Making Movies

Yeah, yeah, okay, so this is nice:



But you know what would make it even better? Imagine if it was an animated movie with Tim Burton at the helm, infusing the production with a quirky, offbeat sensibility. And we could get a real actor -- Johnny Depp? Just throwing that out there -- to play Manny. Now we're in business.

I'm using sarcasm to make a point and be a dick. Film has become the final destination of any work of fiction; sort of a pop culture meridian. That's great for the author whose book was optioned for a cool seven figures, and great for the studios and everyone working on the project but I have no idea why consumers get at all excited at the prospect of a video game being made into a movie. I don't understand the people who actually want to see a Monkey Island film. The story was told pretty well the first time. Who wants to watch that?

Translating a novel into film makes some sense because there's a visual and a sonic dimension being added, but games are already so cinematic as to render the translation pointless. A video game narrative is the closest thing to movies that any medium's got going. In fact, cutscenes are movies.

In exchange for seeing something we like up on the big screen, we have to cut five-sixths of Planescape: Torment and remove what's interesting about Half-Life. Doom and Super Mario Bros. are going to need a story and so the producers will use the template that came with the scriptwriting software. It's not 1990. Games these days are pretty good with cinematic techniques and they're using talented actors and for the most part they know how to structure a story, so I am moved to ask: what's the point? It's a cynical cash grab and that lack of inspiration is reflected time and time again in the product itself.

It's unfortunate that video game movies have, with depressing consistency, been some of the worst pieces of celluloid trash ever; the province of the special effects guy making his directorial debut. That's bad luck and the movies will get better. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Max Payne look like they'll reach a basic level of filmmaking competency. Although Max Payne is a fan letter to film cliché to begin with; it's going to be very exciting when that's all filtered out, leaving the story of a tough-as-nails cop who plays by his own rules.

It's not even about whether the movies are bad or not. It's about gamers thrilling to the very possibility of a movie adaptation, and apparently assuming the cinematic treatment will somehow unlock the game's heretofore unrealised potential.

What's the reason? Is it that a wider audience will be exposed to Metal Gear Solid and we'll be all I-told-you-so. You see, we weren't engaging in meaningless first-review hyperbole when we claimed this was an "Oscar-worthy story". You made fun of me at the time but didn't that thing with Aeris move you more than you ever thought possible?

Do we want to live vicariously through a game's second life? Are the people photoshopping the Firefly cast onto a movie poster for Mass Effect looking for the satisfaction of having their fannish wish-fulfillment writ large? Are we trying to validate this artistic merits of this medium to a mainstream audience by, ironically, repackaging it in an already established and acceptable format?

The advantages and the reasoning elude me. The aesthetics of the major leagues seem fine but we do some things okay. There's the red carpet and there's gold statues, but right now I'm actually pretty content with video games.

P.S. You almost surely read this post as a response to the recent announcement of a BioShock movie, when in fact I had this idea three weeks ago. I blame the news cycle for detonating my post's time-sensitive originality and making me out to be some lousy op-ed writer who just riffs on the day's headlines. Gore Verbinski, how dare you. This isn't over. You're going to feel what I feel. I swear I'm going to find your BioShock script and I'm gonna leak it. Don't mess with me.

Headshot

Here's a thought-provoking piece of trivia from my other life. United Nations peacekeepers wear berets instead of helmets because while the latter affords considerably more protection against getting shot in the head, the less obtrusive headgear better emphasizes the target's face; their vulnerability, their humanity. It's psychologically harder to kill them if they look less like a soldier; in which case the response is automatic. It's like a tactic to combat military dehumanisation. Sometimes snipers are even moved to tears. Then I guess they shoot them anyway.

I don't know if that's actually true. I read it a year ago and I might have since invented some of the details. Nonetheless I can feel my thoughts being provoked even as I type.

I'm still bothered by what Chris Taylor (Supreme Commander) said at his GDC panel: that he got uncomfortable with the idea of video games being about killing thousands of people so he took out the blood and made them all robots. We don't feel empathy for robots and we're not grossed out by their corpses, so we're happy. Problem solved and we can keep on fighting with a clear conscience; just like those guys who are conditioned to recognise that the man holding a gun and speaking another language is an enemy combatant, not a civilian, and so different rules apply.

I neglected to mention that in my other life I am apparently an anti-video game crusader. Games do this all the time, though. We fight zombies, mutants and suits of armour as often as we fight humans. Enemy troops are caricatures; needing three bullets in the chest to take them down. Life and death are binary states. There's no pain and not much blood.

