Once a novelty, full-motion video is now a useful tool for game designers

If you played video games in the 1980s and ‘90s, then you’re probably already familiar with full-motion video (FMV), which was a way of telling stories using pre-recorded video files instead of the typical sprites or 3D models typical in games. While some games used FMV for cutscenes, others used the technique for the entirety of the gameplay experience, to the point that games of this nature are sometimes referred to as “interactive movies.” The use of pre-recorded footage in games can span the spectrum of live-action, CGI, hand-drawn animation, and green screen to fully convey the adventure developers are hoping to immerse their players in. 

In most other popular visual art forms (photography, film, television, etc.), live-action is of course the logical default. These are mediums used to portray our physical world, staged or otherwise, and so real footage is used implicitly. Games, on the other hand, require extreme technical and financial resources to achieve verisimilitude with cinéma vérité. Making video game graphics and character performances in cutscenes appear lifelike is difficult and expensive. The best recent example is Death Stranding 2, which is only able to achieve this because Hideo Kojima is scanning celebrities in his free time and using mocap performances to put them in his games.

With full-motion video—and live-action by extension—having largely gone out of style with the improved technological capabilities in games, the inclusion of the material realm now feels radical and ambitious in the context of this digital medium. Every single one of us witnesses our tangible reality in our day to day, and in many of the aforementioned art forms where it is normal to capture such things, but in the context of games it creates a meta experience for the player. When it doesn’t work, you wind up with the uncanny valley effect, where the increasingly smaller visual gap between real and virtual worlds more vividly highlights the artificiality of the latter. When it works, though, photorealism in an interactive art form can bring players closer into the action, entangling them more deeply with the narrative itself, and thus adding another layer of immersion through this meta-narrative. Some of the best games of recent years have opted to try their hand at this stirring technique, leading to something aesthetically distinct and thematically resonant. 

One way recent games have used the real is to unsettle the player, most recently in the controversial horror game Horses. Ironically, in these worlds composed of pixels, seeing flesh and blood on our computer screens is what creates a feeling of uncanniness after suspending our disbelief in the digital for so long. Immortality is one such example; it’s a full-fledged FMV game (a signature of developer Sam Barlow) that tells a mysterious story surrounding a fictional actress named Marissa Marcel, bringing the actual player themselves into the celluloid’s fold. In the game, you are tasked with scrubbing through unreleased recordings across three lost films in Marissa’s career. What is revealed is that some sort of supernatural phenomenon is taking place that allows strange beings to possess the bodies of humans as hosts. In the ending to the game, one of these beings stares straight at the player and says, “I’m part of you now,” which indicates that they (you) are now a new host. The fact that all of the FMV footage is live-action adds to the both alarming and intimate effect of the story, creating this sense that this is all happening to the player directly. Throughout the game these beings look directly into camera, but are speaking to you.