Why I Can't Shut My Mouth About Video Games

If you talk to me for longer than ten minutes, it becomes painfully obvious that I am really interested in video games. I kind of always have been. There are plenty of reasons for this, among them the fact that I have no depth perception, meaning sports are pretty much out of the question, and when you're growing up in Ohio in the nineties and early 2000's, that rules out a lot of other options.

At least, that was the excuse I used for a long time. But then I thought about it and realized that could only account for a part of it. There are plenty of people who follow sports but have little to no athletic ability, and I'm not one of them, either. I can't say for sure what initially attracted me to video games, but I knew that from my earliest exposure to them (watching someone play Doom, renting an N64 from Blockbuster), I was hooked. I found them fun, and still do, but I think there's still more to it, because that alone doesn't explain why I list them as an interest as opposed to just something I do in my leisure time.

One of the earliest things I realized about video games is that they let the player take on the role of the protagonist, rather than just watching events unfold. You get to be the guy who defuses the bomb with 2 seconds to spare or scores the winning touchdown. When you think about why video games were widely considered toys or children's games when they first emerged, it's not hard to see why so many of the plots (for the games that had them) boiled down to "kill all the bad guys and/or save the princess."

But video games have matured, or at least they're trying to. They're trying to tell stories that resonate more deeply, with more complex themes. What's more, they're also trying to tell these stories in a completely new way, one unique to the format. In the past decade, video games have started to assert themselves as not just a multimillion dollar entertainment industry, but also a new artistic medium.

For instance, consider this. That moment comes in the middle of Call of Duty 4, an excellent shooter that before that point had nothing deeper to say than "Bad guys pew pew pew!" (But done very well, of course.) Then, out of nowhere, that happens. Even though you've saved the pilot with seconds to spare, the nuke went off and you were in the radius. And then it teases you, saying "Look, you aren't dead! You survived the crash!" And earlier in the game you survived a downed chopper, so hey, it's not that far-fetched right? In fact, the first time I played this level, I moved towards the highway ramp right behind the chopper wreck, because I figured there was no point in moving towards the mushroom cloud. If I was gonna get help, I'd have to move away from ground zero.

But then I died. And you die no matter what you do, whereas previously if you got killed in a firefight, the screen would go blurry, you'd get a quote from some prominent figure, and then be thrust right back into the action. An inconvenience of at most ten seconds. But this moment tells you that actually, when you die in war, you stay dead, and it can be for really stupid reasons and it doesn't matter if you're the main character. That right there was the moment I realized that not only could video games have something meaningful to offer, but that could do it in a thoroughly unique manner. And let's just not talk about how Michael Bay apparently took the helm of the Modern Warfare franchise after the multiplayer made the game way more successful than anyone anticipated.

The point is, video games are a very new, innovative field, most especially where story is concerned. Giving control to the player not only intensifies their emotional investment, it can also be used to shape the outcome of the story. Some games have only the barest semblance of a plot and are basically excuses for you to explore and interact with a huge, fabricated world. My dream game, the one I'd want to make, would be one where everything in the plot is up to the player. The first level is the only thing set in stone, and all the choices you make after that are valid. They advance the plot, and they don't do so in terms of some sort of hackneyed "Jesus/Satan" moral choice system, but would instead lead to completely different character interactions, plot developments, and locales. It would all be set in the same world, but the story would be completely different each time.

The reason I can't shut up about video games and why I spend so much time on them is because they're still in a fairly early stage of development, and they offer a quite unique experience. They tell stories in a way no one has before, and it really works for someone like me who's been brought up in the emerging era of user-generated content, where the audience is a participant and not just a consumer.

...Okay, and they're also ridiculously fun and awesome.

My Favorite Movie

It's Children of Men.

...Okay, okay, I'll elaborate. GEEZ.

Yesterday I came across this video. I've only seen the movie twice, and I was only able to pick up

on probably a fourth of the stuff in that video. The various ads, TV screens, and computers in the movie are never on screen for more than a few seconds, and they're pretty much never brought front and center. There are only a few instances where the frame is devoted entirely to some of these ads or news reports. For the most part, the various posters, ads, and so forth are all just glimpsed for a second. Watching them by themselves, it's crazy to note how much detail is actually put into them. They are all produced like real commercials and look like it, not some half-assed thing just to get a concept or image across.