When we play games we sign up to kill people and the game abstracts the process so we can deal with it. Otherwise we might freak out like the guy in Munich did. It works like this scene from Call of Duty 4, which, incidentally, is based on a real-life detachment mechanism:



We don't want to see their brains blown out on the street. When we shoot the bad guys we want them to lose hit points, not scream, bleed and defecate. We want to look into the familiar, robotic eyes of NPC_Face_Generic_2, not someone with a family. Condemned or Soldier of Fortune makes us uncomfortable because we don't want to be disturbed by the violence we have to cause. And that's fine. That's the only way it's going to work.

I don't know why we're so accepting of the premise that our video gaming duty is to kill the enemy; that it's our only way to win. Half-Life and Oblivion aren't necessarily about being a soldier but that's the role we play. It's the role we almost always play. Developers who don't like it instead make it easier to stomach. We're built to shoot. We do it all the time. We go into war zones like the experienced professionals we are and eliminate the opposition. We don't broker cease-fires or reconstruct occupied territory. We don't know how to do that. We're meant for one thing.

It's at least a little creepy, right?

Bad Day

It's a very good title because there is no game so guaranteed to make a bad day even worse.

At this point in their maturity as a medium, video games can satisfy many of our social functions. We can go to the movies.


We can go to art galleries.


We can be in a relationship.


But even in this golden age of $400m openings and hot next-gen narratives, there's one thing games can't do. They can't cheer me up.

Seems like it should be easy, right? Games are built on power fantasies and pleasure principles. They're designed to reward the player. None of them do what I want them to do right now, though, which is stop me feeling sad. Epic campaigns are too slow, too involved. I don't have the patience for funny dialogue. Shooting dudes doesn't make me feel very good about myself.

Legally, you're not allowed to call them "party games" if you're the only one at the party. Those are in fact "lonely games." And I don't want to be challenged, especially when that means exacting difficulty and making jumps with pinpoint precision. On the other hand, something like Endless Ocean is way too meditative and forces you to think quietly about being miserable. I'm not asking for a lot. I'm asking for a happy distraction. I guess I'm looking for something full of really bright colours and pictures of smiling babies. That'd do the trick.

I tend to fall back on the classics. The mindless simplicity of Tetris worked for a while but there was something uncomfortably literal about always ending in crushing failure and death. I did like this web version because I figured out how to cheat. I can win TypeRacer legitimately, but if I play it at work I can't actually tell the difference. Line Rider was nice until that little guy sailed into the air and snapped his neck on a line that I drew. Crayon Physics comes by far the closest. It's pleasant and tranquil and it lets me do anything I want. Problem is it's not out yet so I'm stuck with the proof-of-concept. Likewise, I have a 60-second trial of Puzzle Bobble on my cellphone and sometimes I'll just play that one demo over and over. This is not a fulfilling existence.

P.S.: Understanding what that Sonic thing is all about will also cause many bad days.

Weather Cancellations

Far too late for it to mean anything, I bought the de facto final issue of Games for Windows. I had to have a copy so I could unload it on eBay for $7,000. I accept PayPal.

I didn't read Computer Gaming World in its mid-90s Johnny Wilson heyday and I wasn't in the Post's newsroom in '74 breaking Watergate wide open so I'm not feeling overly nostalgic for the death of PC gaming or the death of print (pretty unlucky to be at ground zero of that particular Venn diagram.) But I'm hardly thrilling to a world where "GFW magazine" now refers, uncontested, to Golf for Women. I've never been interested in gamer-identity-by-platform-stratification and that's not what I'm going to miss about the magazine. I'm going to miss the writing.

It was exactly the kind of writing that gamers, developers and critics bemoan the lack of while not really looking for it. Was GFW gaming journalism's Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael? No, but who gives a shit? In its last months, the magazine's writers could be counted amongst the very few in the profession not only eschewing the press' traditional role as marketing tools but actually trying to raise the bar. This meant critical previews and long-form, in-depth features that resembled investigative journalism over exclusive covers and vapid hype. It was beginning to transcend its mandate to appeal to everyone interested in video games or gaming culture. Evidently no one cared.

Who knows what was stopping people from realising it was actually a good magazine. It takes a while for that kind of reputation to catch on, and GFW probably started at a disadvantage sporting the official Microsoft brand. Maybe it's hard to overcome the perception of EDGE as the only gaming magazine that does any real writing. And some might have found it hard to believe that in 2008 CGW could be something greater than the standard-bearer of a tapped-out zeitgeist. Computer Gaming World had its day for sure, and that day was very specifically part of a different era. Kind of like video game journalism's Juliana Hatfield; whose relevance was tied exclusively to 1991-3, but she still makes albums for some reason.

Or maybe GFW's decline in popularity has everything to do with it not being online and not being free. It couldn't be the same magazine it was even ten years ago. Print can't subsist on reviews and previews anymore. Kane & Lynch's not such an interesting game to read about in February, especially when the review is so substantively similar to all the ones published in December. A magazine can't be the internet except two months later and you're supposed to respect it more for being in print.


