Whose Faulty Vision

Integrating video games and movies

This is going to be one of my long geeky posts about video games, so be forewarned. It does have broader implications about how to integrate stories across multiple media, though-it’s just that I’m using video games as my case study. It’ll be talking specifically about Star Wars games a lot, becaues the Star Wars folks have been doing some of the most interesting experimentation in this area.

For a long time, video games based on movies were pretty much just retellings of the movies’ storylines, adapted to video game form. These could be pretty close adaptations (see the Super Star Wars series for an example of this done right) or distant ones (Batman for the NES, for instance), but that was pretty much the only story they told. During this time, video games based on movies had a really dismal reputation. Among other things, people didn’t want to go through the same story they’d just seen.

Now, don’t misinterpret my use of the past tense: most video games based on
movies are still like that, and most are still pretty bad. But a few game designers are trying instead to integrate their stories with the movie’s story, to tell a story that can be “real” in the context of the movie.

Trying to integrate the stories, though, presents an interesting storytelling problem. You want to tell a story that “matters”, because otherwise, why should players care? But the “big event” has already been taken by the movie. And of course the movie has to stand alone, since a lot of the moviegoers won’t play the game. So what do you do? There are a few possibilities I can think of, one of which has (as far as I know) never been done yet.

• Fill in backstory. Come up with an event that really matters to the story of the movie, without which the movie’s hero couldn’t have saved the day, and explain how it happened. For example: At the start of the second Matrix movie, the people of Zion had just found out that the machines were digging down to Zion. Without that information, they wouldn’t have been able to mount a resistance. But how did they find out in the first
  place? The movie never explains it, which is fine–it’s not necessary to the plot to know how they found out. But if you play Enter the Matrix, you’re one of the people who brings back that information, so you get to do something that “matters”. Star Wars:Bounty Hunter also did this, with an even less crucial piece of backstory (how Jango Fett came to be chosen as the “father” of the stormtroopers), and I’m sure there are others.
• Do a totally different story set in the same “universe” as the movie. This only works with well-developed universes, so usually series rather than individual movies, but it’s a good solution there. Star Wars has a bunch of these, such as Dark Forces and Knights of the Old Republic, and they’re generally well-regarded. There have been a couple of James Bond games that did this too.
• Do a sequel story. This is an obvious idea, but it’s rarely done, presumably because a sequel game might get in the way of future sequel movies. The only instance I can think of off the top of my head is The Matrix Online, which is set after the last Matrix movie. I guess they can get away with that because they’re not planning
  any more Matrix movies.
• Show the movie’s events from a minor character’s perspective. This is tricky, because you want the story to “matter” even though in the movie, the hero did everything important. But it can be done: in Star Wars: Battlefront, for instance, you play through the major battles of the Star Wars movies from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. Sure, some of those battles wouldn’t have been won without the actions of Luke or Han or whoever. But they also wouldn’t have been won without the actions of a whole lot of soldiers.
• Tell interlocking stories. This is the one that, as far as I know, has never been done. It’s similar to a couple of the above, but more intricate. What you’d do is, you’d write a movie with two heroes. One of them (let’s say Ahnold) gets most of the screen
  time in the movie. He communicates with the other hero, who’s mostly doing things offscreen. The moviegoers find out about the other hero’s actions when Ahnold does, either by seeing the results or talking to the guy or whatever. So the movie still stands alone, and it’s a plot structure you see a lot in action movies. But then the video game is a mirror image: Ahnold is off-screen most of the time, and the player controls the second hero, doing all of the other stuff that matters. This would be tough to do, and the game would have to be developed tightly with the movie. But man, gamers would love it. (I say I don’t think this has ever been done; I should clarify that I don’t think it’s been done with a game and a movie. It was done with a pair of video games, Metal Gear Solid 2 and its expansion, Substance. I only played MGS2, and it stood alone just fine, so that part of it can certainly be done.)

Wow, that was long. But I’m sitting here on a bus and don’t have anything better to do. Hope it wasn’t too boring. Are there any other ways to integrate stories that I’ve missed?

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

-Carl Sagan

Recent Economics Findings

Fascinating discussion about various recent findings in economics here. It’s on the Wall Street Journal, so it probably won’t be free for very long; read it while you have the chance.

Promotion

My boss just came by, totally out of the blue, to tell me she’s giving me a promotion, a raise, and (as soon as she can work it out) an office! She says the raise is “nothing to write home about”, but it’s about 20%, which is certainly welcome. My title goes from “Associate planner” to full-fledged “Planner.” And an office will be a huge improvement over my cube. It’ll undoubtedly be an internal office with no windows, but still a huge improvement.

I wasn’t up for an annual review or anything, and I really wasn’t expecting this. My boss says “out of the blue is the best way” and that I’ve been doing good work.

Wow. I’m walking on clouds.

Legal Dream

I had a dream last night in which I had some legal credentials, for some reason. I wasn’t a practicing lawyer, but I had passed the bar exam, and needed that knowledge for work. When I woke up from it, I was still trying to figure out whether I’d ever passed the bar exam or not. I thought maybe, during my unemployed period after the Ad School, I might have gone to a 3-month legal training program, and passed the bar after that. Eventually I decided that 3 months wouldn’t be nearly enough training to have passed the bar, so I must not have. It was a funny sort of half-dreaming thought process, though, where I couldn’t really trust my memories, since they kept shifting, so I had to use logic.

Tween Forums

My eyeballs are bleeding. There is blood coming out of my eyeballs.

I just got asked to investigate tween girl slang, to figure out whether the language we’re using in an upcoming ad sounds right. Which is a typical planner task, and a cool thing to do, really.

Except that it meant immersing myself, for several hours, in web forums written by tween and early-teen girls. This is why my eyeballs are bleeding. Apparently tween computers mostly come without a shift key. Also the letters “y” and “o” are missing, so “you” can only be typed “u”. And so on. It doesn’t help that 90% of the discussion topics are “this boy likes me, what should I do?” or “this boy doesn’t like me, what should I do?”

I don’t mean to complain, really. I enjoy immersing myself in other people’s mindsets–it’s one of the reasons I became a planner in the first place. It’s just that my sense of grammar is a bit strong.

Christmas Tonight

I get to see Christmas tonight! She’s coming down to give a talk at an institution out on Long Island, as part of investigating a potential post-doc opportunity there. Yay!