FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Close-up

FilmCroft: I’m Ready for My Close-upJerz’s Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton
Video Game Conference
reflections.

Jordan Hall’s presentation was the only one that relied heavily on cinema theory, though she showed an admirable awareness of the problems such an approach causes.

To take just one example, she suggests that the default method of playing the Lara Croft games — from the perspective of a camera floating along behind the protagonist — distances the (usually male) player from the character. The shot/reverse-shot cinematographic technique will show a close-up, then show what the character is looking at… While Tomb Raider permits the player to view the game world from Lara’s eyes, Hall finds that, lacking the information a cinematographer would provide by inserting a close-up, rather than identifying with Lara, the player merely appropriates her gaze.

Considering that the person holding the controller has already appropriated Lara’s whole body, ownership of her eyes is probably a minor point. Further, because the player has chosen to switch away from tracking mode and view the world from the PC’s eyes, presumably to get a better look at some object in the game world, the close up – which is the director’s way of announcing that a perspective shift is about to occur, is not necessary. While a director can use shot/reverse-shot to communicate emotion via the actor’s facial expression, once again, that information is not necessary — Tomb Raider is not successful because it conveys Lara Croft’s emotions; it is successful because it is fun to play (although that’s of course not the only reason). Hall is right to critique the nature of that “fun,” as well as other cultural manifestations of the Lara Croft phenomenon, but really, if a game kept cutting away from action sequences to insert close-ups of the PC, I’d get pissed off pretty quick.

It’s a videogame convention to play intense music in the proximity of a enemy, even before the PC or player has noticed it. That’s a moviemaking technique that also communicates important information about the game world. How might a quick cut to Lara’s face be useful during game play? Perhaps, when in a room with a pushable block or other hidden exit, Lara would stare suspiciously in that direction? I don’t know… if you start giving your avatar that much individuality, what’s the point of playing? I recall being disappointed that the magic wand cursor in King’s Quest 7 sparkled whenever in the presence of a clickable region. As annoying as pixel-hunting clickfests could be, the sparkling wand took away even that small bit of exploratory fun.

I found Hall’s clips from cut scenes illuminating; anonymous male characters gaze in wonder and fear at scenery or monsters; the shot/reverse-shot technique invites us to identify with their emotions and their plight, in a way that we do not empathize with Lara. Elsewhere, Hall notes, we see males gazing in wonder and admiration at Lara’s abilities, but she also notes a lack of male characters during action sequences.

For a discussion of camera and agency in games, I’d say an adventure game like Syberia is worth a look. I finally finished the game after getting stuck on the “Blue Helena” puzzle… Syberia did make occasional use of close-ups of the PC, Kate Walker, which helped establish her growing fascination with the enigmatic inventor Hans Voralberg. As a game with pre-rendered backgrounds, it doesn’t permit the shifting camera angles that Hall analyzes, but I did find the final cut scene emotionally effective — right up to the point that I learned that it was, in fact, the final scene, and that was nothing more to do. When controlled by the cinematographic cut scene, the PC made a final decision that ended the game (and set up the sequel).

With the music swelling, Kate runs across several screens of gamespace, at one point knocking over a chair that was not a clickable object during the game. For some reason, I found that event significant — the cut scene wasn’t simply replacing the animation shown during the action sequences, it was taking over the world in which the action sequences took place. I found that a bit troublesome, just as a box that had not been a clickable object near an action climax suddenly conveniently contains a bomb when the plot requires one.

These actions break the “fourth wall,” which can be effective when done well — and I almost thought the bumped chair worked. It emphasized the PC’s fictional presence in the virtual world, which was consistent with the designer’s decision to take control away from me during the PC’s climactic final choice.

Syberia which has (as far as I can tell) no timed puzzles, lots of dialogue, a haunting rich, string-heavy main theme, and gorgeous scenery. I usually played it late on my laptop, wearing headphones, in bed, after everyone else had fallen asleep. (Somehow it never felt right playing RPG or FPS games in that context). Still, the final cut scene forced the game to conclude in only that one way that sets up the sequel. Is that, in and of itself, bad? No, but it may be the reason why some reviewers felt cheated by the end. The designer’s desire to tell a story trumped his desire to give us a satisfying gaming experience.

2 thoughts on “FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Close-up

  1. Sure, John — let me see what I can do to provide a little more background. Let me know if this helps…. People who are active gamers would probably understand most of the terminology in this blog posting, but on re-reading it, I can see that some explanation is in order. Meanwhile, I’ll work on getting my own paper in a format that I can post online, since I tried to introduce my own subject carefully, for those who aren’t that familiar with it. I’ll start here with some explanation of terms I use in this blog entry.