You weren't going to get timeliness with GFW. Nor did you need it. GFW was delivering exactly the kind of features and editorial that made them viable as a print magazine. They weren't just viable, they were good. They could promise articles that were at this level and had this degree of investigative detail and, yeah, they were going to look really nice. It didn't matter if you liked PC games or not. It mattered if you liked games. Lara Crigger reported on gaming in the Middle East and the process of codification for video game writers. Robert Ashley hung out in a virtual representation of Manhattan's Lower East Side, watching band videos at a club with hipster bots ("Technology has taken music in many cool directions. This is not one of them.") Erik Wolpaw played Universe at War as a responsible civic planner. Reviews and previews were written intelligently and with an eye towards analysis rather than hyperbolically validating the reader's choice of gaming platform. It threw its weight behind the most hopeful conception possible of the gaming press: critical, level-headed, independent from PR coercion and staffed by writers instead of product evaluators. Sort of like real journalism. It's amazing how long it's taking to get there.

The internet has some great writers, but signal-to-noise ratios mean it's going to take longer than it should to find them. GFW did the work. It assembled great, smart writers every month. You could rely on a certain standard of quality. Everyone talks about the danger of the cult of personality, and yeah, it's a little ridiculous how every gaming publication suddenly needs a podcast. But personality is what it should be about. When you picked up a copy of GFW you should expect more of it than an affirmation of your PC gaming enthusiasm. You should know Jeff Green, Shawn Elliott, Sean Molloy, Ryan Scott; you should know how they write. That should be worth something.

But apparently it isn't.

Epitaph

I'm going to audit my hipness for a second. You can tell a lot about someone's underground video game cred by how early he bought 2005's Pathologic. (I use the male pronoun because girls don't play video games.) Maybe he bought it after Rock, Paper, Shotgun's enthusiastic post-mortem, along with ten thousand other commoners. Or maybe it was 2006, after John Walker's stunning Eurogamer review. Or maybe it was day one, after he read a review unscored critique in a Russian fanzine. He filed it beside his Dostoevsky and Nabokov first editions, chuckling at the gaming mainstream who still clung to their Fable and their San Andreas. So when did I get it? Uh, the Rock Paper Shotgun thing.

It really was an impressive piece that doesn't leave me with anything new or interesting to say about Pathologic. To be honest, that's kind of a disincentive for me to finish the game. The other big disincentive is Pathologic. You hear a lot about its tragically flawed beauty and crippled transcendentalism with less emphasis given to the first parts of those descriptors. It's functionally awkward and stilted. It's kind of a lousily put-together game, period. Enter it sceptical and disappointed.

Nonetheless there is something charming about Pathologic weirdly dying in front of you. A lot of that has to do with how it talks.

I think there's an uncanny valley in effect for translation. If it's just slightly -- but clearly -- wrong, as is the case with many, many games, it really drives me crazy. This applies to every adventure game released in the last seven years except Sam & Max. Translation consists of a cursory pass which renders the words recognisable but never structured in a way that would ever be produced by an English-speaker. Beyond Good & Evil's "intruders have penetrated into the facility" forever resonates, along with other grammatical faux pas. I always wonder why these English-speaking actors never correct their lines. Maybe they think it's some video game thing or maybe they have to blow through this gig so they can get to their toilet commercial by 2:30.

Pathologic's translation stands at the absolute edge of the valley, threatening to jump. You could call it stylised if it wasn't so demonstrably wrong. It's beyond minor imperfections and "real people don't talk like that." Pathologic is so far gone it's like it was never translated at all.

A plague runs through a broken city and the player is trapped inside. Pathologic's language is of urgent emotional distress and stark terror presented through clinical and impenetrable literary and metafictional ambition. Its boldness and verbosity is rendered grandly ineloquent and as you read along you frequently stop to pick out the wrong word choices and wonder what any of this actually means. It shouldn't be this complicated.

Maybe it should. Pathologic is characterised by the inexplicable and the inconsistent. This game is at once so broken and discordant, but every part, every mistake, is working to alienate, intimidate and oppress the player. Translation included. It's a rationalisation, and it's a game for whom rationalisations are necessary to like. Regardless, a lucid translation wouldn't be appropriate here, and anyway, making sense of this game would be horrifying.

This is a world wrenched out of sync with itself; quickly, violently throttling towards its own destruction. It needs help but it can't speak, communicating only in obscured spurts of choked, screaming brilliance. It is a wreck. It is an abyss. You have to look into it to understand it and you hope that by the end you'll know enough to tell if it was genius or madness.