For Impure Video Games: In Defense of Cinematic Storytelling

With the critical and detached perspective we can now afford on the video game production of the last ten or fifteen years, one of the dominant phenomena of its evolution promptly appears to us: the resort, more and more significant, to the cinematographic heritage.

“This is a video game” can we often read about older games like Super Metroid or the original X-COM, or even with more recent examples like Deus Ex or Dark Souls. Few (or no) cinematics! Expressive and/or emergent gameplay! This is what video games are about! This is their distinctive and unique quality: interactivity, choice, player agency, or something to that effect. The story must be told through gameplay, not through cutscenes! But since cinematic action games are the most prominent form of video games right now on the mainstream scene, and in the public eye, at least when it comes to home consoles, is it to say that we have to forgo the autonomy of our art form? Are video games, or what remains of them, still able to survive today without the crutch of cinema? Are they about to become a subordinate art form, depending on another, more traditional one?

Imitation of Life (1)

What is cinema? Does this question still make sense today, in this age of CGI, digital cameras, heavy post-production effects, with movies distributed in a variety of formats, from the smallest screen (cellphones) to the biggest (IMAX), with the proliferation of home-made videos, with television series and video games increasingly looking like movies (and movies increasingly looking like video games), with the ubiquity of all kinds of moving images, with the rise of new media, etc., etc.? “What was cinema” seems like a better question, but I’m not ready yet to declare cinema dead, like it has been quite fashionable to do for some time (since the advent of the VCR in the 80’s at least). Like I wrote last time, I’m mostly interested in computer-generated imagery for this blog, and how it can be incorporated (or not) in the photographic image, but CGI is merely one of many factors responsible for the profound changes happening now in cinema. In this context of ever-changing technologies and constant metamorphosis of the moving image, clinging to the idea of a “pure” cinema, like I did in my introduction last week, is clearly hopeless.

But is there such a thing as “pure” cinema in the first place? Most film theorists (if not all) would say no, there isn’t. There are many reasons for this (the industrial nature of cinema, the fact that it’s a collective effort, Alain Badiou’s mix of art and non-art), but I want to focus on one for now, more related to our subject: cinema, by essence, is an amalgam of many art forms. It’s less the seventh art than the addition of the previous six. So, why is it so different now with CGI? Can’t we just say cinema has integrated animation like it did with theater? In a way, yes, cinema is moving in a new direction due to the influence of CGI, but animation is an intruder in the photographic image, in a way that wasn’t true with other art forms. Indeed, cinema is impure, but even if it can borrow heavily from theater (for the mise en scène), literature (for the screenwriting), painting (for the framing) and music, none of these challenge the specificity of cinema: the succession of photographic moving images. CGI, though, as a form of digital animation, is an intruder, a radical Other that is tearing apart the fabric of the photographic image. It's not necessarily a problem, but then we have to find a way to wed these two opposite forms in a meaningful way; it's the question I want to adress in this series titled Imitation of Life: how did cinema approach this question in movies mixing CGI with the photographic image?

Things to Come

Videogames are not cinematic and they will never be.

I’m not saying this because I hate these so-called “cinematic” videogames, or because I’m a ludologist who cares only about mechanics and gameplay – quite the contrary, I prefer my videogames with story, and it’s quite difficult for me to write purely about gameplay, without the support of a fiction. It’s not even the gamer in me who’s speaking, but the film lover, which I am first and foremost: calling cut-scenes heavy, high production value and story-centric videogames “cinematic” demonstrates a profound lack of respect for what cinema really is. I think I’ve said it before: I’m coming to videogames through the “video” angle more than the “game” itself, so my take on this is slightly different than the usual one. In general, we complain about this cinematic leaning in recent videogames because it implies a loss of interactivity, a simplification, or even a rarefaction, of the rules of the game, to which the designers substitute a more classical, linear narration upon which the player has almost no control. This is true, of course, but really, most of the time, I don’t mind; it makes for a different experience, less “gamey” maybe, but it can be compelling and meaningful nonetheless.

But when I’m saying that videogames can never be cinematic, I’m thinking about images, not interaction: I’m an old-school cinephile, already nostalgic for the disappearing celluloid, and a bazinian at heart, so essentially I think it’s impossible to emulate cinema through computer-generated imagery. I’m well aware that what we mean by “cinematic” in videogames is related to the use of camera angles, movement, staging, lighting, etc., and not to the way the images are produced, but it’s a superficial understanding of cinema visual language, as if the content of the images and their ethical relation to reality was insignificant, when actually it is where the very essence of cinema lies. For sure, our conception of cinema has drastically changed in the last twenty years and CGI is pretty much a part of cinema language now, so it may seem foolish or backward-thinking to dismiss everything CGI-related in the name of some pure idea of what cinema once was. Well, I’m not dismissing CGI per se (it is not “evil” or inherently bad), but rather its current use and confusion with cinema. CGI and cinema are too different in essence to be considered as similar means of expression: while an artist working in cinema has to use the real world as his first (or even only) expressive material, CGI is similar to painting or animation in that the artist has to create from scratch everything he wants to represent. How can videogames be “cinematic” when computer-generated imagery is closer in spirit to painting and animation than traditional photographic cinema?