Variety

[OssK]

Is it just because I know games so well that I see so much diversity in their field ? How much distance can there be from a movie to another ?

I can see Hitchcock standing there and Transformers on the other side of the room and despite the distance, I can clearly see the room around them, with walls and a floor built on narrative and a ceiling of expression through light and movement…

But while games have been standing outside of the museums and centers for the arts, they seem to me as existing in another space…*How could you put in a single room a Tetris and Braid and an Uncharted 2 and a Portal 2 ? Why can I see Modern Times and Enter the Void and think about them as having some common grounds but Link's Awakening and Everyday Shooter ? Really ?

[Gwardinen]

It definitely helps to know them well, I think. People who are deep into a subject are always going to have a different perspective on it than those who aren't. I think those who have a broad (knowing a little about many things) perspective and those who have a deep (knowing a lot about few things) perspective are often the interesting ones to compare and contrast. Perhaps it's difficult for you to compare games and films because you have a deep perspective on games and a broad perspective on films?

I do sometimes get the same feeling you have described, though, and can only reason that it is due to that extra dimension of interactivity. Ultimately, however nuanced and complex a film is, it can always be reproduced entirely in a game because a game contains all the same physical characteristics that a film does. By which I mean it is essentially a moving picture attached to an audio track. Except that games have that extra dimension, the fact that the player engages with the game as well as the game engaging with the player.

It is in this way that two films can be as different as it is possible for them to be to each other - different acting styles and qualities, different writing styles and qualities, different methods of directing, different tones, different genres, different lengths and budgets and so on - and you can assign them in some sort of X-dimensional space based on all those concepts. You get a whole continuum of potential films through the combination of these possibilities, but games will always exist in an X+1-dimensional space by comparison, simply because they have that extra possibility of interaction.

Truth be told even that is a simplification because it's not as if interactivity is even one dimension itself - games have both a genre of story and a genre of gameplay, for example. We even tend to describe them by the latter; if I asked you what StarCraft was you'd probably tell me it was an RTS. A StarCraft film, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be called sci-fi action. StarCraft the game contains both those attributes, and it contains the attributes of acting and writing and directing that a film has while also containing attributes no film can have, such as interface and dominant strategies and balance. It is also dynamically expressed though not only the interplay between itself and its player but also the interplay between different players and each other. It's not impossible for that to happen in the minds of a film's audience but it's not the norm either.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit about things we all mostly already know, so I think now is a good time to stop. Also, don't misunderstand me and think that I mean games are inherently better than films - I am actually in a phase of my life (and so are games) in which I often enjoy films and TV more than games, but that doesn't change the fact that as time goes on the matrix of possibilities for games is only going to grow.

[Wubbles]

EDIT: Dumb, dumb, dumb. I should try reading the whole OP.

Edited April 27, 2011 by Wubbles

[James]

The crux of the matter seems to be, as Gwardinen pointed out, games can differ in all the manners which films do, and in the manner of their interactivity. It's worth remembering, however, that the apparent restriction of being a static medium does actually afford films a lot of things (such as authorial control) that are harder to obtain in games. While technically, as an audiovisual medium capable of any arbitrary arrangement of the audio and the visual, games can contain anything films can, there comes a point when one is just calling something a game to try to prove some sort of a point. If you take games as they actually are, there's an awful lot of similarity in narrative and emotional content where films exhibit much greater variety.

I guess my point is that I'm not sure whether all the variety in games is inherently valuable. Certainly, I'd rather there were variety than not, but I don't think it elevates the medium above others, by any means. It's almost remarkable, the number of different ways games can evoke very similar reactions and fail to make much of a point. Which is fine, of course.

[OssK]

Can games tell stories as well as linear media do ?

Is there anything you could make with a movie you couldn't make with a book ?

How can you live through a narration as a narration is by definition the recollection of events that happened?

[ThunderPeel2001]

Is there anything you could make with a movie you couldn't make with a book ?

A car chase.

Edited April 28, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[DanJW]

Is there anything you could make with a movie you couldn't make with a book ?

I think so. I was going to go along the path of visual language, but then it occurred to me that maybe this is saying the same things in different ways.

So instead how about: events happening concurrently. Whether it's split screen or foreground-background or something else. We can see these things happen simultaneously. The nature of the written word means that when reading about them we have to learn of one of these things before the other. The gap might be small, but it is there.

[subbes]

A car chase.

"He drove his car."

"The other guy drove his car also."

"He drove his car around a corner faster than the other guy."

"The other guy caught up!"

Repeat for at least 120 pages, find publisher, retire.