    A Few Basic Terms

    In the vocabulary of videogames, the human being sitting in front of the screen is the player, and the digitial representation of the player’s agency is the avatar. Your mouse pointer is a kind of avatar, as was the little rectangle representing your paddle in “pong,” but when the avatar has a personality of its own, it is often referred to as the “player-character,” or PC. If the game features other in-game people (such as adversaries, sidekicks, or bystanders), they are “non-player-characters,” or NPCs.

    One of the chief features of a game is that the player is in control of the action; in traditional fiction, the author is in control. Many (but not all) games offer some kind of plot to contexualize the action scenes; a common way to do that is through a cinematic opening sequence, in which the player cannot control the PC’s actions. Thus, the first time a player starts up a game, he or she might sit idly the protagonist’s partner is killed and the protagonist vows his revenge; the game yields control of the character after a premise has been established, in order to supply moral framework to contextualize the action sequences that follow. These cinematic interludes (often only a minute or two in length) are called “cut-scenes“. As the story advances, a cut-scene may be offered as a kind of reward at the end of each chapter, and in the final closing sequence.

    Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft
    Lara Croft is the heroine of the “Tomb Raider” games, a popular series of action titles that feature a buxom white woman in tiny shorts, looting archaeological sites and shooting monsters. While Angelina Jolie played Lara in a 2003 movie based on the game series, within the game the character is computer-generated — that is, she’s not an actress mapped into a virtual world, she’s an animated puppet that players control. While fans of the game would typically say the game is empowering because it shows a strong woman kicking virtual ass, social critics (including some feminists) feel that a game that invites men to use a virtual puppet to perform tricks for their pleasure is yet another example of male objectification of the female body. (There is much fodder here for both multicultral and feminist studies.)

    In an action game like Tomb Raider, the PC moves quickly through the simulated world, since nowadays computers can render complex virtual environments (with lights, shadows, moving water, reflective surfaces, etc.) on the fly. The player views the action from the square frame of the monitor, but can typically zoom in and out, pan around the PC in a circle, switch to a top-down view, view the action from an imaginary camera that seems to hovers along above and behind the PC’s head. While a particular class of games called “First Person Shooters” (FPS) typically don’t show the avatar during action sequences, instead presenting the game as if you are seeing exactly what the PC sees (with animated fists or weapons coming into view when implemented), the Tomb Raider games are heavy on gymnastic elements such as jumping, climbing, leaping, etc. — these actions are hard to do if the player cannot see exactly where the PC is standing.

    Cinematography and Lara Croft
    While a cinematographer would invite the viewer to identify with a character by showing a close-up of the character looking more or less in the direction of the camera, and then cut to a shot of whatever the character is looking at, that’s the shot/reverse-shot technique. While it is possible in at least some of the Tomb Raider games (I don’t know the series well enough to know for sure how many) to switch to the avatar’s viewpoint (so that we no longer see Lara in the center of the screen), Hall noted that because in the game you simply switch from one angle to the other; the absence of the close-up of Lara’s face, Hall argues, means that the player isn’t invited to identify with Lara as a character.

    My point in the above posting is that her observation privileges the cinematic grammar of shot/reverse shot, which makes little sense in an acton game — if I decide I want to switch to Lara’s perspective in order to get a better shot at an enemy, and instead of immediately showing me what Lara sees, the game first shows me a shot of Lara’s face, that will needlessly delay the game from displaying the information I told the game I wanted when I switched to Lara’s perspective.

    King’s Quest
    A series of games popular during the late 80s and early 90s; the computer would show a 2-D static background, and the PC was a cartoon-like, 2D animated figure. If the background showed a farm house, you might click on the door, the animated figure would walk to the door, and possibly open it. This kind of game typically had only one ending, so it was more like a storybook, broken up into many self-contained, page-like sections; to advance to the next section, you had to find the key to unlock some door that would lead the PC to new regions.
    The “2D graphic adventure” was played mostly by looking at the static screen, clicking on anything that looked interesting, and seeing what would happen. If you were ever stuck in a graphic adventure, you would typically click on everything and anything in view, in the hopes of learning what you were supposed to do next in order to advance the story.

    Cut-scenes
    Action games typically begin with a short movie (sometimes with real human actors, but perhaps more often now with high-quality computer-rendered characters and scenery). These narrative cinematic passages are called “cut-scenes,” which are mini-movies that give the player a chance to rest while the story advances to the next chapter. For instance, an agent who successfully completes one mission may get his next orders via a cutscene. If the plot requires the agent’s partner to die a gruesome death, that sequence can be played in a cut-scene, so that the player doesn’t waste time trying to save the partner from a death that the designer has decreed must be part of the storyline. But the player of an action game typically spends 99% of game time in the “action mode,” rather than passively watching cutscenes.

  2. I looked over several of your postings from Princeton. I’m out to sea, Dennis. I need a primer on game theory or game criticism or whatever is going on here.

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