Thu, September 22, 2005
More Comments Out There—10:16 AM
The Once and Future Tidball is whipping up more bloggy goodness for all of us to enjoy. In his discussion of the intersection between filmed entertainment and interactive stories (like video games), he sparked a bit of inspiration for an angry diatribe I've always meant to write about the dopey prognostications about the future of movies – the mini-rant version of which is in context on Jeff's post, or out of context below:
When you're between the ages of 18 and 25 and you're at a party with a lot of your parents' friends, you get a lot of well intentioned but meaningless advice. ("One word. Plastics.") When people who otherwise didn't know me from Adam learned that I was in film school and I knew something about computers they all said, "Ohhh. Ahhhh! Then you're poised at the perfect juncture, since in five years all movies will be immersive virtual reality stories in which the audience directs the action via a computer keypad." And I always said, "Dear Lord, I hope to hell not."
You're absolutely right that interactive stories would destroy the narrative experience of film. To say nothing of the havoc that would be wreaked upon the momentum and creative continuity of: actors' performances, the musical score, etc. Moreover, lazy screenwriters and/or directors would just be shrugging off the tough decisions to the audience. Do the castaways go down the hatch now, or do they wait at camp until sunrise? As the storyteller, it's your job to choose the most compelling answer and craft an interesting and meaningful reason for the story to take that path. Handing that decision over to the audience is basically saying, "Eh. I can't be bothered to pick. Here's five endings, you choose one." It's a terrible practice in interface design, and even worse in storytelling. If audiences wrote movies while they watched them, it would represent the ultimate capitulation to the focus group/test screening mentality, and the art would suffer gravely for it.
But if you want to make video games more filmic, I'm all for it. I think you can set up choices that are more emotional than "I hope this bullet fells the baddie; I fear it won't" because there are plenty of non-mechanical decisions in life that are still difficult. Should I break up my best friend's wedding, or let go of my feelings for her? The challenge is to put enough emotional weight into the choices, so that there is a real struggle in the mind of the player - off the top of my head, this would probably mean longer cutscenes with more of a story arc to them, so the player/viewer is more invested in the characters and understands the pros and cons of those decisions.
