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Hello! Unfortunately E. Randy seems to have left, but I have posted this up at his other forum, and if anyone here would like to comment, I'd welcome your feedback on this piece ~ particularly in terms of keeping my games facts correct, because as stated, it is not really my field of expertise.
Bear in mind that:
this piece had to be utterly strictly 3000 words max, including references. So I actually stopped providing full references for the date/director of the films when I went over the limit, and I'll have to ask the editor about that.
and that it's allowed to be a "think-piece" rather than a full argument and article.
the references are still in draft form, and to support some of the points I've had to rely on rather motley and miscellaneous links to blogs, online reviews and so on... not very academic so I might prune a few out.
also, I may have lost some of the spacing, and have certainly lost the underlines and italics, by pasting it in here.
It's a bit super-compressed in places, but I hope it puts some ideas across at least, and makes its main point. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll try to tinker some more with it, though it's bloody hard when you're actually dead-on 3000 words.
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Camera-Eye, CG-Eye:
Videogames and the “cinematic”
I used to be good at games. I was good at the only Space Invaders machine in South London, in 79. I was the first kid to have a ZX Spectrum in my school, in 1982. I published in the national games magazine Crash when I was seventeen. But since the age of 18 and my first degree, I’ve concentrated on cinema. So this article comes from a film studies perspective; I’ve relied on game experts for many of my examples. Because I’m no longer good enough at games, I haven’t been able to play through to witness most of these scenes first-hand. I’ve had to watch them at a secondary remove, as records of other people’s achievement. That is, I’ve had to watch game scenes as films.
Of course, one of the reasons I focused on cinema is that you couldn’t study games academically in 1988. You couldn’t even take a degree solely in cinema: my degree was unusually progressive, offering fifty percent film and a token module in television. Since then, film studies has become higher status, moderately established and respectable; on the middle-rung of the ladder between the academic study of television, games and comics at one end, and literature at the other. By extension, complaints about the careless adaptation of Doom (Andrej Bartkowiak, 2005) and Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003) may rage across discussion boards but rarely make it beyond fan communities, whereas issues about the adaptation of Austen or Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007) from their original literary texts are debated in broadsheet newspapers.
Because fidelity to the original is of low priority when porting from games to cinema, direct adaptations of videogames – with rare exceptions – have little in common with the aesthetics and conventions of the source material, and resemble the game primarily only in mise-en-scene and costume design. The film version of Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), for instance, ignores the opportunity to recreate the player’s experience by having Lara “seen to die, even if only on one occasion, and then to be able to restart a sequence, game-style, for another attempt...” its occasional references to the game-world constitute “insubstantial nods... rather than anything central to the structure or form of the film.” (King and Krzywinska 2002, 19)
However, a more general conception of the “videogame-style film” can be established from references to diverse movies that incorporate game conventions while not adapting a specific game.
On a broad aesthetic level, the term is used to connote spectacular, showy displays of effects at the expense of subtext and character, such as Tony Scott’s bravura digital camerawork in Deja Vu (Scott, 2006) (Albertson, 2008), the spectacle that overwhelms ideas in I,Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004) (Dale, 2004), the exhibition bouts between CGI monsters in King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005) (Woodward, 2008) and the dense, detailed but artificial action sequences of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels. (Lucas, 2002, 2005) (Puig, 2002)
More directly, critics and fans have identified specific videogame memes in films, such as the progression through levels, power-ups and signature moves in Ong-Bak (Prachya Pinkaew, 2003) (Lee, 2005) the “get all weapons” cheat code in The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) (King and Krzywinska 2002, 19), and the platform-jumping in Attack of the Clones’ droid factory. These are regarded as playful, knowing quotations and in-jokes along the lines of the Lara Croft “nods” or, in the latter case, as cynical cross-marketing through the placement of a scene that was immediately adapted to PlayStation and Xbox.
