“It’s Just A Videogame”

[MrCalavera]

I'm sure that'll show Rogert Ebert's ghost.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Games are games and not anything else, and often they're more like other things than like each other. People reach for cinema as a comparison because it's the thing that's superficially closest "respectable" medium to what most games do, but really a games as a whole are influenced by a very wide range of outside storytelling styles. The modern reality of games reflects the modern reality of most mass market media. A few large, powerful corporations control most of the mainstream output. Smaller companies with good grasps on niche markets circle the periphery, occasionally pushing more adventurous work to the forefront of the public consciousness. Independent artists use the ease of digital distribution to try to get their work to an audience that will appreciate it, although the sheer volume of work drowns out all but a few talented and lucky people. Some people are trying radical, experimental things, others are trying to recapture the styles of previous eras, and the big companies are looking for whatever will appeal to the widest audience and therefore get the most money. Every subculture is catered for but there's a kind of malaise setting in as nothing has really shaken up the medium in a properly big way for a while. This describes not only games, but films and music as well, and comics and books. There's no real "golden age" of any particular media, really, there are only changes in what kinds of works benefit from that particular creative environment.

Half-Life: Alyx made a small splash, and it is certainly a step up from anything else out there, but the price point to experience ensures its niche status for the foreseeable future. That and the “brain interface” devices GabeN has mentioned recently will eventually be what become the new revolutionary wave, but it will probably happen more slowly than previous instances.

 

[sXeth]

Just taking one of t

And yet you just posted a 4m 47s comprised entirely on various game's cinematic moments, entirely excluding gameplay.

Just to take one of those, from a game I thoroughly enjoyed.


But yeah, inFamous Second Son... if you play the evil side, that cutscene gets basically completely undercut and narratively broken. Can you really hold up as a fine bit of media when it can be completely broken by the other 95% of the media.


Jin vs Lord Shimura would probably be another one. If you act a certain way throughout the game, then Jin and Shomura's conflict makes sense. Otherwise its a bunch of odd awkward cutscenes where suddenly you do something or get a conflict that was never really earned in the gameplay.


(I also notice they put Vaas' death in Far Cry 3... all 3 seconds of it. Which occurs in a massively non-contextualized technocolour blur of a garbage QTE boss fight, and doesn't even get to be a defining moment of the game as they just kind of slide onwards to the other dude none of us remember the name of)

 

[laggyteabag]

But yeah, inFamous Second Son... if you play the evil side, that cutscene gets basically completely undercut and narratively broken. Can you really hold up as a fine bit of media when it can be completely broken by the other 95% of the media.


Jin vs Lord Shimura would probably be another one. If you act a certain way throughout the game, then Jin and Shomura's conflict makes sense. Otherwise its a bunch of odd awkward cutscenes where suddenly you do something or get a conflict that was never really earned in the gameplay.


(I also notice they put Vaas' death in Far Cry 3... all 3 seconds of it. Which occurs in a massively non-contextualized technocolour blur of a garbage QTE boss fight, and doesn't even get to be a defining moment of the game as they just kind of slide onwards to the other dude none of us remember the name of)

My favourites are the ones where the character you are playing as is like "Oh my god! I just killed someone!" *sobs* *sobs*, and then the game gives you full control, and you start popping off headshots like a trained, merciless killer.

The "untrained shooter/killer" trope is incredibly difficult to pull off ingame, without making everything feel awful, but I have always really liked The Last of Us' wavy crosshair approach. Doesn't really do much for the character's conscience, though.

 

[Elijin]

My favourites are the ones where the character you are playing as is like "Oh my god! I just killed someone!" *sobs* *sobs*, and then the game gives you full control, and you start popping off headshots like a trained, merciless killer.

The "untrained shooter/killer" trope is incredibly difficult to pull off ingame, without making everything feel awful, but I have always really liked The Last of Us' wavy crosshair approach. Doesn't really do much for the character's conscience, though.

Oh man, does anyone remember the "Condemned" games? Fps horror with very limited consumable weapons. The main character was a...journalist? Most of the enemies were crazed hobos. It played the untrained killer card well, from memory. Very weighty combat, swinging 2x4s and pipes, struggling with revolvers which only have the ammo loaded and are discarded once spent. That was an unsung gem back in the day. Well, according to my memory, it was a while back.

 

[BrawlMan]

Oh man, does anyone remember the "Condemned" games? Fps horror with very limited consumable weapons. The main character was a...journalist?

Ethan Thomas was an FBI agent in the first game. Became a hobo in the second game. Also everyone got a facelift and redesigned for no reason. To the point where you wouldn't know they're the same characters unless you saw their names.

 

[gorfias]

I thought this pretty thought provoking about the narrative of a simple arcade game, "Missle Command"

 

[BrawlMan]

I thought this pretty thought provoking about the narrative of a simple arcade game, "Missle Command"

I remember this episode. This is back when they were good and actually cared.

