Speculation about a fictional Linklater game

[clyde]

I wonder what the mechanics of a game would be if it was in the style of 90's Richard Linklater films. I've only seen Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Waking Life. The unifying quality of those films is what I am referring to. I think the biggest challenge that this hypothetical game would have would be giving the player a reason to actually care about what all the NPC's were going on about. It's hard enough in the films. If every NPC I ran into started talking about how Sartre was just thinking about the tip of the iceberg, I would run around the room and break all the crates to kill time. Maybe stand really super close to the NPC's face to see the inside of her head while she talked. But I'm hoping that the game designers would go beyond giving me a reason to stand there patiently while I hear about crossword puzzles being completed more quickly two days after they appear in the New York Times. I would hope that the lab results being described would be repeatable enough that I would be presented with an instance of Wordament that I could play while the taxi driver colors my game with his discourse. And then when we have arrived at my destination, he implies that the game I just played with agency, could be taken as evidence of the point he had been making.
I would prefer the game to take on the style of Dazed and Confused for it's larger narrative arch. Make me feel like I came into the game as a novice and I'm leaving as an enlightened being. I think Dazed and Confused does a wonderful job of communicating the nostalgic value of strife. I suppose that the video game equivalent of this is something like Super Meat Boy or Demon's Souls where you are presented with a challenge from an earlier stage that you can easily overcome, now that you have operable knowledge. But I'm hoping for something more akin to Bully, where you share the player character's motivations but simultaneously belittle his concerns because his circumstance is symbolic of a rite of passage, you have already passed beyond. When I watch the Linklater movies, I'm reminded that in the most banal circumstances, you can find perspectives that can change the way you see the world by engaging in philosophical discussion with strangers. I'd be interested to see how a game can successfully do that DURING GAMEPLAY, not in discussion afterward.

[Ucantalas]

...I don't really know what you mean. But this now means I have some movies to check out sometime, so... yay!

[clyde]

...I don't really know what you mean. But this now means I have some movies to check out sometime, so... yay!

Is it because you haven't seen those movies that you don't know what I mean? I wouldn't know what I meant if I hadn't seen those movies. 

[Ucantalas]

Is it because you haven't seen those movies that you don't know what I mean? I wouldn't know what I meant if I hadn't seen those movies. 

Id say its a mix of not having seen those movies and still waking up.

[clyde]

Id say its a mix of not having seen those movies and still waking up.

Well if you decide to watch them, be prepared for a slow pace and a lot of monologues. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that stuff, other times. . .not so much.

[TheLastBaron]

I didn't read the op but I'm assuming the question is how you would combine Bad News Bears with School of Rock and get a game. It would probably be like Pokemon, but with children.

[clyde]

I didn't read the op but I'm assuming the question is how you would combine Bad News Bears with School of Rock and get a game. It would probably be like Pokemon, but with children.

You are on to something. I love the concept of a game where you are the coach of some little-league team. You level them up (by allocating them to training excercises), give them fund raising assignments (whose funds you can spend on fresh uniforms or pizza parties for morale). You have to balance parent's expectations, individual skills, and relationships between players; when assigning positions. Each player would have a Mass Effect 2 style loyalty mission. That would be awesome. Little Bobby is having a hard time with his parent's divorce, he's taking it out on the other kids but if you play it right, you can convince him that he might be able to get them back together by winning the tournament. 

[TheLastBaron]

Btw if you liked those movies you should watch A Scanner Darkly. Also I think you'd like Man From Earth, but it's not a Linklater, but it's really good.

[Patrick R]

To really approximate that kind of ensemble film like Slacker or Dazed & Confused, you'd probably have to play as multiple characters. For Dazed and Confused you'd be Jason London, Rory Cochrane, Wiley Wiggins, and Christin Hinojosa. I never played Heavy Rain, but didn't that have you jumping around multiple characters? It could work like that.

 

Waking Life feels like it'd have to be a Warioware thing. But I don't even know what the gaming equivalent of "idle chats about philosophy" would even be.

[clyde]

 But I don't even know what the gaming equivalent of "idle chats about philosophy" would even be.

Yeah, neither do I. Let's figure it out. 

Mass Effect 1 and 2 spoilers:

When I think about philosophical chats in games, the first thing that comes to mind is the plot twists in Mass Effect 1 Finding out that Sovereign, Saren's ship is a Reaper of myth was a thought-experiment for me. Finding out about the Citadel's true purpose and the 50,000 year cycle made me feel a similar way as a conversation in Waking Life did. 

For me, there is a comparison to be made between discovering the details and logical results of a coherent and consistent fictional culture and discovering perspectives that can change the way you look at the world. I suppose I have gotten a similar feeling from game mechanics, when I've realized that I could use the game's logic in a way I hadn't considered, but it doesn't have the Waking Life feel to me unless an NPC is delivering the info.

[Patrick R]

I guess I'm having trouble seeing the difference between your example and just any typical plot twist.

[clyde]

I didn't know what the difference was either until you asked.

In my Mass Effect examples, what I should have done was explain that its fiction does a good job of having plot twists that would give other characters in the game vastly different perspectives than your own. They are different ways of seeing the situation rather than surprising external events occurring. You play the game for a while to develop base assumptions and then through conversation, you discover that the situation can be seen through a completely different lens. Once you know that the lens exists, you can retrospectively look at everything you have discovered thus far, through it. By doing so your world changes. 
I think that this type of narrative tool is nearly synonymous with "plot twist" because the most surprising plot twists have this Söze quality. The plot twists that would be excluded from this categorization would be actual events rather than information that forces reevaluation of the past.

