Games Vs Movies

Most people that like games also tend to be into Science Fiction books and cinema. Many early games were inspired by science fiction and Sci-Fi films on the big screen.

In recent years the waters have been flowing back the other way and we now have planned film versions of some of gaming’s biggest hits including gears of war – there’s also a big budget version of prince of Persia due out this year.

Toward the backend of 2009 I managed to catch three awesome science fiction films, namely: Moon, Avatar and District 9. All three of these films were very entertaining and fascinating to watch. Each film told a very different story. Moon was concerned with loneliness, isolation and one’s own mortality. The mega block buster Avatar was a story of the exploitation of one species by another, where as District 9 told the tale of racism and prejudice set in South Africa (and filmed in the real life ghetto of Soweto) and the ruthlessness of big corporations in valuing profit over lives (a recurring theme in a lot of science fiction).

All of these films were amazing in different ways – apart from the science fiction setting each one also took me on an emotional rollercoaster in less than three hours. After seeing these movies I wondered how games measure up in their ability to make us experience different feelings and tell a good yarn with a beginning middle and end. In a “No S-it, Sherlock” kind of way games always come up short. Not surprising maybe considering a game is an interactive medium where as a film is a passive experience but could games do more to make playing them a more emotionally engaging experience?

In the early days of gaming the story was 50 words of badly translated text scrolling up the screen. All it did was set the scene and justify your actions in mass alien genocide. Things have moved on a wee bit since the coin-ops of the 80s, today games are much more sophisticated when it comes to visuals and sound but things haven’t moved on as rapidly in the story telling department.

Even recent games touted for cinematic qualities like Uncharted 2 don’t measure up well next to anything other than a very average (straight to DVD) B movie. That’s not to say that Uncharted  didn’t do a great job in the voice acting department but story was totally nonsense and pretty much unfathomable.. This might not be entirely the fault of the story but due to the fact that games aren’t consumed in the same ways as films. I’m thinking here of the running time of a game being 10 hours + where as a film is usually finished in 2 hours, some stretch out the 3 hours but this is the exception rather than the rule. This means when I play a game I don’t start and finish it in one sitting. Often there’s a big gap between the start of a game and getting to the end story – e.g. like the 2 year gap between me starting GTA and completing it. Something of the emotional punch of the story is lost when such a large amount of time lapse between the start and finish.

Other aspects of the mechanics of games tend to pull us out of the experience as well – I mean when I watched District 9 I didn’t get messages popping up telling me TinkerMonkey3352_SS was playing Modern Warfare 2, nor did I get any achievements popping up when the main character killed the final bad guy (equivalent to a end of level boss). These game mechanics can be intrusive and could be managed better; doing so would enable the gamer to become more absorbed in a story getting closer to the immersion of cinema.

The emotional range of games is also pretty small – with only a few games that actually make me feel anything. Exceptions are games like Shadow of Colossus: when you take down one of the giants and the camera pans back to see a once proud beast in its death throws, and then it finally crashes to the ground your sense of accomplishment is mixed with a sense of guilt tinged with sadness at taking the life of a noble giant.

Bioshock also did a good job of telling a story not by lots of cuts scenes but by using the game’s environment to tell you the back-story. Rapture was an amazing place – each room told small part in the over story of dystopian society gone wrong – like peeling back the layers of a glass onion, for instances the bar with the remnants of the 1959 new year’s eve party you could glimpse at the horrors that had gone on before you’re arrival. It was much more effective than a lengthy cinematic which would have taken you out of the game but would have also left nothing to imagination.

This is the problem with games when they try to be cinematic they tell us a story but games are much better when we’re left to explore for our selves and let our imagination fill in the blanks – at least to some extent. I think this is why some of the 8 bit games like Elite had such an impact as players would have their own epic adventures that were created from their own experiences in a massive open world.

As much as I love games I still find that only cinema has the power to make me think about life, love, death and the human condition. Perhaps one day a game will come along and rewrite the rules but as things stand at the moment we are a long way off and progress is not as rapid as I would like.