Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow ta takes gaming’s Hollywood am ambition to task

If movies are dense chains of significant actions, videogames are frequently mushy heaps of generic actions

When people shout at me in the street, they usually start with, ‘Hey, interactive movie guy!’ In the moments that follow, shaking my head and fleeing, I attempt to worm my way out of this uncomfortable descriptor by thinking about what makes games and movies different, and the instances where the former borrows from the latter. As an industry we often reach for the comparison to our older, more beautiful sibling in Hollywood. But outside those pleas to economics and respectability, what does it mean for games to aspire to be like movies?

The title page of the screenplay for Telling Lies describes it as an “anti-movie.” I wanted to be up front with our cast and crew that we were not just ignoring some of the intrinsic elements of movie-making, but were pushing in the opposite direction. A movie is a story told with photography that lasts about 90 minutes. Most significantly movies tell stories by curating a dense succession of images to tell a very specific story. Time and space is compressed; point-of-view is varied to sculpt a scene. Telling Lies doesn’t do that directly – there is no editing, no compression, no steering of the gaze between different images or objects. Rather than being compressed, the dialogue and scenes are often unfurled with the lackadaisical pace of domestic life.

Standard videogames aren’t much different. The camera mostly remains uncut, with space and time contiguous. In thirdperson games this camera generally remains fixed on the rear of the protagonist, making their jeans pockets and scapulas the star of the show. Where movies omit the mundane connective tissue, games revel in it: there are more bathrooms in Remedy’s Control than in every movie ever made in total. And yet… A common refrain you might hear when someone is enthusing about their favourite character-driven videogame is ‘It’s like being in a movie!’ Reviews use ‘cinematic’ as an adjective of quality. So games can be like movies, and it’s often these moments that stick for players. What are games doing to evoke this magic, and why is this a good thing?

In these moments players aren’t talking about the cinematics, but about the gameplay and how it makes them feel. Most games have a limited set of verbs: walk, shoot, open door, drink potion. In the case of text adventures – paradoxically, the first games to invoke the ‘cinematic’ comparison – a small set of verbs would get you through most of the game. That carried over to the point-and-click genre, boiled down to a panel of text buttons. Modern 3D games have distilled it further. We use these core verbs again and again throughout a game. If movies are dense chains of

significant actions, videogames are frequently mushy heaps of generic actions. When game actions approach the density and significance of movies, things get exciting.

Asking players to step outside the generic verb set of a game, or intensifying the density of important actions, can cause problems with the very interactivity driving the game. Under pressure, it’s easy for a player to break the pacing or fail to grasp what’s expected of them. Games will narrow the focus, funnel the player, simplify the controls. Unique verbs are high points if they land, but it’s more common to see games go cinematic by adding weight to their core verb set. To make its jumps more significant than those of Super Mario, the

Uncharted series chains them in a sequence of escalating stakes, of procedurally blended animations so each jump feels uniquely ragged as we leap from drainpipe to roof to balcony, each collapsing the second we leave it.

Resident Evil 4 throws players onto set-piece minecarts, trucks and jet skis to lock them into a timeline and concentrate their aiming and shooting on specific targets. Similarly, Call Of Duty feels most like a movie when it steers its players into moments when they shoot at a target with heightened significance.

It is powerful to understand that the desire for games to feel like movies isn’t about abandoning interactivity, nor does it have much to do with fancy camerawork or special effects – it’s about making our games more specific and more meaningful in the moments when we interact. And if the success stories almost exclusively take their lead from action sequences, we can see exciting opportunities to enact other dense chains of significant actions – those that don’t involve bullets or collapsing rooftops, but rather the exchange of looks, touches and kisses between characters who aren’t trying to kill each other. Then we can work towards having players say, ‘It’s like being in a good movie!’