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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #30: 2009 – The Year Games Took Over

Published Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:00:26 -0600

WARNING: This column has loads and loads of spoilers for many of the big video games that came out this year, so if you want to play them, you may not want to read it.

If there's anything about 2009 that stood out to me, it was that video games became more compelling to me as narratives than most movies, TV or comics. Yes, there was the odd good movie, but not many, and not many from Hollywood or even the US. US network TV is having one of its worst years, where failure of imagination and nerve due to the bad economy has had them retreating to sitcoms while the genre pitches got duller and duller. The Science Fiction and superpowers cycle continues its death-march with V, FLASHFORWARD and HEROES continuing their ratings slide. The SyFylis Channel continues to hold onto a niche audience with derivative and inoffensive fare that non-geeks don't give a shit about. Do I even need to talk about comics? Marvel and DC continue to mine a dwindling well of superhero clichés and tiresome crossover events as a matter of editorial policy and Disney buying up Marvel is unlikely to make the comics anymore interesting. Thriller comics have been just as clichéd, more concerned with getting optioned by Hollywood than actually telling new or interesting stories, and still nowhere near as interesting as manga.

It's been brewing away for a few years now, but 2009 is probably the year where video games overtook movies, TV and comics as the primary storytelling medium in pop culture. I'm not talking about driving or flight simulator games, but games that have stories. The difference is that TV, movies and comics are passive experiences, but in games, you get to play the part of the hero. The plots aren't at all original, but the players get to feel like they're driving the narrative, if not creating the story as they go along. As a result, the games themselves feel like fresher experiences for the players than watching a movie. It's just as well there was no big military-porn actioin movie this year (no, TRANSFORMERS doesn't really count) because CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 fulfilled the brief for anyone desperate for a milporn thriller with nonstop action and dodgy politics. I suppose getting killed by relentless hordes of enemy soliders over and over again until you work out how to not get killed and shoot them first is part of the experience that no movie could ever offer. You get to go stealth, assassinate guards at wintry airfields before planting explosives, get into a James Bond-style snowmobile chase in a race against time, play various soldiers in different parts of the same scenario who end up dying when their mission fails or get shot and then set on fire when a trusted commander betrays them. No movie is going to let you throw a knife into the villain's face at the end.

Or in the less frenetic HALO 3: ODST, you can play a future soldier sneaking through a war-town future city at night trying to find the rest of your squad that's gone AWOL on a mission to recover an intelligence asset that's gone awry. Underneath the sneaking, running and shooting, there's an integrated quest story with a smart subplot about the city's AI that's guiding you towards your goal, with flashbacks to what happened to your squadmates where you play as one of them as the backstory unfolds in front of you, then snapping back to the present towards a narrative twist when you finally reach you destination. Playing through the soldier's eyes means you experience the story in real time

Then there's UNCHARTED 2, not only the best adventure action game of the year, but also the best action movie and the best Indiana Jones movie of recent years. The story may be the standard pulp treasure quest serial adventure, but it's written with more intelligence and attention to detail than most Hollywood movies these days. It certainly has more believable characters and research than Roland Emmerich's moronic disasterporn epic 2012.

And how about ASSASSIN'S CREED II, where you get to play a hitman for the Medicis in Renaissance Italy where you get to sneak up to and shank evil Borgia conspirators and Templars, all the while getting a virtual tour of Florence, Tuscanny and Venice and a history lesson? Or BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM where you get to play Batman doing what Batman does, which is to sneak around scaring the crap out of criminals and then beat them senseless.

These games are rail shooters, which means you have no choice in the path of the story, but that's no different from what movies do anyway, but you're put in the shoes of the heroes and you feel more of an investment in the story, even in a really dumb one like WOLFENSTEIN, because nothing happens without you actively doing something about it, even if it usually involves shooting the bad guys before they kill you. If movies, are supposed to be about vicarious thrills, then games have upped the level of active engagement for audiences. And the amount of sales and money these games are generating is making Hollywood think about trying to co-opt them but still not quite up on how different movies are from games. Video game tie-ins from movies are generic and dull also-rans that do nothing more than promote the movies, though the WOLVERINE game turned out to be arguably a better and more accurate Wolverine experience than the movie itself. DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS is an intriguing novelistic experience in interactivity – the plot may be a standard Tolkein fantasy quest, but the player gets to choose not only the gender but the race and class in which to play, and is faced with different choices that affect the outcome of the various subplots and the stories. It's been especially amusing to read players' reactions to the outcomes of their characters' romances or attempts to romance certain characters in the game, going on message boards to trade tips on how best to land a supporting character in the sack, now many supporting characters they can seduce, and how best to avoid getting dumped by the ones they fall in love with. The debates between female gamers over a love interest in the game has raged almost as feverishly as girls debating over the TWILIGHT franchise. Then there are the moral decisions the player has to make when faced with which side to take as they try to recruit allies for a coming war, with the outcomes often turning out to be the opposite of what they expect when they thought they were making a moral or less evil choice. The game tested many players' own moral and ethical compasses and it practically a social experiment.

If I want a quiet, personal contemplative story about people and complex emotions, I'll read a non-mainsteam or indie graphic novel. If I want to experience active mad thrills, I'll play a game. This means the movies, and especially comics, need to step up their game. Come to think of it, why isn't THE BLACKEST NIGHT a video game? The adolescent slam-bang plot with its big cosmic setpieces should be perfect for an xbox or PS3 game, much more than the rather dull-looking DC UNIVERSE MMO that's being developed.

And with that, may everyone have a Merry Christmas. If you get sick of the family, play some LEFT 4 DEAD 1 or 2 and pretend you're shooting specific people in your lives.

I haven't been paid to review the above games. I rented or bought them to play in my spare time, though some of it was for research in game-scripting.

Either gaming or reading at lookitmoves at gmail.com

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