zen" mode (no time limits or goals other than to keep playing and staying alive), this is very similar to the "exploration of a resolved game world" denouement described above.
Bonus thought #2:
All of the thoughts above describe letting a player interact with a denouement that was pre-determined by the designers of the game. It would be interesting to instead design a game where the player gets to manipulate or create his own denouement. I'm personally particularly interested in a game design where the player gets to enact a sort of ret-con.
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