Who Needs a Story Anyway?

I began to write this a couple of months ago but I never bothered to finish it: I wasn't sure whether I was actually talking about the game in question or just using it as an arbitrary starting point for some philosophical musings which are dear to me. But since I wrote it, and since it doesn’t seem completely without interest, why not put it online? We’ll see how it’ll do. And if nothing, it’ll at least offer some kind of counterpoint to my last posts on cinematic video games, a critical perspective on a game with minimal storytelling. Anyway, here it is: why the Wii U may be the most moving (as in emotional, expressive, beautiful) video game console yet.

I bought a Wii U last spring mainly because of Ian Bogost’s non-review on Gamasutra: a console expressing self-doubt? Color me intrigued. My wallet didn’t approve of my inquiries about the alleged conscience of a video game console, but even though I barely touched it since, the philosophical leanings of my mind were rewarded despite the protestations of my bank account.

Playing solo, the two-screens is barely more than a gimmick, feeling a lot like a DS with your television acting as a bigger version of the upper screen (or at least it felt that way in the few games that I played). And just like the DS, hardly any game uses the two-screens in a meaningful or innovative way. Having a map of your surroundings always open on your smaller screen may be practical, but it’s nothing more than that; it doesn’t affect the gameplay in any way, or doesn’t lead to a new kind of experience. In a game like Mass Effect 3 (which I haven’t played, so, I suppose…), I’m still shooting dudes in the face (as the official saying goes) most of the time, only now I can know exactly where I am when doing so. Sure, this game wasn’t designed for the Wii U in the first place, so it may be normal that the second screen remains unused, but it was one of the most publicized features of this port, and it is the only way most games use this new screen. I still need to be convinced that this screen in my hand enhance my experience somehow, or, better, can lead me to new ones.

But my philosophical investigation was scarcely aimed at the single player experience anyway: I was way more interested in the possibilities offered by the asymmetrical gameplay promised by the multiplayer games. And on this matter, it is, indeed, a whole different affair: the Wii U becomes a perfect, ludic representation of our relation with space and time in our modern digital world.

Imitation of Life (2): The Fall of Man

Let's begin with the obvious: Hollywood doesn’t like changes. So, all novelties Hollywood movies may bring have to be firmly counterbalanced by the most rigorously classical visual style possible. This is what I meant last time when I wrote about how Hollywood movies first represented computer-generated imagery in an ambiguous way: CGI was a new technology Hollywood admired as much as it feared, so we find this contradiction in most movies figuring CGI, from the 80's up to the end of the 90’s (to take a more recent example than the one I will discuss at length below: in the Matrix, the digital world is presented as a falsehood that we must tear apart to go back to the real analogical world, but at the end, Sion, the human city in the real world, is saved by Neo, a digital super-God).

Although Hollywood never hesitated to publicize the many virtues of CGI, filmmakers like producers had several reasons to be anxious about it: CGI was a threat for the photographic image and, more importantly, for the classical language of Hollywood movies (which was conceived around the limitations and possibilities of the photographic image anyway). So, while the movies presented a new kind of image, CGI, they continued to implicitly champion the image of old, photography – a sure way to slowly introduce the radical visual innovations made possible by CGI while anchoring them in the tradition of Hollywood cinema. Ok, we have this new CGI thing, said Hollywood, but don’t worry, our movies will remain the same. Nowadays, movies rarely think about CGI because CGI is a given, an official tool in cinema’s language: the threat has been neutralized, so to speak, in the sense that the limitless possibilities of CGI have been harnessed and restrained by the classical language of Hollywood cinema. In theory, CGI can do anything, but right now, for better and for worst, it continues the narrative tradition previously established by the photographic image.

