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hero as interactive drama
Saw Zhang Yimou's Hero yesterday. (It's entertaining, especially in terms of cinematography, although I found the film's visual power to have been weirdly denatured by the fact that the trailer had already shown me of each of the major setpieces.)
In any case, I kept thinking about videogames that could be made from the film. The film suggests a certain readiness to be adapted into another swordfighting game, but I thought that a more compelling game was suggested by the sequences where Nameless stands 100 paces from the Emperor's throne and they engage in discussion. This discussion essentially functions as a formalized preamble to an assassination attempt, and even though both paricipants understand this fact early on, the discussion continues, leading to a single instance of moral choice that happens only when the conversation has drawn them inexorably to the point when it must happen. Being in that situation, having that discussion, and working up to that moment of moral choice would be a very compelling situation to be immersed in, and the film succeeds in that it does a good job of immersing us, at least partially, in that moment. But videogames have the interactive dimension that film lacks, and thus have the potential to create experiences that are more immersive than those created by film.
(Relevant here may be Grand Text Auto's notes on Bus Station, an immersive theatrical game which similarly revolves around only a single moment of "action.")
The fact that my imaginary Hero game doesn't exist, and no game really very much like it exists, and that it is profoundly difficult to even imagine how it might function (what would the controller do? what would the interface look like?) reveals how few forays have been made in this direction by the current crop of videogame manufacturers (the people who are thinking in that direction seem, perhaps predictably, to be mostly theorists and writers). |
Monday, August 30, 2004
11:53 AM
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