The question, then, is why bother? Why devote so much time and energy to making these ancillary bits that most people won't be able to view for more than a second as they take in most of the scene, if they even notice them at all?

For pretty much the entire movie, we follow the main character Theo, as portrayed by Clive Owen in a badass overcoat. The camera sticks on him, and pretty much never cuts away to show what other characters are doing or other plot developments taking place. The reason we see so little of these ads and all this amazing technology that's been developed in the next twenty years is because Theo just doesn't give a shit. The first scene is a perfect example of this. The movie opens with a news report that the youngest person in the world, the 18-year-old "Baby Diego", has died. In a world where everyone is infertile and humanity is officially terminal, this is a very big deal. But after a few seconds of the news report, we cut to Theo in a coffeeshop packed with people watching the news and looking suitably horrified. Not Theo. He couldn't care less. While we hear the news reporter talking more about what this means for humanity and the next youngest person on Earth, Theo just pushes his way past the throng, not even really bothering to glance at the TV, because he wants his coffee, dammit.

Most of the first part of the movie just has Theo walking around, and it's very clear the Britain he inhabits is not the one we know today. It's essentially a police state, with numerous cities turned into refugee camps for the numerous illegal immigrants fleeing the anarchy that's supposedly broken out in the rest of the world and suicide pills marketed as a comforting alternative to an untimely, unpredictable demise. It's also got technology that, while certainly feasible today, is clearly from a world 20 years ahead of ours where progress suddenly got stunted. Cars have heads-up-displays on the windshield to warn about oncoming hazards and video ads cover pretty much every surface. The director Alfonso Cuarón has called it "science fiction with the wires exposed."

And throughout all of this, Theo maintains pretty much the same attitude as he did in the first scene. He only really cares about politics and the refugee situation when he becomes directly involved, and characters never stop to comment on the amazing new technology around them or when it was invented. In addition, the camera almost never cuts away to focus specifically on some new technological marvel, and instead favors a lot of long, single takes. This helps to keep the action tense, especially during chase scenes, and it also helps to connect the audience with Theo, but that's not what I love so much about this movie.

What propels Children of Men, for me, to great movie status is the fact that this style of editing and camerawork, along with Clive Owen's performance, perfectly captures the way we interact with technology every day. Everyday, I walk around with an iPhone, which is not only a portable phone, but it carries pretty much every song I've ever heard, and can also be used as a map, to tell me the weather, and whatever else I want it to if I feel like buying an app for it. I can also access the internet with it wherever I get a cell signal, which is more places than you'd think.

Now picture going back in time fifteen years, or even ten, and telling yourself about this. Patton Oswalt has a great bit where he talks about this, as does Louis C.K. A lot of people are walking around now with phones that are more sophisticated than many of the computers we'd send up in the space shuttle. And at first, of course, everyone freaked out about it. "Holy crap, this is amazing! I just use my finger to swipe and it's awesome!" I was the same way with mine, but only for the first week or so. After that, everyone was just like, "Yeah, whatever," or griping about how slow it works.

Children of Men works the same way. It's a world radically different from our own in so many ways, and Theo just doesn't care. Like us, he's just become totally inured to everything. The performances help sell this, but the fact that the camerawork also adopts this perspective, of not particularly calling attention to all the crazy stuff going on, is what makes it such a great movie for me. It drives home a second moral, one about the way people can so quickly become accustomed and bored to the crazy world we live in, without cramming it down our throats or talking at us for ten minutes. It's a purely filmic way of doing it (still don't believe "filmic" is a word, but spellcheck isn't calling me on it, so whatever).

Transmetropolitan, my favorite comic book, does the same thing. Technology and the world can change in any number of ways, but at the end of the day, people are still going to be people. It's my firm belief that we're basically living in a work of science fiction at this point (See: unmanned aerial drones, chocolate-chip cookie dough pop-tarts), and if that really is the case, Children of Men is one of the best movies depicting that situation. It's my favorite type of science fiction, one that isn't all about the fantastic setting and technology, but rather uses those to tell a personal, tightly woven and really interesting story.