My angst can still beat up your angst.
If you search for “victor frankenstein reliable narrator” on Google (no quotation marks), this blog’s January 2006 archive is the first result (because of this post).
Judging from my counter’s Recent Search Terms, some class in the New York/New Jersey area has a paper due this week about Walton’s reliability.
The power of the Internet!
Things read:
“This isn’t about censorship. It’s perfectly appropriate for games to use this kind of content, and perfectly healthy for people to play them. But is it healthy for it to be so overwhelmingly what games are concerned with? Can games ever expect to escape ill-founded and damaging labels like ‘murder simulator’ if they can’t find more to focus on?”
“And so we come to a view of games in which all game designers simulate just a few archetypal situations (flight, fight or cooperate) not because they lack creativity, but because we’re still rather close to an age when mortal conflict dominated every waking moment.”
Questions raised:
Things written:
Gilbert’s right - there needs to be intelligent defense of and discussion about video games. This isn’t about censorship, though. Being able to understand and articulate how people make sense of the games they play is a small part of understanding media literacy, a skill which grows more important as media becomes more prevalent.
The post below is a reading of Silent Hill that I, as gamer-film-academic, wanted to get out there. My aim was to suggest a middle ground interpretation: just because the film wasn’t entertaining doesn’t mean it’s useless, and just because it’s got Puppet Nurses doesn’t mean it’s a successful adaptation.
Silent Hill was released in theaters last Friday, and the reviews I’ve been reading seem to agree on one thing - that it’s close to the video game. The critics are citing this as a fault; fans are citing it as a strength. What I find interesting is not how the film reflects the specific game Silent Hill (in its appearance - the design, the monsters, the sounds, the music, etc), but how it reflects a game. There’s something about the film that feels game-like.
In the interest of full disclosure, a disclaimer: I have not played any of the Silent Hill games. I have watched someone else play the Dreamcast version for about ten minutes. I have, however, played many other games and watched many other movies, and these are the experiences that color the thoughts that follow. I am not attempting to create a Unified Theory of Video Games and Movies - except where noted, references to a video game are not specific to any particular game, nor are they meant to be broad generalizations covering all video games. They are what they are.
That said, there is something about the way the character Rose navigates through the cinematic world of Silent Hill that feels like a game. She finds an item that leads her to a location, in which she finds another item that leads her directly to the next location. She says that she is sure Sharon is in a hotel, because she found something that says “hotel” in the mouth of a corpse that was tied to a toilet in a bathroom stall with barbed wire and - wait a minute. How does this make any sense?
Video game logic assumes that in a video game, everything serves some kind of purpose - since a game exists in a self-contained, totally created environment, someone is responsible for the location of every item you come across (I’m aware this takes a lot for granted - that’s why it’s called an “assumption”). This knowledge of the existence of a game’s createdness inflects the decisions you make while playing the game. The game machine, the graphics (and their lack of real-world referents), the controller in your hand - these all serve to remind you that while you’re having an effect on the game world, it’s still a constructed experience that requires technology to exist. No matter how “realistic” it is, it is not “real”.
Hollywood cinematic style works in a different way - it hides its technology as best it can, through “intuitive” camera shots and editing. Its aim to create a kind of “realism” does not allow its characters the knowledge that they are, in fact, creations bound by the cinema frame. The style expects its characters to behave as though they were real people in the situations they find themselves in (the existence of this standard is implied in any criticism faulting a film or its characters for their lack of “believability”). Rose doesn’t follow these rules - she acts as though she knows that she’s playing a game. This assumption explains her logic that the seemingly random object she found in the corpse’s mouth is a clue about where to go next.
When Bennett and Rose arrive in the church, Rose says that it is where they are supposed to be. If they are film characters, this is true - where else can they be but where the filmmakers put them? If they are real people, there is a “destiny” aspect to this statement. If they are video game characters, arriving where they are supposed to be means they (through the work of the player) have overcome the challenges set before them to arrive at the place where the game’s creators want them to be.
A short time later, Rose memorizes a map of a hospital basement. Rose is told that the map could save her life - when Bennett suggests that it is just a trick to psych Rose out, her concerned is dismissed. In video game language (especially in earlier games, in a darker time when resolutions were not so high as they are now), a bright map hanging on a wall would be a cue for the player to take note; so follows the film.