Tomb Raider (2013): Surviving a Tutorial

I started to play the new Tomb Raider recently and as I already knew the first hour or so is a series of non-ending QTEs. And as I already knew too, the brand new Lara Croft is represented as vulnerable and terrified as opposed to our usual invincible arrogant hero. What I didn’t know, though (but should have guessed), is that these two elements are quite contradictory: simply put, a hand-holding, heavily scripted, QTEfest’s tutorial does not convey, at all, vulnerability and terror. There was not one moment during that whole sequence where I felt vulnerable because everything was so scripted and pre-determined that nothing seemed threatening. At least not to me as a player: I was watching a vulnerable character, yes, but I sure wasn’t playing one. In fact, the few moments I was playing, in control of Lara, I was just like the usual invincible confident hero I played before in every other third-person action game – I mean, how can I fail at pressing W? I know where the W key is after all. Pressing W for half-an-hour can feel meaningful when playing Proteus, because this minimalism suits the contemplative experience the game offers, but it doesn’t work as well when you’re running to get out of a cave which is falling around you: the triviality and impossible-to-fail action of pressing W just doesn’t match the representation of chaos and imminent threat on the screen. 

The opening sequence of Tomb Raider (the first twenty minutes in particular) is as bad a case of ludonarrative dissonance as it can get, cramming in as few minutes as possible all the biggest problems with how AAA videogames envision interactive storytelling nowadays, which is a bit sad because the intentions were good (I want to play a vulnerable character for a change) and the writing is above average, for the most part, so let’s honor this eloquent case study by taking it apart.

The Illusion of Choice

“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” We all know this famous assertion made by Sid Meier (does anyone know when and in which context he said it, or do we just have to take it for granted because it has been repeated so many times that it became its own truth?), but what did he mean by “interesting decisions”?

Let’s take strategy games, maybe the more “gamey” genre of game, or at least the one closer to traditional games, and the one Meier is renowned for: they’re a precarious balancing act, where every decision must lead to various consequences, preferably with some degree of unpredictability, or else there’s no strategy at all, just an optimal tactic that will work in every situation. But in a narrative-centric game, what makes a decision interesting is completely different, and is not necessarily coherent with what would be best from a purely ludic’s perspective: for example, it is not always wise to present equally seductive rewards when a player has to choose between a “good” and an “evil” option. The designer would say we should not penalize a player for prefering one or the other path, because who will want to be “good” if the game becomes dull or too hard or too easy? But what does it say, from the point of view of ethics, when a game presents such “interesting decisions”, based on a system of rewards?

The Protean Form of Videogames

Maybe this can explain why I find videogame criticism so difficult or at least so alien for me, with my background in cinema: it is the only form of criticism relying both on what the critic hasn’t experienced himself and on an object that will appear differently for each player. The videogame critic has to write about an object so fluid that nobody else (not even him) will encounter it again the same way he did. 

Sure, seeing a movie in the (usually) respectful ambiance of an almost empty morning press screening is clearly different from seeing the same movie the night of the premiere in a crowded frantic theater, or as seeing it in the comfort of your own sofa, but we’re more or less able to abstract the physical context of our encounter with a movie and concentrate our criticism on the moving images themselves, even if we know that this context contributed to our appreciation. And sure, every individual brings his own experience to an artwork, but in traditional art forms, these subjectivities still confront the same immutable object made by the artist; an artwork may exist only once it’s interpreted, and therefore the same object may produce different artworks (like I wrote before, my Citizen Kane is not your Citizen Kane), but every spectator should be able to describe the same physical object that sustains each of their unique interpretation. Indeed, an interpretation is only as good as its capacity to properly encompass the whole of an artist’s work, in the most coherent way possible, so it’s not an entirely subjective process.

The Experience of Art

I should have learned by now: never announce an article that is not yet written. I will not answer (for now) the questions raised at the end of my last article. I want to write about videogames, but strangely every time I begin an article on the subject, I struggle with my ideas and come back to what I’m more comfortable with: cinema, authors, nature of art, Spielberg, etc. Maybe all those numerous re-definitions of what games are (or not) are confusing me, and now I just can’t grasp the concept anymore? I don’t know, but for now, I have an article on my favorite subject, criticism, which is going to lead, hopefully, to another one on videogame criticism, and we will then be a little closer to the subject – but it’s another not-yet-written text, so I’m not going to promise anything…

