Author Archives: esawyer1

Show, don’t tell.

Like many of you guys, I attended Seamus Sullivan’s “Dramatic Storytelling in Games.” Sullivan shared quite a few tips on how to write strong characters and dialogue, tips which, I thought, were very insightful. But one point especially got me thinking – Character Tip #3: “Show, don’t tell.” One example he used to illustrate this point was the first cut scene from Thief: The Dark Project, in which Garrett first encounters a Keeper. The scene begins with a voice-over by Garrett, and transitions into dialogue between him and the Keeper. Other posts have described Sullivan’s analyzing process: in short, he extracted information about the characters and their environment based on the way they spoke and behaved, rather than by what was explicitly said.

When he first used the phrase “Show, don’t tell,” I was a bit confused, as I thought he was encouraging purely visual rather than verbal information, and the scene from Thief was pretty wordy. While I recognized seconds later that he was referring to the “between the lines” of the words in the cut scene, that initial thought stuck with me. Obviously, dialogue is invaluable for its implied message as well as the explicit. But there are also instances where even layered dialogue falls short of the image. As great as the script is (but not the original one) of the “Tears in Rain” scene from Blade Runner, the imagery of Rutger Hauer releasing the dove has depth and symbolism that I don’t think could ever be properly translated into words. In film, the filmmaker determines the narrative context of every frame. So in a way, films have something of an advantage over games in visual communication. Still, thinking about this has made me want to be more perceptive to the imagery in video games, not just to the dialogue.

Relaxation in Games

Chapter 13 of Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames talks about “Relaxation.” Bogost concludes the chapter by asserting that for relaxation, “designers and players… must reject the principle of engagement,” and that “Relaxation and reflection arise from constrained environments in which the senses are de-emphasized and focused rather than escalated and expanded.”

While I agree that a kind of “constrained environment” is required for a game to actually be relaxing, I don’t think it’s necessary to “reject the principle of engagement,” or even to “de-emphasize” the senses.

For me, walking outdoors is probably, aside from sleeping, the single most relaxing act I can commit. But —aside from the element of exercise— it relaxes me not because my environment is not engaging, but largely because it is a “constrained environment” in that the scene is familiar and seems safe. I don’t normally have to expect an enemy to jump out at me (and if I did I certainly wouldn’t be relaxed). I have not played Bogost’s Meditation Guru, but it seems to me that the only reason the Atari platform might be more conducive to relaxation than another platform in this instance is simply because the player is aware of the extreme limits of the technology and would not expect a major curveball in terms of what they will have to do. I don’t think the lack of graphical sensuality has much to do with it at all.

It seems to me, then, that the greatest obstacle to creating a relaxing game is not an sensually engaging diegetic environment, but an unpredictable one. Simply doing nothing does not produce calm; it is freedom from uncertainty that allows a player to truly relax.

Bullet Time

The first video has nothing to do with video games per se. It does, however, expound on an concept which Galloway mentioned multiple times in today’s reading: the concept of bullet time. This video, originally from the special features of The Matrix, describes the process of creating bullet time for the medium of film. I was immediately prompted to contrast the complexity and non-typicality of creating this effect in film with its normality in gaming.

The second video also shows a take on bullet time, this time in a scene from the game Max Payne 2. Here, somebody tampered with the game’s software to achieve an extreme bullet time effect. Obviously, the video game medium already gives the player control over the on-screen world that the viewer of a film does not have, and this accentuates that control to a ridiculous extent. I was pretty amused.

“Rock Stars” in Video Games

Although Kline had a lot of good observations, I think what interested me the most in the reading had to do with the parallels he drew between the video game industry and the industries of music and film, and what these parallels say about the roles of the various parties involved in video games.

In 1982, Kline tells us, Trip Hawkins modeled his company’s marketing approach after that of the music industry, by “packaging its games with album-like artwork and liner notes, and promoting its developers like rock stars in game magazines” (97).

Perhaps this is merely because I haven’t really spent much time studying the video game industry, but it seems to me that there is no clear parallel to a “rock star” in a video game, or, if there is, it is not the developer but rather a character from within the game itself. While musicians make music and Hollywood stars underlie the characters in films, the primary hero, name, and face behind Pac-Man is Pac-Man. And considering that by 1982, “revenue from the game Pac-Man alone probably exceeded the box-office success of Star Wars,” and the arcade game business grossed double the international sales of the pop music industry (103-104), I am really intrigued. A yellow circle with eyes and a mouth, existing only as an animated visual in a 2-D virtual reality, somehow made a greater impression than the combined forces of George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and a bunch of ridiculous (in a good way) special effects.

I guess what I’m really trying to get at is this: What made/makes the influence of video games, particularly in their appeal to consumers, so different from that of films and music? Is that influence centralized in a name, be it a developer or a character (like Pac-Man)? Or does the interactive nature of games, the “play” we’re so fond of discussing, cause players to view themselves as the “rock stars”? Also, where do designers (such as Warren Robinett, who created the first ‘Easter Egg’ to garner individual credit outside of the corporation) fall in our perception of video games today, and how has this perception changed from what it was 30 years ago?