In the age of 3D graphics and professional voice actors, it goes without saying that the most common medium to compare video games to is film. There are probably two main reasons for this. First, on an experiential level, movies provide the easiest comparison: both are visual and auditory mediums that are commonly played/watched on a television and often follow a story through a narrative arc from beginning to end. Games such as
Red Dead Redemption and
Uncharted invite the comparison further by styling their aesthetics after action films. The other reason, I believe, has to do with the history of film as an artistic medium. Film started as a medium that had almost immediate mass appeal, yet still had to fight for its place in the artistic world. In the early part of the twentieth century, film theorists and filmmakers wailed about the possibilities of their new medium, elbowing and shoving their way to artistic legitimacy as politicians and moral watchdogs condemned the cinema as licentious and wild. For those of us looking at video games today, the parallels are wide and many. And, so, oftentimes we think of playing a game, especially a cinematic one like Final Fantasy VII or the increasingly filmic Rockstar games, as akin to watching a movie…a really long movie. However, as games get longer, and ironically, more cinematic, the experience of playing a game can have just as much similarity to reading a novel as to watching a film.
And this brings me to
Final Fantasy VI (originally released as
Final Fantasy III in the US for SNES). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing through this heralded classic for the first time. With a huge overworld and quest that supposedly lasts upwards of fifty hours, there’s a lot of game here. And it’s been consuming my time like almost no other activity (except for The Wire. Good lord what a show!). I get home from work, I play FFVI. I wake up on Saturday. I play FF VI. I eat mac ‘n’ cheese. I play FF VI. You get the idea. And what is so great about this game, you might ask. FFVI is unique in the sense that, while it is a sprite-based game in some ways limited by its format, its plot was A) fairly complex, both in its structure as well as its themes, and B) involved a lot of character development. Compared to traditional save the princess tales of sorcery, it had a literary quality. I wouldn’t call it Proust or Austen, but it certainly had some substance to it.
In FFVI, much of the gameplay not devoted to the plot is spent wandering around towns, exploring deserts or crevices in mountains and talking to the quaint characters that you meet along the way. I love how, in traditional JRPGs, when you walk into a town and talk to someone, the character has some totally random fact to tell you. It gives the small sprite characters not only a personality, but an endearing sense of innocence and humor. There’s something about the way the dialogue works, without standard introductions or other markers of conversation. You press A and whalla, “A strange rabbit has been eating all my crops.” Oh, good to know. Everywhere you go in the game, there’s some new side quest or non-essential person to speak to. They’re not required, but they add a lot of depth and charm. And they give you a chance to sink into the world, to really get to know the space and place in which your game experience is taking place.
In thinking about my experience with the game, the complex, lengthy plot melds together with the ability to wander and explore to form a holistically immersive experience. As I’ve played, I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly how to describe and how to think about that experience. The closest parallel for me was the last novel I read, Cormac McCarthy’s
No Country For Old Men. This may seem like a strange comparison at first: steampunk fantasy world and gritty, nihilistic Texas thriller. The link between them was in the way that, while experiencing either game or novel, you get a chance to live in the world they’re set, to really spend time with the characters. Of course this can be said of many novels, but this one stuck out not only because I had just finished it, but because its film adaptation is such a fantastic and faithful one. When my game experience felt so much like my literary one, and not at all like my experience with the film, it brought to mind the overlaps between games, films and movies. The Coen brothers’ film based on
No Country was great, but it had more of an immediate, aesthetic impact. In the novel, which is strikingly similar, you get more time to really know who you’re dealing with, to feel the landscape and enter into another world. To me, this type of experience is the core of the appeal for so many adventure games.
And so I wonder if playing
Final Fantasy VI, or other long story-based games, is not in fact more akin to reading a novel than watching a film. It’s hard to really draw your own mind into a film in only a few hours. Novels and games take weeks, months, sometimes even years. The time between playing is spent thinking about the media object in the question. Sessions last hours at a time and you leave them feeling like you’ve just woken up into some other universe. You live for days on end with characters, learning about them slowly and through smaller, more drawn out interactions. In terms of what matters, the experience of the art and what you can take from it, perhaps our metric of film comparison is not only lacking in its relation to interactivity, but also to its accuracy as a comparison for more weighty games. Of course there are a whole host of issues outside of this one, but right now, I’m thinking, all other complications aside, the
experience of playing games just might be more like the experience of reading novels than watching films.
Top image via DesktopMadness
No comments:
Post a Comment