[ThunderPeel2001]

"He drove his car."

"The other guy drove his car also."

"He drove his car around a corner faster than the other guy."

"The other guy caught up!"

The defense rests, your Honour.

[subbes]

Hang on, I hadn't even got to the part with the dinosaurs.

[OssK]

Car chases have been done and done again in books, but yeah, I guess visual superposition is pretty specific to movies, even if the way the human eye is made also makes it impossible to focus on two concurrently happening scenes so you will inevitably learn one before the other.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Hang on, I hadn't even got to the part with the dinosaurs.

Lol.

Car chases have been done and done again in books

Everything has been done in books, Ossk. That's not proof of anything. Could you point me to a great literary car chase? I'd like to see if it gets my pulse racing like watching the French Connection does.

Edited April 28, 2011 by ThunderPeel2001

[Hermie]

I think DanJW is on the right track, the thing academics point out as being the unique feature of films is editing.

The human brain tends to look for patterns and connections, even when there are none, so by putting two images after each other, we make an involuntary connection between them. If you see a clip of Daniel Craig picking a lock, and then a different clip of Daniel Craig in a room taking something from a desk, everyone would agree that they saw "James Bond broke into that room and stole something", even though the only recurring element was Daniel Craig.

This also applies for editing sound and images together. In a book you couldn't have music that amplifies the feeling of f. ex. dread when something is about to happen or happening on screen (Psycho), nor could you have music and sound effect that are the opposite (contrapunctal) of what is happening, to create an entire different feeling (American Psycho).

[OssK]

Yes but is editing something games cannot do ?

[Hermie]

Yup, games are the second big audio-visual medium, but people like Eisenstein and Kuleshov were around at the beginning of the century. Now we have this new medium, that as people have pointed out, have another layer; interactivity.

Just look at the way we categorize games. While movies and books are typically classified by their narrative and structural elements - romance, western, action - we categorize games by what we DO in them; Real Time Strategy, Third Person Shooter, Match Three Puzzles.

So maybe that's why you feel the width of games can be bigger than the movie? Movies range in style, technique, narrative content, etc, but since also are similarly built, you have the same range, but you have the additional factor of what you do to the game, making the variables much bigger.

[Patters]

Yup, games are the second big audio-visual medium, but people like Eisenstein and Kuleshov were around at the beginning of the century. Now we have this new medium, that as people have pointed out, have another layer; interactivity.

Just look at the way we categorize games. While movies and books are typically classified by their narrative and structural elements - romance, western, action - we categorize games by what we DO in them; Real Time Strategy, Third Person Shooter, Match Three Puzzles.

So maybe that's why you feel the width of games can be bigger than the movie? Movies range in style, technique, narrative content, etc, but since also are similarly built, you have the same range, but you have the additional factor of what you do to the game, making the variables much bigger.

Fourth: Theatre, Cinema, Television, Games

[Hermie]

Fourth: Theatre, Cinema, Television, Games

Right! In my head, I kinda counted cinema and television together since they use largely the same tools, but I forgot about theatre.

[Erkki]

That's not proof of anything. Could you point me to a great literary car chase?

Not sure if it qualifies, but the Amber series by Roger Zelazny had various chase sequences. One of the first ones involved at least one car. I read them years ago so I don't remember if those parts were good, though.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Comics.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Here's what Alan Moore has to say about Ossk's question:

"There are a lot of things that can be done with a film that can't be done with a short story or novel. Information can be presented visually in an efficient an measured fashion concerning character and environment that would take a lot of bulky description and exposition to convey with words alone. Also, since our current society has a greater visual orientation than a literary one, a visual flow of narrative gives a much more immediate and involving sensory impact to the work in hand, even though much of the emotional depth and resonance is forfeit in many cases."

E.g. Car chases, explosions, fight scenes, slapstick comedy. It's hard, if not impossible, to have the same level of visceral impact of such things in prose alone.

[Ben X]

Hang on, I hadn't even got to the part with the dinosaurs.

I bet one of the cars drives up the back of a diplodocus and ramps off its neck.

Edited April 29, 2011 by bbX1138
Royal Wedding drinks = misuse of apostrophes

[ThunderPeel2001]

I bet one of the cars drives up the back of a diplodocus and ramps off it's neck.

Yep, I thought that, too. It's such a cliché. (Sorry, Subbes.)

[miffy495]

Not if you ramp off a stegosaurus. That shit will mess up your undercarriage.

[Thompson]

Try ramping off a pterodactyl. I dare you.

[DanJW]

Stegosaurs are for superbike chases - you know the bit where they skid underneath, as if it were an articulated truck.