Finally, “videogame” style in films suggests a certain form of narrative, based on the cycles of character-death and reset. Charles Ramirez Berg traces the “Tarantino effect” in recent cinema to the influence of postmodern resistance to master narratives, hypertext links, and video games, which “...repeatedly take players back to the same situations”. (Berg 2006, 6). Similarly, Jeff Gordinier identifies the “PlayStation Generation” of twenty-first century filmmakers, who “mess with narrative in new ways... mess with time, with space, with the laws of physics and the structure of story” and “bring to their movies the cut-and-paste sensibility of video games and the internet.” (cited in Kimberly A. Owczarski 2007, 3). This is the reading of video-game conventions that leads Warren Buckland to identify “videogame logic” in The Fifth Element’s “serialised repetition of action” (Buckland 2000, 160) and prompts Margit Grieb and Kate Stables to discuss Run Lola Run (Grieb 2002: 161) and Groundhog Day (Stables 2001, 19) respectively as game-style cinema because of their looping mini-narratives and retelling of the same story with variations, like repeated attempts at the same level. Like Berg and Gordinier, Margit Grieb’s discussion of Run Lola Run links the repetition and non-linearity that structures the film’s narrative not just to games but to other forms of digital media – “websites, hypertext stories, interactive CD-ROMs”. (Grieb 2002, 165)
The implications of this overlap between cinema and games are mixed: on one hand, importing videogame conventions suggests a fast-and-loose, “cut-and-paste” resistance to traditional narrative rules, with overtones of rebellious youth (Berg describes “playing with narration” as “cool and fun”, and refers to Tarantino’s “wild” techniques). On the other, videogame aesthetics are associated with empty spectacle – even cynical attempts at cross-platform marketing – taking precedence over character and traditional storytelling. Common to both readings is a sense of digital novelty and technological innovation, whether in the bold slicing and reworking of story like a word-processed document, the web-style clicking through branching narratives or the flashy showcasing of state-of-the-art effects.
The deliberate association with a lower-status form like videogames brings a movie down to a trashier, edgier, funkier level; it sacrifices any claims to serious art, but it gains a hip attitude. Crank, reviewed in Film Journal International as “among the most mindless action films ever made, but ... a helluva video game” (Feld, 2008) is a prime example of this trade-off.
The movie refers explicitly to gaming conventions and history, both superficially (screens from of the 1980 arcade game Berzerk! and a pastiche of the PC game-emulator MAME) and on the level of storytelling. Its plot is made up of fast-paced missions with a single goal; its visual perspective switches from ground-level chase to Google Earth map views. Its aesthetic is Grand Theft Auto, and it makes the debt clear with visual nods to GTA’s producers, Rockstar Games. The film was written off by one reviewer as “the latest stab by Hollywood to cash in on the violent video game craze,” and, tellingly, slated for its similarity to “any recent output by Tony Scott”. (Orndorf 2006) The movie’s teen-punk response to criticism, in turn, is built into its opening credits, in the form of a hi-score table: “FUC”, “YOU”, “ASS”, “HOL”.
The connotations of the “cinematic” in videogaming are very different. King and Krzywinska identify an assumption within the industry that “more cinematic equals ‘better’... a judgement accepted by many reviewers.” (King and Krzywinska 2002, 6). Cinema, as they recognise, has greater cultural prestige and a “standing higher in our dominant cultural hierarchies... a factor that adds to its potential appeal to the games industry.”(2002, 7) Mark J. P. Wolf’s taxonomy of on- and off-screen space in games is based on the same implicit approach of elevating the study of gaming through a comparison with film theory and cinematic form – just as theories of authorship, borrowed from literature, dignified popular cinema in the 1950s and 60s. Wolf finds a parallel between the scrolling of Defender (1982) and the panning in Porter’s Life of An American Fireman (1903) and Hepworth’s A Day With The Gypsies (1906), while Griffiths’ cuts between adjacent spaces match the cuts between neighbouring rooms in Atari’s Adventure (1978) (Wolf 1997, 15-16).
If these overlaps between the evolution of spatial storytelling in early (1900s) cinema and early (1970s) gaming were the result of technological limitations – in both cases, a static “camera” – by the mid-90s the process had become one of deliberate emulation. As Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter note, since the advent of the PC CD-Rom and the CD-driven PlayStation, both offering increased storage capacity, game designers of the late 1990s worked towards the holy grail of “interactive movies”; “movies”, in this case, implying mainstream Hollywood.