When Rose eventually makes it to the “demon’s lair” and the screen fades to white, “Alessa” congratulates her for following the trail set out for her. At this point, “Alessa” takes on the role of the game’s creator (when she claims responsibility for the existence of this nightmare world) and Rose’s player role is confirmed. When “Alessa” tells Rose that she has led her there, it begs the question: Why place all the monsters in the way, if her arrival at the place was so important? Perhaps she didn’t want the game to be too easy, as to bore Rose?
The ensuing flashback acts as a cutscene, explaining the town’s history. In a game, a cutscene is primarily marked by the removal of player control - here, it is marked (to the audience) through heavily filtered “old” and “grainy” footage. There are glimpses of written-on-leader. This flashback serves the same expository functions that a cutscene in a video game would serve.
This has happened once before in the film, when Rose first opens Alessa’s desk in the school. While Rose is enveloped in white light in the film’s later “cutscene”, during this one her actions are clear: from the moment the scene flashes onto the screen until it ends, Rose stands immobile, control wrested from her.
These decisions contribute to the feeling of watching someone playing a video game in cinematic format - this arguably was the goal of the filmmakers, evidenced by their attempts to keep everything so close to the game. The problem with this approach arises when you realize that there’s more to watching someone else play a video game than just looking at the action onscreen. There’s a potential there, a promise that you could affect what is going on in the game, even though you’re not actively controlling the character on screen (James Newman does some excellent work with this idea, where he divides game players into primary and secondary categories, in this article from GameStudies.org).
Removing this potential removes a lot of the threat from the game. In the March 2005 issue of Edge Magazine, there is an article about horror games and how they scare. Games can mimic horror film techniques (through the sound and images), but the “play” aspects are what’s most interesting. “They can destroy the progress you’ve painstakingly made; they can take two hours of your life and tear them up in front of your eyes. Games can hurt you in a way that nothing else can.” And a paragraph later, “[G]ames are where you are strong, where you’re the hero. Scary games are the place where you’re weak, and where you’re punished for that weakness by repetition and boredom.” (I can’t find a copy of this article online, which is a shame - it’s the kind of practical-but-thoughtful work video game writing could use more of, and I think more people should read it).
If this was a game and “Rose” died, you would have to start again. This is the wrong “ending” - in fact, it’s not an end at all, because you can start over (either from the beginning or from a previously saved point in the game). Let’s say that you saved about two hours previous to your in-game death. Those two hours which you spent playing have now been rendered useless - your actions have been negated. The most you can salvage from them is the knowledge on how to best progress through the portion of the game that you will have to replay. If Rose dies in the film, the movie is not going to start over. So while she is behaving as a player in a game would, the stakes are (theoretically) higher because Rose only gets one chance to progress through the story events. She will not be punished by “repetition and boredom”, but by death. It should make for intense viewing.
Except as a viewer, I’m not that engaged. Were I watching a game being played, my role as “secondary player” my involvement with assisting the “primary player” in overcoming the challenges set by the game’s creator would be a part of the experience. Whether this would be a distraction from the absence of an abstract quality I will refer to as “compelling human drama”, I’m not sure.
It’s not fair to dismiss the film by saying it’s the same as watching a video game - that’s misunderstanding the act of watching someone play a video game. It’s equating the experience with watching an unengaging film and ignoring the differences between the two media that are not just limited to the experience of the person holding the controller.
My ignorance of the Silent Hill games prevents me from making any judgement on how well the film reflects the specific games it is based on (whether or not it does this, and whether or not that is a worthwhile effort, is not what I’m getting at here). What I am certain the film does is reference its source material’s original nature as a video game - a tendency that one notices more often in video game films (Doom and House of the Dead contain two of the more garish examples, with the former’s recreation of the original viewpoint of the video game and the latter’s use of images from the game as part of the scene transition) than in adaptations of texts from other media. Why is it so important to acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) the text’s original format?
