This mission is called Shock and Awe. You may want to check out some of the other YouTube movies of this mission. Because the player has control over the character's movement, the second part can be played a variety of different ways. One of the interesting aspects of this that is not in the embedded movie is when the player moves close to the playground. You can faintly hear children's voices (there is a snipet of this at about 3:28 in the embedded video). Rather disturbing.
Interactivity is what sets video games and movies squarly apart. A movie is the same each time you watch it. A game's plot may always come out the same in some games, but your path to getting to that conclusion is almost always different. Also, you take that path. With a movie, you watch someone else take it. This is not to poo poo movies, but this is a key difference between the two.
Within in my favorite genre, Role Playing Games, there have been many attempts to make a truly interactive story. This takes many different forms, which is actually nice to see developers experimenting.
Example one: Fire Emblem, Path of Radiance. In this tactics game, death was permanent. If one of your units fell in battle, then the other characters would react and the story would change to reflect this loss. Garret cannot be the first one to leap and attack the enemy general if he died two months ago. This made me play very cautiously and heal someone if they so much as got a splinter. Very complicated to design, but quite successful.
Example two: Fable. Fable was an action RPG that claimed complete freedom. It was well received but got a little bashed for not really having anywhere near the amount of promised freedom. You could be a good or evil hero. However, the story demanded that your character save the world. It seemed more than a little contrived at times that this horrible evil man was being held up as the world's only beacon of hope. This system is known as a moral choice system, and they usually have this problem. In the end, this usually boils down to forcing the player to play through the game twice if they want to see all the content, or at least both endings. Sometimes the very end is the only difference.
Example three: Oblivion. Oblivion also was claiming large amounts of freedom. You could do evil things, or good things. However, I found that in order to be evil as per the game's designation, I had to join the assassin's guild. If I tried more conventional, and freeform, methods of evilness, that I would either have guards chasing me constantly or that everyone would flee in terror at my approach. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to buy arrows from a merchant who's tearing away from you at top speed, leaving behind only a trail of terrified wee. In the end however, the story doesn't change one bit if you are evil or good. So in this case, the story is completely ridgid with a nice layer of fake interactivity draped over it.
Giving the player control over the story is great. Player's love it when the feel they are actually making a difference. However, a problem arises when you do this: how do you handle sequels? Which ending do you consider canon? From my examples, Oblivion will have the least trouble with this. Only one possible outcome leads to easy sequel writing. Fable solved this problem by setting the second game far in the future. The bad guy was slain either way and (according to an in game book) "the records regarding the hero are muddled and conflicting". That covers their own butts by allowing for any way you played the game to fall under that description. Fire Emblem had the most problems, as you can probably imagine. Since they could not guarantee that any of the characters except the main one (his death was immediate Game Over) he was the only one they carried over to the next game.
The Mass Effect games have broken new ground in this area. They are one of the few games these days that allows you to directly port your character over from the first game. Several choices you made in the first game are mentioned in the second. Characters you pissed off in the first game are still mad. Anyone who died stays dead. This will continue on into the third game, as it was originally announced as a triliogy. Now, you will have the play your way through the first game to change your set up in the second and see all the possible differences.
And then you have games like Call of Duty 4, where the story doesn't change, but the player gets to truly experience what is happening in the world. Which feels more interactive to you?
This one's for you Adoring Fan... though actually with him it was personal... VERY personal.
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