Cinematic gaming (Part 1 of 58)

I ended my commentary on Mass Effect's dialog system with this statement:

...game designers too often forget that gaming is inherently abstracted, and there's no shame in this. If designers truly wish to offer "cinematic" experiences, why not take a cue from cinema and develop games which celebrate, rather than hide, the constraints on immediacy and interactivity inherent in our medium?

That sounded pretty grandiose and crazily vague all at once, and it isn't even quite what I meant. It's worth considering the intersection of cinema with gaming, but that's a major project with plenty of antecedents in the world of academic game studies. Let's start small.

"You keep using that word"
What I meant, above, is that a century of cinema has developed an extensive visual vocabulary (camera angles, choice of actor gazes, editing tricks) that accepts the inherent limitations of the medium (flat two-dimensional screen, division between picture and audience, lack of interactivity) and works artfully within them, even against them. By manipulating these constraints, cinema evokes both subject and object, often in juxtaposition or superimposition. For example, cinema can invite us to identify with an on-screen character through one camera angle approximately behind her gaze, sharing her perspective almost physically, then cut to another view in which we objectify the same character, looking upon her beauty or anger or steely determination as an external object of our independent gaze. Such techniques can both abridge and intensify the mechanical distance between audience and non-interactive cinematic image.

I see few mainstream games approached in that fashion - by first examining and accepting the limitations of the medium, then figuring out how to build upon those limitations rather than pretend they don't exist. Such mindful design is a challenge in itself, obviously, but it's also the necessary foundation of a long-term cultural vocabulary for gaming such as we've inherited for cinema.

Part of the challenge is perhaps that digital games are so young a medium, designers are concerned more with extending boundaries than working within them. That may be an unproductive choice. Designers need to learn to walk before flying; there's limited value in aggressively pushing boundaries without first evolving more sophisticated techniques and cultures of game design. And the design boundaries of games have expanded much less than most people seem to think, anyway. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the funding market's risk-aversion to designers' philosophical inflexibility, games are often created, marketed, and consumed as metaphorized films or novels - not as a distinct cultural medium with extraordinary untapped potential even under current technological restraints. The sorry fact is that many computer game genres have evolved very little in the past 5-10 years, at least as far as the mass market is concerned.

Mass spectacle
Following up on my comments regarding Mass Effect and the limitations of the medium, I'm thinking particularly of interactivity, one of the strengths of digital entertainment, and interface latency, one of its weaknesses. (By "interface latency", I mean the "lag time" between a player processing game information, deciding how to act, and then being able to implement that decision through the game's interface.) At first glance, Mass Effect's dialog system may appear to optimally negotiate these two poles: it enables greater flexibility of player interaction than previous dialog systems, and it also encourages direct "real-time" engagement by the player. As we've seen, however, things can be more complicated than that.

(This is as good a time as any for me to acknowledge that more recent press coverage of Mass Effect, especially at this week's Game Developers Conference, has shown some of my preliminary criticism to be misplaced. Specifically, responses won't actually require as much translation as I assumed, because they'll be more predetermined than I understood. Bioware co-founder Ray Muzyka explained to GameSpy that positions on the dialog wheel will be consistently associated with attitudes, somewhat mitigating the challenge of translating abbreviated dialog options into fully elaborated responses: "upper-right tends to be kinder, straight-left tends to be inquisitive/investigatory, and lower-right tends to make you unfriendly". This doesn't change the point I'm about to make, however.)

Mass Effect may turn out to be a more "cinematic" experience than any preceding RPG - in that the game invites us to not merely interact with the main character and control his manipulation of the gameworld, but also to regard and admire that character and his actions with an external, objectifying gaze. The game's antecedents in film and television are repeatedly cited by Bioware. Muzyka promises "HBO-style" production values, for example, and has called the game's main character "Jack Bauer in space" (a quotation which, cited in most mainstream previews of the game, clings to Mass Effect like second-hand smoke). The camera in dialog employs depth-of-field blurring, a mechanical trick inherited from photography and cinematography and designed to mimic human vision - to appropriately focus attention on individual screen elements and also to "naturalize" the camera as the spectator's (player's) gaze. And it's hard to miss the cinematic camera angles in the two screenshots I previously quoted, moving from over Shepard's shoulder to a more objectifying neutral shot of Shepard's physical aggression against Garrus.

Mass Effect's unusual dramatization of dialog is a further nod toward filmic sources like 24:

[Demonstrating the game, BioWare co-founder Greg] Zeschuk has Shepard ask about why Manuel is acting so weird, and Manuel's doctor explains that he's a bit cuckoo... In a move that blends surprise, humor, and brutal directness, Zeschuk has Shepard say something along the lines of, "I can shut him up" and without warning, Shepard simply quips, "Good night Manuel," before decking him in the face for an instant KO. Manuel's stunned handler could only stammer, "...I guess that's a faster way to put him to sleep." This humorous method of getting results via harsh means is the heart of Muzyka's famous "Jack Bauer in space" quote. (GameSpy)

The abbreviated dialog is not merely elaborated into longer speeches, but is also automatically expanded into action sequences presented as spectacle rather than interactivity - action which Bioware, in promoting the game, characterizes in terms of a popular TV hero.

