I D É E S   F O R T E S    Issue 1.04 - August 1995

Games Aren't Movies

By Dave Green



There are things in video games that make no fucking sense. In Asteroids, right, if your spaceship has such a powerful hyperspace feature, why don't you just hyperspace away from that part of space where all the rocks are? In Scramble, in order to get more fuel, you have to blow up the fuel dumps on the ground. How does that work? And in Killer Instinct, one of Fulgore's finishing moves is to grow a turret out of the top of his neck and machine-gun his opponent. If he had that ability all along, why didn't he use it earlier?

Put a logical flaw like this in a movie and you'd be laughed out of Hollywood. But they're accepted in games because games do not reflect real life. Films always try to reflect reality, so they're not allowed to have characters moving off the top of the screen then reappearing at the bottom - while video games do this all the time. One of the many problems with the Super Mario Brothers movie was that Mario's traditional way of dealing with bad guys (jumping on their heads to make them disappear) would, in real life, look utterly ridiculous. In a video game it looks just fine.

Despite these differences, you still hear plenty of well-intentioned hype about "interactive movies" as the Holy Grail of games playing, while games-software companies - Rocket Science, to cite the main offender - rush to sign up top-rated Hollywood talent, like film designer Ron Cobb (who worked on Alien and The Terminator). So what's going on?

It's a classic case of new media being hijacked by old. When TV came along, it took people ages to realise it wasn't just radio with pictures. Photographers wasted decades trying to emulate painting. The reasoning now seems to be that, like films, video games make a lot of money. And like films, they take place on a screen. Therefore, they are the same. This patently isn't true. A film must attempt a plausible, human, emotional premise - it must "make sense" - but many of the best games (Tempest, Qix, Pacman) are self-contained, plotless abstractions. When a novel explaining the background scenario falls out of a game box, games players throw it straight in the bin. (Anyone recall the unlikely sci-fi justification for the space-based Breakout clone, Arkanoid?)

Games can get away with astonishing, imaginative simplifications that movies never could - simplifications which are part of the game's appeal. That's why there hasn't been a film of Tetris. ("A chilling Cold War thriller. Sean Connery plays one of those long thin blocks that never turn up when you need one.") Similarly, no-one (yet) feels the need to supply chess boards or draughts sets with more exciting characterisations: "The black king has kidnapped the white king's girlfriend. But the white king vows to win her back in battle..."

Cam Winstanley, editor of controversial games magazine Amiga Power, argues that there are films that are like video games, but they're not what you expect: "Martial arts movies and porn videos. In both, the story's only there to further the repetitive, stereotyped action. By itself, the story doesn't stand up at all - it just gets in the way of the good bits."

Video games are a new, exciting medium. Their content is studied in more detail by players than by academics, but they clearly have their own genres, language and grammar. Mario's head-bouncing manoeuvre, for instance, has become an industry standard. It's impossible for this evolving culture not to be influenced by other media, but in the case of cinema - a firmly non-interactive artform that's now over 100 years old - it's equally important that it is not overwhelmed.

A good game puts you in control, it lets you learn the internal logic of a fantastic artificial world. Sometimes effective characterisation and plotting can help achieve this, though mostly they just get in the way. In the final analysis, games don't need to tell any kind of story or even be remotely realistic - they only need to play. Like the captain says at the start of the cult movie, Dark Star: "Don't give me any of that intelligent life stuff - just find me something I can blow up."

Dave Green is the Reviews Editor of Wired