If it wasn’t clear already: I come to cinema and videogames through the perspective of art. Without directly addressing the “videogame as art” question, I’ll just say that I believe all videogames have the potential to be art, and in the end it’s all that matters. Likewise, not all movies can be described as artworks, but cinema has the potential to produce artworks, so for me all movies should be considered on that level. I don’t even understand what would be the point of doing otherwise, unless you have a very low opinion of criticism and just want to know where to invest your entertainment money. I guess many people are looking just for that, a consumer’s guide, but they’re the ones we should convince that there is more to cinema and videogames than a good way to spend some time. And I guess, also, that for most people this consumer’s guide approach makes more sense with videogames: after all, the first thing we associate with games is “fun”, as if there’s nothing else to look for in a game, or rather as if everything else is tangential to the “fun” factor (it’s partly true for cinema also, but we’re more accustomed to the idea of movies as something more than pure entertainment). Videogames are still struggling to be considered as a “serious” expressive medium, but in order to achieve this, the first step would be to offer good criticism; we have to prove that we can write about games seriously before we can convince an outsider of their value. All this has been said before in the last decade, and it’s not difficult nowadays to find meaningful videogame criticism, but I think we still lack a proper theoretical framing akin to what was auteurism for cinema, something that could reach outside of the (relatively) small videogame community. One could argue that this is exactly what New Games Journalism did in 2004, and while it is undeniable that Kieron Gillen’s manifesto inspired some important pieces of videogame criticism, I’m not sure it really helped to show how videogames can be important for people who are not a New Games Journalist.

Author as Style

What is an author? Or rather: how does the idea of “author” fit into an interpretation of a work of art?

 

Let’s begin by the obvious: The Death of the Author, by Roland Barthes, published in 1968, a famous essay arguing against intentionalism, or what we can call biographical criticism, i.e. interpretation relying on the author’s intentions, or what we know of the author’s life. For Barthes, on the contrary, the coherence of a text comes first and foremost from the reader, who provides its meaning to the text, the author himself being nothing more than the person who happens to write the text. This person, the artist, the facts of his social life or his opinions expressed outside of his texts, all this is trivial, only the work itself matters (although the context of its publication is still important). Analysis must then concentrate on the writing itself, on the style, because “the language speaks, not the author”. But then, what about my two articles on Spielberg, which tried to define him as an author? Surely I must think Spielberg is able to impose his will, or his intentions, on his creation, because what would be the point of analyzing his whole body of work if the fact that these movies were all made by an individual who goes by the name of Steven Spielberg is ultimately irrelevant? And, if we follow the logic of anti-intentionalism to its extreme, if we effectively kill the notion of author in interpretation, how can we even make the difference between a man-made work of art and a pile of garbage aimlessly thrown together by the wind, since both of them are created without intention?

The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (2): Behind the Images

If the first part of Steven Spielberg’s career can be summarize by a general movement toward the lights in the sky, like Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, from the 90’s and forward his cinema is exemplified by characters trying to flee artifices that have become dangerous: now, they have to get out of Jurassic Park’s island.

I wouldn't follow those lights...

This change of course came gradually: it was clearly in effect in Jurassic Park (1993), the second major stepping stone in Spielberg’s cinema after CEot3K, but it was first introduced at the end of Always (1989), where Richard Dreyfuss (Pete) has to learn the responsibilities he eschewed as Roy Neary. Dorinda (Holy Hunter) is constantly trying to keep her aviator lover (Dreyfuss) on the ground, or at least to stop his dangerous behavior. “You’re not a movie hero” she says to him at one point, “you’re not saving any life here”, so no need to seek these narcissistic adrenaline thrills because you got some responsibilities, here with me. Or, if you will, no need for this pure entertainment, or to revel in your own technical virtuosity: cinema has a duty towards reality, and images should not be used to escape from or to hide the real world (as Jaws already implied). In the last sequence of Always, Dorinda’s plane crashes in a lake where she lets herself drown, hoping to leave a reality she doesn’t want to participate in anymore. This time, Dreyfuss (remember he’s Spielberg’s alter ego) takes her hand and brings her back on the ground, back to her earthly responsibilities, thus correcting his own decision at the end of CEot3K. This time, we need to stay with our two feet on the ground, not in the sky or at the bottom of a lake. And if it wasn’t clear enough, when Pete and Dorinda are walking together in one of the last shot, we distinctly hear in the music the characteristic notes used in CEot3K to communicate with the aliens.

