Trust No One
This week, William Hughes stopped by with an On The Level in praise of 2013’s Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine and the way it directly involved players in the slow reveal of its big crime-caper twist. That moment, William argued, is especially admirable because it borrows a fun trope from the crime fiction of other media but uses it in a way only a game could pull off. Down in the comments, that got Wolfman Jew thinking about why more games don’t take inspiration from film genres outside of the usual action and adventure fare:
Isn’t it a bit odd how so much of that influence comes strictly from genre or blockbuster action movies? It makes sense to an extent—the easiest point that distinguishes games from other media is their interactivity, so why not draw from movies that most of your audience has either seen or would enjoy specifically because they’re exciting—but it does feel odd that inspiration rarely reaches any further than a few easily digestible action pictures. I find it weird that someone as fetishistic of cinema as David Cage seems almost exclusively inspired by ’90s crime thrillers, but maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. When you’re so invested in just taking surface elements, pretty soon that’s probably all you care about. Even Uncharted feels at times like its attempts at aping Indiana Jones put it closer to Dan Brown territory.
Something like this shows the potential value in taking concepts and core ideas instead of just baseline aesthetics and recapturing its pleasures through a different medium. Maybe instead of shooters all looking like Aliens, developers could try to look at films that are sort of like it and try to make their work more unique? Or maybe Old Hollywood, Howard Hawkes-style action movies to get better character arcs or narratives, since those often have more solid structure behind them?
Vandermonde thought this wasn’t giving developers enough credit:
I think it’s a somewhat false premise that games aren’t drawing from a wider variety of movies and other media. Dating sims exist; mystery adventures exist; weird sci-fi settings as metaphors for various aspects of humanity and relationships exist. (Although, admittedly, they only rarely integrate their gameplay particularly smoothly. There are a lot of abstract puzzles and barely related platforming in that niche). Big-budget first-person shooters might only draw from a pretty narrow subset of influences and vary almost only by setting, but one genre of game mirroring one genre of movie doesn’t seem like a failing to me.
Monaco uses the old “unreliable narrator” trick to set up its plot twist, and, in William’s eyes, this is a case where it’s put to great use. Down in the comments, Bakken Hood mentioned a few other games that used it well:
Maybe we could get an “Unreliable Narrator” Inventory? In a medium that generally lends itself to straightforward narratives, some game designers have done some pretty clever things. A few players interpreted Mass Effect 3‘s original ending as an indoctrination-induced hallucination, which—assuming that’s what BioWare was going for—is a ballsy amount of faith to have in your audience, for all the abuse it got them. Assassin’s Creed IV had some fun with the weird sci-fi meta-narrative, presenting its version of the 17-18th century West Indies as a fictional set created by computer programmers, rather than the real thing. And then there’s Borderlands The Pre-Sequel, which doesn’t use its unreliable narrator for character development or world building or anything, just as a self-consciously half-assed joke. As in, the half-assedness of its narrative justification for having a New Game+ mode is the joke. It probably says something about the quality of the game that that’s one of its best gags.