SalamiAttack
All Star
There Is No Such Thing As A Cinematic Video Game
FORMER KOTAKU WRITER....
One of the worst levels in a video game is Half-Life 2’s A Red Letter Day, a level where you run around like a child on crack while people vomit story at you. It’s nothing but exposition and character, and it might be great in a film, but in the game, most players I know are running around, climbing, jumping, fiddling with buttons and knobs, waiting for the game to get on with it and let them fight the bad guys.
But wait, it gets worse!
As a game director, you can’t control the camera and editing the way a film director can, unless you’re making something extremely limited, like a Telltale game or a Bioware-style conversation, and those games tend not to be as good as movies because their conversations are almost exclusively done through over the shoulder shots. Stand still, alternate the camera, bing, bang, boom, done. It’s why most game conversation systems are so boring. You’re just clicking through dialogue options until you get to the end of the conversation. If you’re lucky, the game will have some meaningful choice and consequence system, but how many games truly have meaningful choice and consequence?
Most films tend to do more than over the shoulder conversations, using interesting actions and complex body language to keep things interesting. But, again, this stuff is way more interesting when you’re watching, not when you have expectations of interaction.
5. Playing Along
So, there’s this game, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which starts off with you in this dramatic action sequence that culminates in your best friend’s death. In the next scene, you’re at his funeral, and when you walk up to his casket, a prompt flashes on screen, telling you to press F to pay your respects.
A lot of people made fun of this.
On the surface, it makes sense: how can you really pay respects for someone by just pressing a button? What meaning could possibly be conveyed in a single button press? It seems so absurd.
But this kind of scene happens in a movie all the time: the protagonist is involved in a struggle, then expresses sadness at a funeral in some way. In any other medium, we wouldn’t find ourselves laughing at this scene, because we’d be watching the actor and we’d feel sad because he’s emoting sadness.
Advanced Warfare wants you to participate in the same action; it wants you to be the sad guy, but this only works if you’re willing to play along, and many gamers aren’t. Remember when I mentioned A Red Letter Day above? That’s how players tend to respond, running, jumping, and climbing, not really paying attention to the story or trying to be the character.
If you’re trying to embody the character, this moment actually works really well. You have to tune out the fact that there’s a button telling you what to do, and embrace it as a thing your character would do of his own volition. If you take this as a very sincere attempt to bring you into the act of role play, it’s a great moment, which is true of the Call of Duty series in general.
The problem, of course, is that players rarely want to play along.
It’s easy to watch someone and feel empathy for them. It’s much harder to be put in that person’s shoes while sitting eight feet from your television and try to play along with that. It’s a problem that’s challenging for me to understand because I’ve never had a problem with this; when I play No One Lives Forever, I’m Cate Archer. When I play Halo, I’m Master Chief. When I play Half-Life, I’m Gordon Freeman. It helps when the character can vocalize just enough to give the player a sense of the character’s personality, which is one of the reasons I had a much better time playing as the vocal hitman Daud in Dishonored than the mute soldier Corvo.
Some games, like Half-Life 2, make this extremely hard by going out of their way to define the character while avoiding overt storytelling. Like, at one point, someone asks you if you remember crawling through vents to get an absent-minded professor’s keys, because apparently you did this all the time in Black Mesa, but of course, you have no memory of this, because you never did that. It’s especially jarring if you’ve created your own version of Freeman in your head, and your mental image of the character doesn’t match up with the game’s.
Players have to be willing to shut out the real world and become the game character, but players rarely want to do that. If you can embody the character and perceive the world As They Do instead of As A Game Where Death Means Nothing Because You Can Reload, you can connect better, but this is challenging for most game designers to accomplish.Brings up positives like varied storytelling and games needing more editing/better pacing (Gears Of War 3 Act 1). How a narrative context around emergent mechanics in games like Hitman or STALKER are more compelling than Minecraft. How The Beginner's Guide, despite being labelled as a walking sim where you expect dull exposition thrown at you does more interesting things with its storytelling thanks to interesting decisions. Which made me think of games like Thirty Flights Of Loving (which is mentioned in the article) or the recent Virginia that do this with their jump cuts so you can get whole narratives and go through a lot of chronology in the space of an hour or two.
My favourite part of the article is about gameplay being story, and mechanics being storytelling devices.
If there’s one way to tell stories “wrong” in games, it’s by making the mistaken assumption that “story” and “gameplay” are two separate concepts; it’s this idea that a “narrative-heavy” game must inherently be light on the gameplay. This false dichotomy has resulted in way too many pointless arguments over what should be emphasized.
The reason this misunderstanding has arisen is because, historically, games tend to separate gameplay and narrative. The game Vanquish, for instance, starts with a lengthy video, then allows you to walk down an L-shaped corridor, and then, lo and behold, you are faced with yet another lengthy video. Videos are equated with story, while gameplay is considered its own thing.
The thing is, gameplay is the story. Remember, earlier, when I suggested focusing on mood and tone to tell a game’s story? Gameplay is a lot like that. Dead Space features a player character who is slow and plodding, which helps enhance its scary vibe. Doom makes you agile and tough, giving you the sensation of being a powerful space marine. Every single mechanic in a video game contributes to how you, the player, feels.