Does it have something to do with the age of the medium? Is it a new media text seeking some kind of respectability through translation into a more established medium? Cinema is older than video games, books are older than cinema. Is the relationship of a video game to the film based on it closer to the novelization of a film than it is to the cinematic adaptation of a novel?
A bit about those games that I mentioned in our last class meeting:
Course reflection:
Frankenstein is a good starting point, since it is both a narrative about technology and a narrative that uses the technology of the time (both letters and the book). I think a little more focus on the “book” would be useful, since we tend to take its format for granted, but its the form against which most other kinds of narratives are pushing against.
Keep Patchwork Girl, but put it later in the semester - most of us had little trouble reading Frankenstein or playing Myst (even if some found it boring) because we’re familiar with these formats. The learning curve for Patchwork Girl is much steeper, and figuring out just how to read it may be easier after you’ve been made more aware of how you read a book or play a game, since in it Jackson is actively playing with these activities. Getting frustrated with Patchwork Girl and then figuring out why may be more important than figuring out what’s going on in it.
I enjoyed The Diamond Age, and am indebted to Juli for introducing me to the term “infodump”, giving a name to that kind of writing which bores me, but I am not sure how well it fits in with the other readings - it seems more suited for a Science Fiction lit class than this partcular class. Although the primer IS an interesting device for conveying narratives, and there are some parallels between the primer passages and the letter sections of Frankenstein.
I came into the course with an interest in video games, and I really wanted to like First Person. I was hoping for insightful, observant academic writing that would situate the medium historically within its relationship to other media, and also situate the games within it. Instead, most of the articles we read suffered from the worst of the academic approach. Academic detachment gave way to almost insufferable vagueness - terms were being defined for the sake of havi them defined, rather than for a pratical purpose to describe some existing phenomenon. Descriptive studies of texts that are aware of the context they were created in and the milieu they reflect are shunned in favor of overarching prescriptive theories that aren’t grounded in any existing artifacts. Defending a favored theory (narratology or ludology) takes precedence over looking at a game that contains both narrative and ludic elements and seeing how the influence, enhance, or detract from one another. The research is justified not through its results and their insight, but through mentioning how much money the video game industry makes (one wouldn’t begin a work of literary criticism citing figures from the publishing industry).
Granted, it is a medium that academia has ignored,and it is likely that these academics are making extreme cases in order to overcome resistance that is equally as strong, but justifying the study of it by appealing to an idea of mainstream acceptance suggests doubt in the validity of one’s work. Especially when that mainstream acceptance may not exist -just because video games make lots of money doesn’t mean the majority of people are buying them, just that someone is spending money. A minority with a lot of buying power could result in similar figures.
I know a few of my classmates have expressed the blog format for weekly journal entries allowed them to be more comfortable with their writing and be less constrained than they would be if we were handing in weekly response papers. For me, it had a different effect. The knowledge that everything I wrote for the class would be publicly posted here and accessible to anyone with a computer forced me to be very conscious of what I was writing.
This led to the more questioning tone a lot of my entries had - which was ultimately very useful to me. Rather than setting out to write definitively about subject X (and making myself look silly, pretending to know what I was talking about), I tried to weave together observations, readings, and things I had encountered both in and out of class, using the writing to help figure out the connections that I felt were there, but couldn’t quite put my finger on. The public nature of the blog definitely encouraged me to bring in outside sources that I probably would not have touched upon had I been writing response papers, which (given their more private nature) would lead to a text more focused on the class itself.
I have everyone’s blog address bookmarked in a Firefox folder for easy “Open in Tabs” access, and will probably still do that a couple times a week out of habit and work downtime.
As for this blog, I am not sure whether or not I will continue its use. I suppose if I do, then it will be obvious as there will be other posts. If not, though, then this would be the end.
According to this post on No More Marriages, some would argue it’s a low-cost promotional tool for filmmakers.
The protagonist of the film was a PR man for a Big Tobacco lobby, which explains the e-mail’s use of the words “spinsight” and “spintelligence”. This particular contest, though, is playing not on the nature of “blog” as “independent journalist whose personalized writing makes them a master of spin”, but rather its perceived relation to the historical tradition of the fanzine. The “win a random drawing to meet your idol!” contest has been dressed up in what is arguably a more active experience for both parties.
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