 

[Agema]

So instead people try to push the cinematics so much - because its a part of videogames that's like this other thing so maybe people can understand it better?

If we assume the basic concept that there's a way to present dramatic action via sound and audio, you'd have to assume that drama (theatre, TV, film) has pretty much nailed it by now. Thus a computer game has nothing to do but copy these media to get the same effect.

One of the things about cinematics is the yearning for depth and seriousness. Pong, Pacman and Space Invaders don't really do narrative and emotional depth. At some point however story appears in computer games, and inevitably someone is going to want story more complex than "Start, kill demons, take the yellow key to open the yellow door, kill demons and find the Big F***ing Gun, take the red key to open the red door, kill the Prince of Hell and his spawning minions, you have won." It's not just that players like that, but some developers want that too. Some have probably spent years dreaming up their worlds and writing their stories, like any novelist. Possibly even a sort of insecurity and a reply to the people who see computer games as trivial, children's hobbies: computer games can be serious, profound art for adults, too. That stakes a claim that running round a maze eating dots whilst avoiding ghosts never will.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

If we assume the basic concept that there's a way to present dramatic action via sound and audio, you'd have to assume that drama (theatre, TV, film) has pretty much nailed it by now. Thus a computer game has nothing to do but copy these media to get the same effect.

One of the things about cinematics is the yearning for depth and seriousness. Pong, Pacman and Space Invaders don't really do narrative and emotional depth. At some point however story appears in computer games, and inevitably someone is going to want story more complex than "Start, kill demons, take the yellow key to open the yellow door, kill demons and find the Big F***ing Gun, take the red key to open the red door, kill the Prince of Hell and his spawning minions, you have won." It's not just that players like that, but some developers want that too. Some have probably spent years dreaming up their worlds and writing their stories, like any novelist. Possibly even a sort of insecurity and a reply to the people who see computer games as trivial, children's hobbies: computer games can be serious, profound art for adults, too. That stakes a claim that running round a maze eating dots whilst avoiding ghosts never will.

True, but with videogames and their added element of interactivity, the desire for depth of story shouldn’t mean a compromised depth of play mechanics, which many people feel weary of happening too often in the medium (ie walking sims or *hold forward to finish chapter x*). There is a balance between the two that’s still largely being experimented with, and some genres will struggle to find it more than others simply based on their typical design formats. Although others may not really even need to consider it as much.

 

[EvilRoy]

If we assume the basic concept that there's a way to present dramatic action via sound and audio, you'd have to assume that drama (theatre, TV, film) has pretty much nailed it by now. Thus a computer game has nothing to do but copy these media to get the same effect.

One of the things about cinematics is the yearning for depth and seriousness. Pong, Pacman and Space Invaders don't really do narrative and emotional depth. At some point however story appears in computer games, and inevitably someone is going to want story more complex than "Start, kill demons, take the yellow key to open the yellow door, kill demons and find the Big F***ing Gun, take the red key to open the red door, kill the Prince of Hell and his spawning minions, you have won." It's not just that players like that, but some developers want that too. Some have probably spent years dreaming up their worlds and writing their stories, like any novelist. Possibly even a sort of insecurity and a reply to the people who see computer games as trivial, children's hobbies: computer games can be serious, profound art for adults, too. That stakes a claim that running round a maze eating dots whilst avoiding ghosts never will.

Movies and TV have the visual and auditory communication of story down, Live Theatre has it down as well but also adds spectacle and audience/actor interaction because that's the extra advantage it has over other mediums. Games have a similar sort of advantage in that they have audience led interaction (gameplay). The problem I have is that some game makers view TV/Movies as the be-all end-all of storytelling through a visual medium, but in the process they ignore what makes videogames unique as a story telling medium.

When you're watching a Cirque du Soleil show in person, they don't do big fancy visual-only acts, then pause everything to interact with the audience a little bit, and then go back to the show (well okay I went to one show where they did and it was one of the weakest I've seen) - the interaction is peppered through out from things as small as eye contact and a wink to things as large as using the audience seating area as part of the stage. In videogames cutscenes are often treated as little breaks from the game where the creator shows us a movie they made and then we go back to playing the game. I understand that this is attractive, because working gameplay into the story is hard (players love to not follow direction), but it is ignoring a huge element of games that other mediums don't have.

This is nothing against games that don't bother trying to tell a crazy dramatic story or use cinematics as their exclusive storytelling medium. It took a long ass time for Live Theatre to really learn how to use everything it had to full advantage, and in the meantime there were a lot of productions (and still are) that try to be movies without an effect budget. Its just that I don't think we should be treating games that also have movies in them as the end state for what you can do with games.

 

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