digiscreen

[digiscreen]

Okay, so in today’s blog I want to address my love and passion and that is, video games. Shocker there, isn’t it? But Josh, what in particular do you want to talk about? Video games are a huge, ever changing and evolving medium, and there’s so much you can possibly cover, how will you ever choose? Well today, I want to approach games from a more textual point of view. We’re going to look at them as if we were looking at them as a film, and in particular, we’re going to look at Naughty Dog’s 2013 release The Last of Us. I am sure that many of you have no doubt heard about this game, and how it has been hailed as an ‘outright masterpiece.’  If you haven’t, don’t worry. I am intentionally leaving things vague for the time being. Just know that it is a story driven game, set in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies roam. Though plenty of narrative heavy games have come before hand, including the Uncharted series, also created and published by Naughty Dog, The Last of Us is a game that truly broke out of the gaming “bubble” and into the cultural zeitgeist. Now there could be several reasons for this; in the years leading up to its release, zombie/post apocalyptic film and television had flooded the market (the superhero boom that is still present today was just beginning to take off) (pardon the pun), with shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead garnering a large amount of attention. It could also be due to the fact that discussions about gaming had started to change and be reshaped. The time of its release (in terms of where consoles were) is also something I personally feel factors into its huge success. Microsoft and Sony were preparing to move into their next generation of consoles (with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 respectively) and so the The Last of Us was a swan song of sorts for the PlayStation 3. But I digress.

Let’s address the claim then, that “given video games are non-linear, does this mean we cannot study them using traditional textual lenses?” Well let’s first establish what traditional textual lenses actually mean in this context. What we’re thinking of here, is the ways in which we would normally analyse film. We’d look at shot composition, mis-en-scene, sound, lighting, camera movements; all the technical aspects that go into what is on the screen in front of you. These are all physical, malleable objects that are based in reality. Jean Douchet posits that filmmakers deserve to be called “great precisely because of their near obsessive focus on capturing reality and respecting it.” They know what is in the real world and what can be accomplished. But what about animation then? David Bordwell notes that the “classical model has adapted itself to different media and technologies, adjusting to the introduction of sound as well as to other technical innovations.” The whole discussion on what film is becomes very blurred when you combine those two mindsets, and that argument only gets more muddled when you bring in something like remediation. This idea that cinema takes old outdated forms and repurposes it when it creates new technologies. However, despite this mess I’ve laid out before you, and despite cinema having evolved so much, we can still break it down to it’s bare form.

Looking at the 1st Academy Awards, the categories Best Director, Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Story were present, just like they are today. The core elements are all still there. (Wow that was a much longer break down of that concept than I meant it to be) Thankfully non-linear is a bit easier to define. A film/tv show is linear as you as an audience member are passive in the watching of it. That is to say, you have no control over where it is heading, the story and events have all been shot and edited, and you are just experiencing them. Video games give you control, and despite games (generally) having an established story and path they want you to follow, you are by no means obliged to follow that. We won’t delve into it much further than that, or we end up in some weird reality where by my definition, Candy Crush is a linear story because I know when I play that game I have no control over anything happening in it. Anyway, point is, textual lenses=physical things we can look at in the frame or within the frame of a movie, non-linear= multiple ways of progressing (or not) through a story.

Now, the more traditional elements are not lost in The Last of Us at all. Watch the credits for the game below (fear not, you don’t need to watch them all, just the beginning):

As you can see, the game has two listed a directors, Game Director Bruce Straley, and Creative Director Neil Druckman, who is also the writer. You have visual effects artist Eben Cook, Editor Ryan M James, Composer Gustavo Santaolalla, like any credits scene at the end of a film, the list goes on and on. Now of course this isn’t the strongest argument to say that we can look at games through the same textual lenses as film because they have credits, by that logic if I added a list of names to anything they could be classified as “film;” but I do raise the credits first because I’d hazard a guess that if you’re reading this you hadn’t realised that video games could have directors, or composers, or editors.

So let’s watch the opening of The Last of Us. Remember how I told you not to worry earlier and I left the description of the game vague, now’s the time to fix that. Now just a quick note that there is violence in this clip, as well as horror themes. Nothing too intense, but worth mentioning.

Now this probably hyperbole, but I feel that there are little to no other mediums that establish so much about everything you are about to experience in 15 minutes as well as Naughty Dog has done here. The clock ticking immediately creates a sense of unease, and one of the first things we hear Joel see is “I can’t lose this job.” We know he’s down his luck. The relationship between him and Sarah is established as a loving, playful one, as shown when Sarah gifts her father a nice watch, and his response is to pretend it’s broken, and their subsequent casual discussion of selling drugs. This nicely juxtaposes when Sarah is wandering the house alone looking for Joel. Cold, muted colours now fill the pallet, and bits and pieces begin to frame the world we’re entering (the newspaper report on spiking admittance to hospitals, the news report in the background). When we see Jimmy break through the glass the camera places us behind Joel, with out eye line at his back, really conveying the vulnerability and fear Sarah is now experiencing. As the scene progresses the camera stays linked to Sarah as we control her and begin to experience the world as it descends into chaos. The fear she experiences, as well as the emotional bond between Joel wanting to protect her at all costs, is really conveyed through this introduction to the game. It sets up the protagonist Joel, and gives the player a clear understanding of what he has been through to make him the man he is when the actual game commences some 15 years later. All these emotions, the world building, they’re entirely based of cinema conventions and tropes. A small American suburban town is the originating point of a virus; chaos slowly descending as the military desperately try to contain the outbreak. A father doing everything he can to protect his child. It’s all classical Hollywood, but the story it ultimately tells is one of relationships and family, and it achieves this through perfect uses of camera movement and placement, a well written script, a score that encapsulates the emotional resonances, and fantastic acting from the cast. Markku Eskelinen excellently points out that “outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama, and games” and The Last of Us is an excellent example of why those sorts of theories need to be re-worked and re-examined. HOWEVER, with all this being said, the question isn’t about whether we can or cannot apply traditional textual lenses to video games, but is actually whether we should. Eskelinen’s full quote finishes saying “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Video Games are a medium of their own, and they will always try borrow from other mediums in doing so. They, like cinema, are constantly remediating themselves, only they have a much larger pool they can remediate from. 2018’s God of War is one single take for the whole thing, and has received praise for how cinematic it is (citation needed) and would be very easy to analyze, much like The Last of Us under a traditional lens, but throw something like Epic Games’ Fortnite, one of the biggest games right now which is being enjoyed by millions of people, in the mix, and there is no chance you can study it under traditional means. In the same way that you wouldn’t study a book on its cinematography, you shouldn’t be assessing a video game under that same guise.  

References: Moriarty, Colin. 2013. "The Last Of Us Review". IGN. https://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/the-last-of-us-review.

Elsaesser., Thomas. 2016. Film History As Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

"The 1St Academy Awards | 1929". 2018. Oscars.Org | Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences. https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1929.

Eskelinen, Markku. 2001. "The Gaming Situation". Game Studies 1 (1). http://gamestudies.org/1801.

Druckman, Neil, and Bruce Straley. 2013. The Last Of Us. Video. Naughty Dog.