The Cinema of Steven Spielberg (1): Toward the Lights

A quick note about my last post: it wasn’t made clear that the author theory is an interpretative angle amongst others, one I particularly like, but it’s certainly not exclusive. So, for my analysis of Steven Spielberg’s cinema that follows, which will be divided in two or three parts, I’m only using scenes, motives or images that are most relevant for him as an author, but it’s not to say that it’s all there is. His cinema is a tapestry with multiple intertwining threads, like it was once said about Hitchcock, and the closer we look, the better we see the subtleties and the complexity of his work. I’m trying to describe the main picture as I see it, following with my words his leading thread, but whole other subtexts are just waiting to be revealed underneath. Here’s part one:

Steven Spielberg lost the respect he once had: at first, he was celebrated as a young genius, a virtuoso with an undeniable cinematic flair, but now we talk of him with a whiff of suspicion, mainly because he’s often depicted as the prime architect of the blockbusters, this so-called plague of modern cinema. For his detractors, Jaws’ massive box-office success in 1975 signaled the end of a New Hollywood apparently bursting with creativity, this haven of artistic freedom slowly disappearing under the pressure of a newfound interest for monetary gain, until soulless teenage flicks reigned over the patently commercial Hollywood of today. This, maybe, we could forgive, after all Spielberg didn’t intend to make the first blockbuster in cinema history; however, he also shaped our conception of escapist entertainment by popularizing a form of grandiloquent and boisterous spectacle, movies so obsessed with their own artifices that they get lost inside their technological prowess, without a thought about a reality they try to evacuate – at least, that’s what we say about him, but do these reproaches hold up? Well, they do sometimes for certain scenes in some of his movies, but that would be quite a superficial outlook on an exceptional author trying to introduce the notion of responsibility in these infantile blockbusters he supposedly gave birth to.

A Thoughtful Love

The author theory seems to be greatly misunderstood nowadays. Or maybe it’s not new, I don’t know, but for sure, now, the idea of defending all movies made by a single filmmaker is seen as poor criticism, or as blindness to the possible (unavoidable) faults of an artist; apparently it’s far more relevant to judge every movie on its own basis, and to forget who made it because this knowledge can cloud our judgment. I’m slightly exaggerating, but how many times to we read things like “if you didn’t know this movie was made by X, you would not be so lenient”; well, that’s the point, it is made by X, so why pretend it is not?

Recently, amongst the many articles written about Paul Thomas Anderson latest movie, The Master, we got another good example of this attitude, in a text by Stephanie Zacharek published by the A.V. Club, where she wrote “The idea that certain filmmakers reach a point where respect is their due, rather than something they earn film by film, defies one of the most immediate and visceral pleasures of movie going: the pleasure of seeing for yourself. Plus, isn’t it a lot more boring to march around on a filmmaker’s behalf, trumpeting the significance of intentions and reputations, than it is to wrangle with the actual movies?” But doesn’t wrangling with the movies also imply to consider who actually made them? When Steven Spielberg shows a rising moon giving chase to robots in A.I., are we supposed to forget it’s the same man who gave us the iconic image from E.T., this gentle and heartwarming moon, which also happens to be the logo of his company, Amblin? I haven’t seen Lincoln yet, which will come out in a few days, but I know already that I will love it, as I did with War Horse even though it was Spielberg at its worst. This is not blindness: I can see what’s wrong with the movie, but these flaws are far less interesting than my encounter with the moving thoughts of a true author. Sure, he can faltered from time to time, but being able to follow someone else’s train of thoughts is a fascinating and deeply intimate experience, much more rare and precious than the experience of a good but impersonal movie, so why should we deny ourselves this pleasure? In my mind, some filmmakers undoubtedly have earned their respect: we can’t easily dismiss any movie made by Terrence Malick, to take an example used by Zacharek, because even if To the Wonder is a piece of shit (I don’t know, but I doubt it), it will still be the outcome of a great mind struggling with itself, and there’s nothing boring, or simple, in trying to understand the thought process of an author thinking through images. At worse, it’s infuriating, “how can he fall so low?”, but never boring.