FORMER KOTAKU WRITER....
One of the worst levels in a video game is Half-Life 2’s A Red Letter Day, a level where you run around like a child on crack while people vomit story at you. It’s nothing but exposition and character, and it might be great in a film, but in the game, most players I know are running around, climbing, jumping, fiddling with buttons and knobs, waiting for the game to get on with it and let them fight the bad guys.
But wait, it gets worse!
As a game director, you can’t control the camera and editing the way a film director can, unless you’re making something extremely limited, like a Telltale game or a Bioware-style conversation, and those games tend not to be as good as movies because their conversations are almost exclusively done through over the shoulder shots. Stand still, alternate the camera, bing, bang, boom, done. It’s why most game conversation systems are so boring. You’re just clicking through dialogue options until you get to the end of the conversation. If you’re lucky, the game will have some meaningful choice and consequence system, but how many games truly have meaningful choice and consequence?
Most films tend to do more than over the shoulder conversations, using interesting actions and complex body language to keep things interesting. But, again, this stuff is way more interesting when you’re watching, not when you have expectations of interaction.
So, there’s this game, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which starts off with you in this dramatic action sequence that culminates in your best friend’s death. In the next scene, you’re at his funeral, and when you walk up to his casket, a prompt flashes on screen, telling you to press F to pay your respects.
A lot of people made fun of this.
On the surface, it makes sense: how can you really pay respects for someone by just pressing a button? What meaning could possibly be conveyed in a single button press? It seems so absurd.
But this kind of scene happens in a movie all the time: the protagonist is involved in a struggle, then expresses sadness at a funeral in some way. In any other medium, we wouldn’t find ourselves laughing at this scene, because we’d be watching the actor and we’d feel sad because he’s emoting sadness.
Advanced Warfare wants you to participate in the same action; it wants you to be the sad guy, but this only works if you’re willing to play along, and many gamers aren’t. Remember when I mentioned A Red Letter Day above? That’s how players tend to respond, running, jumping, and climbing, not really paying attention to the story or trying to be the character.
If you’re trying to embody the character, this moment actually works really well. You have to tune out the fact that there’s a button telling you what to do, and embrace it as a thing your character would do of his own volition. If you take this as a very sincere attempt to bring you into the act of role play, it’s a great moment, which is true of the Call of Duty series in general.
The problem, of course, is that players rarely want to play along.
It’s easy to watch someone and feel empathy for them. It’s much harder to be put in that person’s shoes while sitting eight feet from your television and try to play along with that. It’s a problem that’s challenging for me to understand because I’ve never had a problem with this; when I play No One Lives Forever, I’m Cate Archer. When I play Halo, I’m Master Chief. When I play Half-Life, I’m Gordon Freeman. It helps when the character can vocalize just enough to give the player a sense of the character’s personality, which is one of the reasons I had a much better time playing as the vocal hitman Daud in Dishonored than the mute soldier Corvo.
Some games, like Half-Life 2, make this extremely hard by going out of their way to define the character while avoiding overt storytelling. Like, at one point, someone asks you if you remember crawling through vents to get an absent-minded professor’s keys, because apparently you did this all the time in Black Mesa, but of course, you have no memory of this, because you never did that. It’s especially jarring if you’ve created your own version of Freeman in your head, and your mental image of the character doesn’t match up with the game’s.
Players have to be willing to shut out the real world and become the game character, but players rarely want to do that. If you can embody the character and perceive the world As They Do instead of As A Game Where Death Means Nothing Because You Can Reload, you can connect better, but this is challenging for most game designers to accomplish.Brings up positives like varied storytelling and games needing more editing/better pacing (Gears Of War 3 Act 1). How a narrative context around emergent mechanics in games like Hitman or STALKER are more compelling than Minecraft. How The Beginner's Guide, despite being labelled as a walking sim where you expect dull exposition thrown at you does more interesting things with its storytelling thanks to interesting decisions. Which made me think of games like Thirty Flights Of Loving (which is mentioned in the article) or the recent Virginia that do this with their jump cuts so you can get whole narratives and go through a lot of chronology in the space of an hour or two.
My favourite part of the article is about gameplay being story, and mechanics being storytelling devices.
If there’s one way to tell stories “wrong” in games, it’s by making the mistaken assumption that “story” and “gameplay” are two separate concepts; it’s this idea that a “narrative-heavy” game must inherently be light on the gameplay. This false dichotomy has resulted in way too many pointless arguments over what should be emphasized.
The reason this misunderstanding has arisen is because, historically, games tend to separate gameplay and narrative. The game Vanquish, for instance, starts with a lengthy video, then allows you to walk down an L-shaped corridor, and then, lo and behold, you are faced with yet another lengthy video. Videos are equated with story, while gameplay is considered its own thing.
The thing is, gameplay is the story. Remember, earlier, when I suggested focusing on mood and tone to tell a game’s story? Gameplay is a lot like that. Dead Space features a player character who is slow and plodding, which helps enhance its scary vibe. Doom makes you agile and tough, giving you the sensation of being a powerful space marine. Every single mechanic in a video game contributes to how you, the player, feels.