Movies

I've played exactly one new game this year.

Meanwhile, I've watched a couple dozen films in just the last few months, even more hours are added when including shows. It's a little weird as somebody who's always put Games at the top of their media consumption.

Some of it is playing catch up admittedly, there were a legion of classic films I'd never seen growing up, either because I had an odd bias against them, or because my parents did, which likely spawned my odd bias to begin with…

As I'm sitting here struggling to come up with a gaming related topic for this week's Randomly Mine however, there's an obvious question to ask.

What am I getting out of film that I'm not getting in games?

To start…

It's a lot easier.

The consequence of having a preference for fast-paced kinetic games that demand your concentration at every second of play is that… it's quite draining by the end of the day.

All of the gunfire, tire screeches, and screaming from friends or strangers, it is a lot to handle.

That doesn't happen with film.

There's intense movies, ones that'll inspire you to keep the lights on late at night, or address a particular habit about yourself that was eloquently criticized by a character, but in-terms of the act itself, sitting there and watching a movie…

That's all there is to it.

I'm admittedly obsessed with pacing, it's always my biggest concern with every video I produce, and the most common reason I hate my old work (aside from narration) is that the pacing feels off.

After Bullet Train, To Catch a Killer, D&D: Honor Among Thieves, The Menu, and just tonight, Across the Spiderverse, I think games as a whole are still very much constrained in this regard.

Some of it is technical, some of it is empathetic.

Technical
We've not had a console capable of loading levels under thirty seconds reliably until just two years ago, and quite a few games are still being released on last-gen systems, meaning the core-game must be designed within that ten year old technology.

It's quite difficult to maintain the flow of your gameplay and story when the experience has to stop in-order to continue.

Companies like Rockstar attempted to address this via games like Max Payne 3, but not only is it pretty unreasonable and creativity limiting to dream up a fully produced cutscene every single time the game has to load, it only works once.

Not to mention that if somebody dares to skip said cutscene, they're forced to sit and wait instead of playing the video game you spent $100 million developing gameplay for.

That also only works for one style of cinematic game. Good luck slotting Max Payne 3's framework into Forza Motorsport or System Shock.

I've not played God of War yet; I'm aware that game's claim to fame is its seamless transition from cutscene to gameplay that never cuts the camera.

I've heard it's something Cory Barlog had actually been trying to implement in earlier games he was a part of like Avalanche's Mad Max; it's very cool to see a developer not just share my frustration as a player but address it directly.

But pacing doesn't just pertain to cutscenes, or story-driven AAA games.

Songs, I make a decision on in a minute or less.
Books, I make a decision on in a chapter or two.
Films, I make a decision on in 15-20 minutes.

Games, I feel like I have to give an hour, because said hour isn't even the actual game; it's being told the right trigger fires a gun, the main character has powers, or that a Ford Focus is interesting.

Forza Horizon 1 greets me to an unskippable monologue with enough cringe to break my jaw. I assumed this existed to let the Xbox 360 load the open-world in the background.

Forza Horizon 5 releases on the Xbox Series X SSD Powered top of the line 4K console… and it does the exact same thing.

Empathetic
I do believe there's a lot of stubbornness; if people running a grocery store won't change their shelving arrangements from the shame of admitting their original setup isn't optimal, I'm sure that same mentality is going to spill its way into the multi-billion dollar games industry.

Most developers I talk to don't strike me as that though, it more seems to stem from empathy, of not wanting players to ever be overwhelmed, misdirected, or penalized in the opening moments of a game.

As you're dealing in an artform that's a collaboration of the artist and the player, you need to be empathetic to be a game developer.

I'm just starting to question if these efforts don't just as often hurt the experience as they help. Is an RPG spending over an hour to setup an inciting incident really the method to bring new players into the genre? Were unskippable cutscenes the secret to making racing games mainstream?

I'll never forget Deus Ex Mankind Divided teaching me how to fire my Assault Rifle…

FOUR HORUS into the game.

I think what annoys me about the frequency of this is that when I think about it, there's a ton of games that feel very similar to the movies I've listed, even if only in-terms of flow and literally nothing else.

Titanfall 2, DOOM, The Last of Us, Super Meat Boy, and most recently OTXO.

It's easy to understand why films have an advantage in pacing, they control everything the viewer sees, but it's games like these, that capture the player's full attention within that 15 minute window of film which gives me hope all the stubbornness and fear will fade.