Games from the mid-90s onwards attempted to incorporate this “cinematic” sense in a range of ways. Full-motion video, with real actors and sets – such as the casting of Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in Wing Commander III (1994) – proved to be a fad, phased out and replaced by pre-rendered, CGI sequences created on a more powerful computer than the games console itself. Ironically, this incorporation of high-quality, “filmic” visuals tended to disrupt the player’s immersion in the diegesis, breaking the flow between cut-scene and gameplay (King and Krzywinska 2006, 135, Howells 2002, 114-5). Cut-scenes therefore improved, paradoxically, by becoming less smooth and polished; bridging scenes were increasingly generated “in-engine”, created on the fly by the console, with no discrepancy in visual quality; and Half-Life (2000) introduced a radical shift by keeping all exposition within the game-space, avoiding the shift between “playing” and “viewing” (Howells 2002, 120).
The Resident Evil games of 1997-1999 fit Wolf’s theory of a parallel evolution between cinematic and game grammar by forcing the player to work within fixed camera angles, linked through the conventions of classical continuity editing. However, as King and Krzywinska note, “predetermined framing of this kind acts like that of a film... at the expense of player freedom.” (King and Krzywinska 2002, 13), and this fixed camera positioning is, like full-motion video, rare in contemporary gaming.
21st century games continue to incorporate cinematic (and televisual) motifs – most obviously in their title sequences and credits, but also through in-game pastiche: the “bullet time” of Max Payne, inspired by John Woo through The Matrix, the Saving Private Ryan simulation in Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, and the slow-motion stunt replays in GTA: San Andreas, which recall a range of sources from Bullitt to Terminator 2. The “realism” these games aspire to is a mediated truth – the experience not of being at war, but being in a war film. Similarly, King and Krzywinska recognise that within sports simulations, the “primary point of reference is television coverage of the sport, rather than the experience of the sport itself.” (2006, 136). That games continue to simulate mediated experience is underscored by the way they digitally recreate the view through a camera lens, rather than the human eye: the golf game Links 2004, like the strategy war game Ground Control and the SF combat of Halo, incorporates the analogue oddity of lens flare; Max Payne experiences drug hallucination through a fish-eye lens (2002, 14) while GTA: Vice City signifies rain through droplets on a glass surface, even when the player is outside a car. (2006, 102-3)
Overall, however, the trajectory within games of the current decade has been away from a slavish emulation of the cinematic, and towards the evolution of visual storytelling techniques that establish a unique mode, distinct from cinema; or more precisely, distinct from mainstream Hollywood. The experiments in “interactive movies” have demonstrated an unworkable tension between the cinematic – in terms of continuity editing and conventional film grammar – and the playable. Full-motion video cut-scenes break the player out of immersion in the diegesis, like inter-titles in early films. Fixed camera angles restrict player movement and freedom, leading to an “on-rails” experience like a theme-park ride, rather than a convincing simulation. As Wee Liang Tong and Marcus Cheng Chye Tan conclude in their chapter on narrative space across the two forms, while many games “have intentionally mimicked and even attempted to out-do movies”, what has emerged is “a distinctive mode of visualisation...[games] unlike movies because they lack defining cinematic cues.” Above all, it is “the employment of a free-ranging camera that breaks the rules of conventional cinema.” (2002, 109). Again, the key term is conventional cinema.
Videogaming is currently dominated by two key camera positions, that of the Third-Person Shooter (TPS) and the First-Person Shooter (FPS). While, as noted, games are still dedicated to reproducing the visual effects of an analogue lens, these two key camera modes are very different from the camera-eye, and the associated editing, of mainstream cinema.
The FPS point-of-view is generally assumed to have originated with Wolfenstein 3D (id Software , 1992), though it has precursors in the arcade game Battlezone (Atari, 1980) and the ZX81 3D Monster Maze (New Generation, 1982). Wolfenstein led to Doom (id Software, 1993), which led to Quake (id Software, 1996); these and further variants refined the details, texture and lighting of the game environment, but retained the fundamental premise that the game “camera” represents the player’s point of view.
