Last night, a couple of inebriated fellow students stormed into my room whilst I was shamefully attempting to replicate the economic policies of the Hanseatic League on Patrician III, and made me watch an episode of The Twilight Zone, because “they don’t make shit like that these days”. As you can probably tell, we’re all a bunch of nerds/geeks, and so the conversation (after watching 25 minutes of excellent early science fiction television) inevitably turned to video games, and particularly LA Noire.
LA Noire is an upcoming vidya game for the PlayBox and X-Station that is absolutely nothing like La Confidential. It’s main draw is its revolutionary new means of capturing the performances of actors and translating them to the screen. Rather than conventional motion capture, which requires actors to dress up like characters from Tron, this new method simply uses lots and lots of cameras, translating the actor’s every facial twitch into a 3D model in real-time. As a result, this creates much more realistic facial animations, enabling players to see every movement of the nose, eyes, mouth, and so on, with frightening accuracy.
My drunken friend argued that this level of accuracy is a revolution in video games; that it will not only change gameplay (by allowing for players to act as human lie detectors, for example), but more importantly will dramatically increase the emotional connection between the player and the characters on-screen.
I am more sceptical, and I believe that my scepticism is well-grounded, for several reasons. Firstly, the technology required to achieve the level of realism of LA Noire is brand new and incredibly expensive. LA Noire, I’m guesstimating, has the budget of a huge Hollywood blockbuster; such production costs are simply out of reach for most games developers. While in the film industry, a couple of guys can go out with a camera and make a guerrilla film on a small budget that has great emotional depth, albeit without the special effects or production values of big budget titles, video games do not work that way. Indie games developers do not have the resources or technology to create photo-realistic games like LA Noire with top-notch actors and scripts, and thus their emphasis has always been, and will always be, on creating unique forms of gameplay, often with simplistic but stylised graphics. This highlights a fundamental difference between films and games, and is one of the reasons that games can never be like films; in films, the actors do not have to be painstakingly modelled by animators, and this simply makes it much easier to create films with both a human element and an accompanying emotional depth.
My second reason to be sceptical of this new technology is that, alone, it will not revolutionise the video games industry unless it comes packaged with a free copy of ‘Writing for Dummies’ for every games developer. Let’s face it: the majority of games are not well-written. Graham Linehan made an excellent point in 2009’s ‘Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe’ that too many games writers take their cues from films instead of books. They see the fact that images are on a television screen and immediately assume that games should be written like films. This is a fundamental misapprehension of what video games are, or should be. Games are much closer to books in several senses. Like books, games can be taken at the player’s own pace. Many of the best modern games, like Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2, allow the player to explore, examine and manipulate the environment, which allows for a great level of exposition (of the background of the game world, of characters, and so on) without resorting to ‘cinematic’ cutscenes, which substitute that depth for flashy visuals. A film can only last up to around four hours maximum before it starts becoming something quite boring (or ceases to be a film), and is generally watched in one-sitting. Both books and games are supposed to be enjoyed over a longer period of time in multiple sittings, and in books this allows for slow-paced but very detailed character development and world building, which is something that many video games can learn from.
At the moment, video games are very much leaning towards the cinematic, and yet the critical reception of the recent Call of Duty games, which are the archetypal cinematic video game experiences and yet are often criticised for lacking depth, good writing or interesting characters, can lead us to several very different conclusions. The first is that everything about Call of Duty is fine, but if it were combined with the technology of LA Noire it would be vastly improved. This would be simply misguided; more realistic faces in Call of Duty would have just a marginal impact on the quality of the game. A second conclusion we can draw is that a combination of improved writing and characterisation with the technology of LA Noire would vastly improve the Call of Duty experience. This is a possibility, and yet something is odd about it. The writing of Call of Duty really is no worse than most equivalent films, but the game is spread over a much longer amount of time (even if the campaign is only 5 or 6 hours long, that is still a lot longer than your average film), which means that a ‘cinematic’ form of storytelling is going to inevitably become flat, unstructured, and overly long.
This leads us to the third conclusion. This conclusion is that the attempts of Call of Duty are misguided, because it is taking a cinematic approach to storytelling when it should be taking a different approach. This is the conclusion that I personally favour, but I am open-minded to being convinced by the second. But I’m not entirely sure what this ‘third way’ is. I said earlier that games are more like books than films, and I stand by that, but at the same time games are also very different to books. They do have a visual element, which is vital, but they also have a gameplay element, which I would argue is the most important aspect of video games (they are games, after all). But gameplay and storytelling do not have to be divorced, and I believe that any ‘new approach’ to storytelling would be an effective combination of gameplay and storytelling that combines the methods of literature, cinema, and gameplay into a coherent whole, without emphasising one over the other as games invariably do currently. The result of this would be the depth of a well-written novel, the visual flair of a Hollywood blockbuster, and the entertainment value of...whatever it is that people do for fun that isn’t a video game.
I wonder if LA Noire is going to pull it off.
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