I spent June and July and a bit of August this year in Los Angeles, the first time I'd ever been there, and had basically two internships. One of them was at a film production company, where the bulk of my duties would be reading scripts and writing coverage of them, which is where you give a summary and then your comments and recommendation. The other one was at a Youtube network and production company, which was more business oriented, dealing with organizing and categorizing member channels and stuff like that. Both of them were very enlightening in their own ways, and gave me the opportunity to get a taste of the worlds of both Old and New Media simultaneously.
Whenever people would ask me about these internships, they'd invariably end the conversation by asking if either one of these things would be something I'd want to do after school as a job. And my answer was always "Sort of maybe". To be sure, I had a great time at both of these companies, and not only learned a lot but came away feeling like I could get a job in either of those fields. But would I want to do either one as a career career? Well, that's a different story. I love movies and I consume Youtube videos like there's no tomorrow. I guess I could write scripts or be a creative executive, or even help produce Youtube videos, but when I think about how I really want to express myself creatively, the type of media I'd feel most fulfilled producing...well...
...yeah. I guess I am getting pretty predictable, huh?
Here's the thing: I saw a bunch of movies over the summer, both in theaters and at home with my buds. And they ranged from okay (Prometheus) to pretty good (Ted, Brave) to awesome (Moonrise Kingdom, The Dark Knight Rises, Monsieur Lazhar). I enjoyed going to see all of them, and I really do believe the experience of going to the theater with friends can't be matched or beat. But none of those movies had me talking about them for a full week and a half after I'd seen them. None of them really shook me to my core and got me thinking in a way I don't usually. You know what did?
Spec Ops: The Line is so good, you guys. Not just as a videogame, but as a piece of mass media that manages to stay with you long after you've put it down, and not for any superficial reasons. I rented the game and played through it in a day, and I'm only now getting over the bulk of the impact it's had on me. I seriously recommend you play this game, because it manages to do so much with the expectations of what a video game should be and can do, not to mention why we play them, that it ended up being my game of the summer, even though I didn't get to play it until a couple weeks ago.
Which got me thinking, and I realized that my interest in movies seems to have become a lot more intellectual, concerned with the craft and the ideas they might play with. This actually explains why Children of Men is my default "favorite movie", because of the way it uses filmmaking techniques to tell a science fiction story that feels so real and examines the world as it might be without shoving that depiction in your face all the time. To be sure, it took every ounce of my strength not to start bawling over the ending of Toy Story 3, but that film was very much an exception rather than the norm.
Whenever I think of moments in media that have really moved me, off the top of my head, pretty much all of my examples come from video games. Bioshock is chock full of environments that suggest so much about the lives of the people who inhabited the city of Rapture, which accomplishes so much more than any expository monologue ever could. The "Minerva's Den" add-on for the sequel contained a story so compact but so poignant that it ended up better than the core plot the game was originally built around (and was so good I may even examine it later on this very blog). The stark, harrowing message about the realities of war contained in the "Aftermath" segment from Call of Duty 4, conveyed entirely through gameplay. The descent into madness you're dragged into by Far Cry 2. Pretty much all of Journey and both Portal games. I could probably keep going if I really wanted to.
It's possible to speculate endlessly about why I feel these moments rush to the fore in my mind rather than something from films or books, because to be sure I don't mean to disparage those mediums. But the participatory elements of video games, the novel ways in which they can deliver their messages, when executed well, have always struck very close to home for me. So I think it would be awesome if, at some point down the line, I got a shot at being a creative director for a video game studio. No idea how I'll get there, but that hasn't stopped me before.
Right now though, I think I'll just focus on graduating in one piece.