The TPS point-of-view can be traced to Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), where it appears as a literal flying-eye camera, independent of the Mario avatar; the mode evolved through Tomb Raider (Eidos 1996) and became the dominant POV in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto when the series went 3D in 2001. In contrast to the FPS, this virtual camera “corresponds to no actual pair of eyes in the gameworld. The point of view from which we see Lara Croft is constantly moving, swooping, creeping up behind her and giddily soaring above, even diving below the putative floor level.” (Poole 1999, 145-6)
Neither of these modes is conventionally “cinematic”. We see a POV similar to the FPS in horror and science fiction, putting us in the position of the “Other” – the Terminator’s digital scans of a bar-room, or the Predator’s infra-red vision. We witness Murphy’s transformation to RoboCop through his helpless eyes, as we share Jean-Dominique Bauby’s locked-down vision in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Similarly, cinema invites us to share a character’s enhanced vision through binoculars (see Star Wars: A New Hope) or a zoom lens (Rear Window). Of course, the POV shot is part of conventional film grammar – but it is a small part, a shot sparingly used. A sequence in an FPS game, from start until death, is a continuous point of view shot – a technique so rare in cinema that the exceptions can be quickly listed. The unsuccessful experiment of the first-person film noir, The Lady in the Lake; the scenes where we jack into a character’s cerebral cortex in Strange Days. Even The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, which may seem to come closest to FPS, differ in that their point of view is explicitly a camera, which shakes, blurs, can be set down and passed from one character to another; quite distinct from the smooth, steady view of gaming, where the virtual “camera” is not held separate from the body, but embedded behind the eyes. (Tellingly, the television comedy Peep Show is shot from precisely this point of view, for its unnerving, uncanny effect). The movie adaptation of Doom incorporated a first-person sequence as a novelty, another token nod to the source material, but switched back to conventional continuity editing for the majority of the film.
Where do we see the fluid, soaring, unbroken TPS camera in cinema? Again, the exceptions stand out as remarkable. Orson Welles choreographed a swooping crane shot for the opening of Touch of Evil; more recently, Children of Men and Atonement faked lengthy, mobile shots with a combination of camera rigs and CGI. As with the FPS, the most notable aspect of the third-person POV in games is (after its mobility) its lack of cuts: a technique that aligns it not with conventional Hollywood, but with Hitchcock’s playful experiment in Rope, with Greenaway’s long tracking shots, with Tarkovsky’s lengthy takes, with the unblinking stare at violence in Irreversible and Hidden; with rarities like Timecode and Russian Ark.
The dominant camera of videogames, then, is far closer to that of art cinema than to mainstream Hollywood. The videogame’s vision of “reality” is Bazinian, not Eisensteinian. Its virtual camera starts, records what happens without turning away, and cuts only at the end. While “videogame cinema”, as discussed above, seems to imply an aesthetic of cut and paste and flashy, funky superficiality, the FPS and TPS modes actually look nothing like a Tony Scott movie. As cinema, the videogame would be not youthful rebellion, but the mature challenge of the avant-garde.
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King, Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska. 2002. Introduction. In ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, 1-32.
Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide http://www.amazon.ca/Deja-Vu-Tony-Scott/dp/B00005JPD0 (accessed March 17, 2008)
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John Dale. 2004. Autology (August 9)
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Berg, Charles Ramirez. 2006. A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the "Tarantino Effect". Film Criticism Vol. 31: 5 – FIND END PAGE
Grieb, Margit. 2002. Run Lara Run. In ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. King and Krzywinska, 157-170. London: Wallflower.
Warren Buckland. 2000. Video Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element and Video Game Logic. In Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam, ed. John Fullerton and Astrid Soderberg Widding, 159-164. London: John Libbey.
Stables, Kate. 2001. Run Lara [??] Run. Sight and Sound August: 18-20.
Feld, Bruce. 2008. Crank. Film Journal International http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003087415 (accessed March 17 2008)
Howells, Sacha. A. 2002. Watching A Game, Playing A Movie: When Media Collide. In ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. King and Krzywinska, 110-121. London: Wallflower.
King, Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska. 2006. Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms & Contexts. London: I.P. Tauris
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Tong, Wee Liang and Marcus Cheng Chye Tan. 2002. Vision and Virtuality: The Construction of Narrative Space in Film and Computer Games. In ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. King and Krzywinska, 110-121. London: Wallflower.
Poole. 1999. Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. |
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