Storytellersunplugged

Imagine, if you will, a movie.

A really dreadful movie.

A movie wherein no cut in the trailer lasts more than three seconds, wherein explosions and car chases and wirework kung fu abound. A movie that doesn’t go more than five minutes in between action sequences, in part to hide the fact that you could fit the plot summary in that apocryphal fly’s navel next to a producer’s heart, all the sincerity in Hollywood, and three medium-sized caroway seeds.

Got a mental picture of that movie? Good. Now take a mental picture of the reviews of that movie, at least the ones that don’t include the word “AWSUM!!!” Five bucks says somewhere in there, you find the following phrase evoked as a perjorative:

“Video game”.

And man, that pisses me off.

“Written like a video game” has become the lazy movie reviewer’s shorthand for “bad and full of things that explode.” If it’s fast, loud, and primarily action-driven, it gets slapped with the “video game” label, generally by a reviewer whose most recent interaction with video games came when he accidentally wrapped the cord on his Intellivision controller around his kid brother’s neck.

OK, maybe that’s being a bit unkind, but the underlying truth is there. Games, and in many cases specifically game writing, are constantly being compared to movies and in every instance dismissed as inferior. As a working game writer, I find this infuriating. Not because I think every line of dialogue I’ve written, every “arrgh” and “yargh” and “He’s up on the roof!” is pure unvarnished gold, but because when I do game writing, I do game writing, and having my work and the work of all of my peers dismissed out of hand on a false premise really gets the old Hulk muscles working.

What’s that, you say? False premise? But surely it’s not a false premise. Games are just…games. Their storylines, characters, and writing can’t hold a candle to movies like The Godfather and The Seventh Seal[1].

Well, no, not when you put it that way, and that’s part of the problem.

As Roger Ebert so famously noted, games aren’t great movies. To this, I can only say “no kidding” (hey, it’s a family blog, or I’d be saying something a hell of a lot more emphatic). Furthermore, I’d like to point out that Copelia makes a lousy NFL highlight film, The Faerie Queene is a piss-poor haiku, and, in the words of Bioware Austin lead writer Daniel Erickson, Citizen Kane is a craptacular ballet. Video games make lousy movies for one very simple reason: They Are Not Movies. Dismissing them for what they are not is illogical, nonsensical, and lazy.

Unconvinced? Let’s look at the basics. Movies generally run between ninety minutes and two and a half hours. They are a passive media, wherein the only audience participation you’re likely to see involves someone drunkenly throwing toast at Tim Curry’s cinematic avatar and doing the Timewarp on cue. They are also rigid in their presentation; what’s filmed and on the reel is what the movie is. For all that the audience at a slasher flick might yell “Don’t go down in the basement!”, if that’s the way it’s filmed, the nubile young babysitter is still going to wander down into the root cellar for her messy appointment in her own personal Samara, and that’s just the way that it goes.

Standard console or PC video games, on the other hand, get pillaged in reviews if they come in under eight hours of gameplay. They are immersive and interactive, with player choice being absolutely meaningful every step of the way. That, after all, is what makes it a game – players making difficult and meaningful choices, and dealing with or being rewarded for having made those choices.

In game design, we call this “hunting the unknown fun,” but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that even the most cursory examination reveals that movies are games are two entirely different beasts. Why, then, are games constantly pilloried for not being movies?

Part of it is that movies are seen as being the closest thing to video games, which is, of course, hooey. Part of it is cinema’s cultural dominance as a media form, where by dint of omnipresence, box office and ease of use, it’s become the default media for discussion, the prism through which everything else gets viewed. As a result, everything else suffers by contrast, because movies automatically have the home-field advantage in any comparative discussion.

What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater. Game writing, by definition, needs to take into account the player and his actions. It needs to allow the player to be the protagonist, and to support the immersive experience of play. And it needs to be understood in that context, as part of the gameplay experience, and not as a movie where the player occasionally waggles the joystick once in a while. This has to be understood, otherwise, you’re shortchanging yourself and the game, and neither of you deserves that kind of treatment.

Now bear in mind that I’m not saying that all game writing is brilliant and misunderstood, the fourteen year old emo kid of the artistic world just waiting in the corner for someone to give it a hug. Hell, I’m not even saying most of it is; Sturgeon’s Law holds for game writing as well. God knows I’m sick unto death of hard-bitten space marines and gruff unshaven ex-mercenaries and the third-act reverse where the bad guy captures you and takes away all your hard-earned inventory. Then again, one of the reasons I’m sick of that stuff is because they were movie clichés before they got transplanted into games without any adaptation to the new medium. Or, to put it another way, when the bad guys capture Indiana Jones and go through his pockets onscreen, it doesn’t provoke an angry response from me because I haven’t invested hours and hours of time filling those pockets with stuff that I can on some level consider to be mine. That’s my stuff you’re taking, not Indy’s, without letting me do anything about, and you’re doing it in a medium that’s all about what I can in fact do. That’s where the cracks start to show, the seams in the movie narrative model pasted over immersive gameplay.

Give us your poor and hungry, movies, but your tired we can do without; we’re still in the process of inventing our own tropes and conceits and language of storytelling, and the pure cinema elements plunked down reflexively can sometimes be stumbling blocks in that necessary and ongoing process.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to have a useful discussion about what is good game writing and what isn’t if the default definition of “good game writing” is “like a movie” and the default description for “bad movie” is “like a video game.” You might as well constantly downgrade a burger joint for its failure to serve sushi.

Instead, we need to get to a place where we understand storytelling in games well enough to discuss intelligently and well. We need to figure out what good game writing is within the context of games, and not simply try to cram them into a movie-shaped box. Movies are great…at being movies. Video games aren’t, nor should they be. Deep down, you knew that already.

And that movie we were talking about up top? It’s a movie, and by all accounts, it sounds like it would make a lousy game.

[1] Whether they can hold a candle to Godfather 3 is a question that gets asked a lot less frequently. The logic behind this argument is that video games haven’t matched the crème de la crème of movies in providing a suitably Aristotelian experience, with the comparison then made between the best film has to offer and the middle-to-bottom of gaming’s barrel. I suppose it could be turned on its head easily enough; if anyone wants to compare the writing in Glitter and Good Luck Chuck with, say, that of Grim Fandango or BioShock, I’ll take that action in a heartbeat.