What is the relationship between cinema and videogames? Hollywood film franchises are routinely translated into games. Some game titles make the move onto the big screen, none more prominently than Lara Croft, iconic star of the Tomb Raider series. Games often depend on recognized film genres, milieu or devices for branding and marketing. Some aspire to a film-like quality of graphics and action. But games also offer markedly different experiences, especially in the realm of interactivity.
And what happens in the interface between cinema and games console or PC? Is there a merging of languages as games influence movies and movies influence games? Are some films becoming increasingly like games, and to what extent do they draw on the characteristics of Hollywood or other forms of cinema? ScreenPlay investigates all these issues and explores the extent to which the tools of film analysis can be applied to games, in particular how the pleasures (and frustrations) of computer games can be compared with those of cinema.
Screenplay isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I thought it was a pretty good book. The central unifying concept of the book is exploring the ways in which videogames draw from films. This is a very different and much more reasonable approach than the more common found approach of applying film theory to videogames.
Authors in the book include articles by both King and Krzywinska as well as names familiar to me such as Andrew Mactavish, Jo Bryce & Jason Rutter, and Sue Morris. Other authors include, Wee Liang Tong & Marcus Chen Chye Tan, Sacha A. Howells, Paul Ward, David Bessell, Steve Keane, Margit Grieb, Diane Carr, Derek A. Burrill, and Leon Hunt.
As far as the articles are concerned, to be honest, some of them seem to be much more on the film side than the videogame side. Keane's “From Hardware to Fleshware: Plugging into David Cronenberg's eXistenZ” is mainly about how videogames are used in films, Grieb's article, “Run Lara Run” seems to be arguing, “Run Lola Run was inspired by videogames! No Really!! It was!” I haven't seen Run Lola Run so this whole article was pretty lost on me. Hunt's “I Know Kung FU!” is about the authenticity of various forms of martial arts in videogames and modern films like the Matrix and how they influence each other. I like kung fu movies and fighting games, but didn't really find much of interest here.
The article that I found most out of place was Burrill's “Oh, Grow Up 007” which, as one might guess from the title, is about James Bond films and, at least superficially, games starring the character. I say superficially because it feels as if this has once been a perfectly good article about James Bond and had some brief comments about videogames tacked onto it. The article is really about recent James Bond movies, and there is does pretty well. It is in his comments about the James Bond videogames that he goes astray. For example, he notes that in the Bond games that women hardly appear at all and when they do it is as either villains or as liabilities. Ummm.... isn't that true of just about every First-Person Shooter with the exception of the No One Lives Forever series? And isn't that true of nearly all of the men in games as well??? He also makes a big deal about the player inhabiting Bond and such, but I'm not buying that. Is the fact that you are playing as Bond that essential to Goldeneye? Wouldn't it be just as fun if you were playing as 008 instead of 007 or something like that? Isn't it the setting that is important? Not the role you play? This article does seem to make some good points about James Bond, but would have been better served if the videogame portion had been left out.
For me, the most interesting portion of the book is the first part. These are the articles that deal most directly with videogames and the experience of playing them. Andrew Mactavish starts off the collection with, “Technological Pleasure: The Performance and Narrative of Technology in Half-Life and other High-Tech Computer Games,” an intriguing article that, basically, explores the notion that part of the reason why we play games is to experience spectacle. He writes that “For many gamers, the pleasure of computer gameplay is substantially composed of admiration for, and participation within, the game's exhibition of advanced visual and auditory technology” (34). It is an interesting idea, and one that does have some merit, at least for the first timewe play a particular game. However, it does not explain why we come back to some games and play them more than once. Surely once we have played them we have become immersed into the game and do not really notice the visuals and sounds. My main bone of contention with this article is that its description of pleasures seems to imply that we can only experience one kind of pleasure at a time. The article discusses the fact that the spectacular elements disrupt our immersion in the game by their sheer “wow” factor, but I'm not so sure that we can't remain immersed if not within the game world then at least immersed within the act of playing while simultaneously appreciating the technological wizardry.
The next two articles are by Geoff King and Jo Bryce & Jason Rutter and discuss spectacle in videogames. While both articles make some interesting arguments about the nature of videogames, I am just not convinced that videogames really are about spectacle. I don't know what it is, but it just doesn't feel like spectacle is the right word for it. Maybe we don't have a word for it yet, whatever it is. The articles are worth taking a look at though.
Sue Morris's article “First-Person Shooters – A Game Apparatus” lays out a lot of interesting territory. It discusses not games so much, but the players, which is a project close to my heart. It does a good example of describing the unique situation of gamers in that they are immobile, yet highly active and immersed. It takes the notion of the apparatus, one that is unfamiliar to me, and applies it to gaming, complete with a detailed chart detailing the differences between movies, TV, and games and the ways in which they are consumed. One major quibble with her article is that it seems to me, at least from my perspective, that what she is talking about is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow but without using that term. Had she done so, it might have provided a different slant to her article that would have been intriguing.
To conclude, this is one of the better books about videogames. While I do not agree with their focus, I find much of interest in it. There were a few times where an author was attempting to argue that something in a videogame was appropriated from films when there were other equally plausible explanations that don't involve cinema in any way. In many cases, even when I do not agree with an author, it makes me think about why I do not agree with them and in that way reading it helped me to further refine my own thoughts about what videogames really are and what their place is. Any work that makes me think and defend my own ideas is worthwhile and, judged by that standard, Screenplay is a success.
That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures:
Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can
be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.