In order to really channel Waking Life, the base assumptions, the default perspective of the player, should be the average perspective that we have in our lives. This would allow many different subjects to be given the new lens treatment. Linklater relies on what we already know when we come to the movie than what he shows us during it. I don't think Dazed and Confused does this especially well, but Slacker and Waking Life have a Wikipedia feel where you are just jumping around and finding out interesting things about each stranger's specialization.

[Patrick R]

But to also keep that restless wandering feeling of those films, you couldn't stick to one scenario too long. So maybe the assumptions that would be challenged could be gameplay assumptions, instead of narrative ones (because if there's one thing movies like Slacker, Waking Life, and Dazed & Confused aren't, it's plot-driven). Which I think maybe makes something like Braid the Waking Life of games you're talking about. That game constantly challenges your perception of how to navigate through it's worlds and what those rules are. Also, complaints that it is pretentious and too up it's own butt are common.

 

Though I should say that I think I may have a slightly different take on Waking Life than you. For me the film is less about what is being said then how it's being said. What saves it from being pretentious to me is that I think Linklater is more focused on HOW people communicate. Making a film where people have scenes centered on more abstract conversations is a way to put the focus on that, since there's none of the typical sources of drama (interpersonal relationships, power dynamics, plot, etc). So for me the Waking Life of games would be more about exploring how game mechanics are communicated to the player, instead of simply subverting assumptions the player has about them.

 

I do think there is a lot of potential in ensemble games in general. A similar thought experiment could be made about films like Magnolia, Nashville, and Short Cuts. Games about multiple people whose lives intersect in interesting ways. I think one of the strengths of games is that a well-written one can foster empathy in a player really effectively (because they literally walk around in someone else's shoes) so a game that would encourage a player to empathize with multiple perspectives in a single world could be really great. Thomas Was Alone is a pretty good example of how powerful that empathy could be (projecting strong personalities onto the most abstract of avatars), though I'd appreciate it more in a game with a more realistic setting, and without really tedious gameplay.

 

On a completely different Linklater note, I would play any game that had the setting and tone of Bernie.

[clyde]

Though I should say that I think I may have a slightly different take on Waking Life than you. For me the film is less about what is being said then how it's being said. What saves it from being pretentious to me is that I think Linklater is more focused on HOW people communicate. Making a film where people have scenes centered on more abstract conversations is a way to put the focus on that, since there's none of the typical sources of drama (interpersonal relationships, power dynamics, plot, etc). So for me the Waking Life of games would be more about exploring how game mechanics are communicated to the player, instead of simply subverting assumptions the player has about them.

I'm glad we are talking about this. Your observation here is something I can chew on for a while. 

[eurotransient]

Didn't see any mention of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset above, but I highly recommend those films. Great timing, too, since the third film in the series, Before Midnight, has just been released in theaters. The two main characters in the series, Jesse and Celeste, actually make a short appearance in Waking Life, laying in bed together. Jesse brings up collective memory and talks about a study he'd read: a group of people were tasked with solving a crossword puzzle. When the group was given a puzzle that was a day old and had thus been solved by thousands of people already, the control group's scores went up dramatically.

 

Anyways, those two characters meet in Before Sunrise on a train pulling into Vienna. It's Jesse's last night in Europe and as he's about to get off the train, he proposes Celeste join him as he explores the city through the night. She says yes and the rest of the movie is just watching them learn about it each other, walking around and talking.

 

Before Sunset picks up nine years later and Before Midnight another nine years after that.

 

Looking at something like this, it's difficult to see how you might translate this into any sort of interesting game mechanic. It's not so much that they lack plot, though. In these films (and really any film), there are still interesting choices being made by the characters in the story (perhaps less so in Waking Life, though -- it's been years since I've seen it). Hasn't it been said that games are a series of interesting choices?

 

I think Patrick has it right when he brings up ensemble pieces. It's just not a thing you really see in games, right? Even if we strip that ensemble down to just two, a film like Before Sunrise succeeds largely because both characters carry equal weight and the viewer's experience is a construction of what both Jesse and Celeste see, do, say, feel, etc.

 

How then to translate that into a game, introducing the control mechanics necessary to make it a game while not forcing an individual perspective that would rob the game of the richness the film has? I guess you could switch between the two perspectives, but then you're stuck with either (a) forcing players to replay the same scenarios from each perspective or ( moving forward so each moment or encounter in the game is played from an individual's perspective, but the cumulative effect builds to that same richness.

[Patrick R]

Or some kind of online co-op game in which two characters end up spending significant amounts of time apart from one another, doing different tasks, so as to eventually have two completely different set of contexts when called upon to act cooperatively. That would simulate the way two people can have two different perspectives on the same event, neither being incorrect. The second time you play through it, as the opposite character, you'd come to realize why your partner acted the way they did.

 

To make it more interesting, time spent apart should prime each party to tackle eventual problems they'd have to collaborate on in different ways, so when chatting about how to solve that puzzle (let's say), they'd be set up to disagree on things.

 

Actually, I rather like this idea. Though I haven't seen the Before movies, so I can't really say how true it is to their spirit.

And to do an easy one, Rock Band has proven itself to actually functionally be School of Rock, transitioning gamers into musicians.

[TheLastBaron]

I am in full support of an Ethan Hawke role playing game.

[Patrick R]

Well, you can always play Amnesia and pretend it's an adaptation of Sinister.

[TheLastBaron]

What's a good game to pretend is Gattaca?

[Patrick R]

Papers Please?

[TheLastBaron]

Wow, I never would have thought of that, but that is very astute.  I'm going to go grab my Moleskine notebook of people and move you name up a couple places.