Gaming transmedia
To suggest that Mass Effect may be the most "cinematic" RPG to date is not an overly ambitious claim. Only in recent years has gaming evolved the technology for mechanical techniques as basic as depth-of-field (not available in hardware until 2000); cinematic techniques are buzzwords but still not widely employed. Bioware's previous game, Jade Empire, is notably less sophisticated in its camera views and manipulation of subjectivity - and the dialog screens and cutscenes of Neverwinter Nights 2, a much more recent genre leader developed by Obsidian, are downright primitive. As a genre, RPGs seem to lag behind first-person shooters and adventure games in their cinematic influences.

On the other hand, the cinematic ambitions of Mass Effect make perfect sense as a culmination of Bioware's recent history. Their 2003 title Knights of the Old Republic channeled the archetypal filmic setting of Star Wars, right down to the iconic Jedi and lightsabers ("an elegant weapon for a more civilized age"). Many of Jade Empire's best moments borrow the visual language of 1970s kung fu cinema, combined with the polish of the later Hong Kong revival and of contemporary Hollywood. In this context, Mass Effect is situated not merely within the RPG genre, but also at the forefront of a "cinematic" direction in game development.

More to the point, Bioware's titles since 2003 signal a clear agenda of developing games within what Henry Jenkins calls a transmedia environment - games which derive context and meaning not merely from antecedents within their own medium, but particularly from other media such as television and film. Mass Effect clearly aims to extend the cinematic hallmarks of its recent predecessors. In so doing, Bioware has also embraced a corollary project: through the broadly-shared vocabulary of cinema and broadly-drawn nods to popular TV, players will be deeply invested into enacting the character of Commander Shepard.

Or at least that seems to be the idea.

Raiding cinema
It's the same idea at the heart of 1996's Tomb Raider. Mike Ward's canny article "Being Lara Croft", from 2000, explores the ways in which Lara is both subject and object - identified with the player, the virtual tool of the player's subjective power to configure the gameworld, but also an object of the player's independent gaze. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's more recent Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine explores the mechanisms of this subject-object dynamic, more explicitly addressing the obvious pop-cinematic antecedent (Indiana Jones) and Eidos' explicit goal, with the first Tomb Raider, of creating an "interactive movie".

As it turns out, Lara is becoming less and less unique in this regard. EA's American McGee's Alice (2000) presents a much darker vision of the same formula, this time with both literary and visual influences. The swashbuckling protagonist of Ubisoft's recent Prince of Persia revivals has equally filmic and literary roots - and is presented, through the same mechanisms used with Lara, as both an acrobatic tool of the player's subjectivity and an objectified spectacle of graceful ferocity.

This direction in gaming isn't inevitable, however. An obvious countervailing example is Valve's immensely successful Half-Life 2 and its groundbreaking predecessor, both of which emphasize first-person interaction and refuse to interrupt the player's subjectivity. Protagonist Gordon Freeman is the player's alter ego - the agent of player interaction, a context for the reactions of other characters, and an expression of narrative continuity within the gameworld - but he never speaks or appears as an object for the player's gaze. Valve's commitment to the player as pure subject is so consistent that they don't even include mirrors in the gameworld, as so many other FPS games have done. Gordon Freeman amounts to nothing more than a name for the player's power of subjective interactivity.

Among RPGs, the classic Fallout exhibits the same commitment to subjective interaction, presenting dialogs with important characters through a first-person interface that broke new technological ground in 1997. The Vault Dweller, the game's protagonist and the player's character, is cinematically objectified only in the game's brilliant final cutscene, and in a manner that overwrites none of the player's configuration of that character. More recently, Bethesda's Oblivion maintains first-person interaction from beginning to end, adopting a philosophy similar to Valve's. The player's sense of interactivity is diminished through many other flaws in the game's design, but notably not through objectification of the protagonist as spectacle.

Cinematic role-playing
Of these two fundamental approaches to character in games, Mass Effect seems most aligned with the first: Bioware wants players to experience Shepard not as themselves, but as an externalized and highly specific force within the gameworld. The problem is that Shepard isn't a unitary character; Mass Effect is positioned as a role-playing game, which means players will be able to exercise (at least) a minimum of configurative control over who Shepard becomes in their experience of the game. Muzyka even takes care to point out the range of distinct attitudes available within the dialog wheel - possibilities in addition to those enacting "Jack Bauer in space".

What does it mean, then, that the game is bent on encouraging identification with - and even flexible configuration of - a protagonist who's simultaneously objectified through cinematic technique and transmedia references? Bioware promises superior interactivity through Mass Effect's dialog; is this compatible with its approach to interface latency and character definition, elaborating player-selected attitudes into (literally) spectacular, objectified action?

For that matter, is it even possible to engage sophisticated cinematic techniques and craft characters for objectification while still providing the subjective configurability associated with good role-playing games?

It's not my intention to judge Mass Effect a failure before it's even released, especially when Bioware's cinematic ambitions are common among developers. Throughout the hype leading up to the game's delivery, however, games journalists and commentators have exhibited considerable ignorance of the implications of "cinematic gaming". It seems accepted as axiomatic that convergence between film and electronic entertainment is both desirable and inevitable.

Regarding this widely-shared agenda to play upon cinema's cultural legitimacy and accumulated power, I see nobody asking the obvious question: is it worth it? Is it a wise long-term project to (even partly) barter away the extraordinary potential of digital games - including a radically subjective interactivity of which film directors could only dream - simply to borrow the authority of another medium? The answer isn't necessarily no, but it should never be an unconditional yes.

Labels: design, dialog, RPGs

  ¶ 19:04