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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #34: Now We Live In Science Fiction

Published Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:00:16 -0600

Last updated Mon, 31 May 2010 10:39:20 -0500

We don't have flying cars or jetpacks or condos on a terraformed Mars, but we have video games to tide us over while we wait.

The last few weeks have seen a bombardment of advertising for MASS EFFECT 2, the new Science Fiction role-playing game from Bioware and Electronic Arts. There have been posters all over town and at least six different trailers on TV during the shows deemed popular with the game's target demographic, namely males in the 18-34 age group. CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 didn't get this big a media blitz and it's made a billion dollars in sales. Aside from the question of how many copies of the game will need to be sold before EA makes back the money they spent on developing it and the publicity campaign, the trailers are an indicator that video games have overtaken movies as the predominant storytelling medium of the 21st Century. Movies are in danger of becoming moribund, bogged down in over-inflated budgets and tired, rehashed scripts while games continue to catch the attention of the market the studios are desperately trying to attract and hold onto. The trailers for these games are overtly pitching the games as the equivalent of movies. The MASS EFFECT 2 trailer is edited with the same beats you would find in a trailer for the next big Hollywood blockbuster.

With the increasingly improved graphics engines, games like MODERN WARFARE 2, and then MASS EFFECT 2 and HEAVY RAIN are looking more and more like playable movies and offer a more immediate and visceral narrative experience than actual movies themselves. Movies are essentially passive experiences. You sit there and watch the story unfold in front of you. MODERN WARFARE 2 lets you be the hard special ops soldiers fighting through the missions, which can't progress with you taking action. The new generation of video games let you take an active part in structuring the story, where the choices you make will determine the direction of the story, and even how it ends.

I haven't bought or played MASS EFFECT 2 or HEAVY RAIN yet because they're not out yet, but there have been more than enough interviews and demos that explain how the games work to paint a decent picture.

MASS EFFECT 2 is not just a shooter game. You can choose the gender and appearance of the hero character you play, you can choose to be a nice, helpful sort or a ruthless bastard when you interact with the other characters as you recruit them and then prepare for a suicide mission to save the galaxy. The plot is essentially THE DIRTY DOZEN IN SPACE. You actually have to ensure the misfits and mental cases that make up your squad stays on-mission and loyal to you or you could all end up dead in the final mission. It's not the usual "get out-shoot and die to start again" death but a final in-story death. You'll have the option to play the game again knowing what you did wrong before and making different choices in order to survive the final mission, and then play again to get everything absolutely right so that everyone survives. That effectively turns the player's experience of the game story into GROUNDHOG DAY as well. In space.

HEAVY RAIN is a noir thriller set in a grimy American city where you get to play as four characters in alternating chapters as they search for a serial killer for reasons of their own. There's the father whose son has been kidnapped, the aging private detective, the traumatized journalist, and the drug-addicted federal agent., all of them needing redemption for a troubled past. Here you not only choose how each character talks to people, you're directly controlling their every action, whether it's a gesture on a dancefloor, brushing his teeth, cooking a meal, whether you throw a punch in time, or dodge a fatal blow, all on cue. Missing a cue will result in a different outcome every time, sometimes resulting in the permanent death of the character in the story. If one or more of the main characters die in-story, the surviving ones can still continue the story to its conclusion, and the conclusion will be different depending on who survived and what their actions were. If all four characters die in-game, then the killer gets away and the story ends tragically.

Despite the sophisticated software and game engines powering these games, their origins are actually quite humble. The MASS EFFECT games really have their roots in the original table-top pen-and-paper throw-a-dice role-playing games from the 1970s. HEAVY RAIN has its roots in choose-your-own-adventure books where you chose a different path by flipping to a different page with the divergent outcome of your choice, which was then adapted in the 1980s into the first point-and-click adventure games with crude 8-bit 2D graphics before voice actors were added to the mix, then computer animation became so advanced that they can now create virtually photorealistic people with detailed facial expressions and body language.

Both MASS EFFECT 2 and HEAVY RAIN have a lot in common in their ambitions to create an immersive narrative experience for the player, who has to be an active participant in the story. MASS EFFECT 2 does this under the window of the Science Fiction and shooter genres while HEAVY RAIN chooses to send the player through a dark serial killer detective thriller. The producers of both games have quite ambitious agendas for creating immersive narrative experiences, even if David Cage, being French, is more forthright about the importance of creating an artistic and emotional experience in HEAVY RAIN. Cage wants games to reach a point of telling stories for adults akin to the best dramas, even if they still have to be under the more commercial umbrellas of genre fiction.

I would love to ask Bioware and Cage if they ever had at the back of their minds thoughts about social experimentation and engineering. If you look at Bioware's game forums for MASS EFFECT and their other game DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS, you find players debating passionately, if not fanatically, about which characters they've become attached to, fallen in love with, seeking advice on the best choices to make in order to romance or have sex with them, which ones they hate and which ones they want to get killed as soon as possible. Some players talk about discovering the nuances of their own moralities as they debate which choices to make, others talk about taking the time to talk to hated characters and discovering they're more than the unpleasant stereotypes they initially appeared to be and are more complex than expected, all of which were scripted into the game and left to the players to discover should they feel inclined. Surely this becomes a kind of covert education in empathy and psychological understanding, even social interaction – in one quest in DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS, your character is asked by a comrade to play wingman in his bid to reunite with an old flame, and you can choose to help him impress her or piss her off so much she won't have anything to do with him. And then there are the nasty choices for players who just want to indulge in nasty comedy or just being a dick, but those choices will always have consequences. This seems to me that these types of role-playing games have the potential for more than just escapism. The player is engaged and directly involved far more than they could be in any movie.

Of course, the movie studios are now eager to get a piece of the action, but the best they can offer is to option the rights to make a movie out of HALO or MASS EFFECT or METAL GEAR SOLID or BIOSHOCK. A movie of a popular video is surely redundant. They don't fulfill the same function, and a movie turns the story into a passive experience, and in the end, after every player has already played the game and shaped the narrative their way, with MASS EFFECT, they've also literally created a character on their own terms and carried him or her through the narrative in a unique and personal path, what's the point of a movie?

MASS EFFECT 2 is on sale on xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC this week. HEAVY RAIN is on sale in late February. I will buy them.

Clicking away at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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