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FADE
IN: An informant lies dead on the ground. Bonfires burn around him, under a dense canopy of jungle fronds. Gabe Logan, an American counterintelligence expert, stands over the body, shaking his head. Staccato white type hammers out "Central American Jungle" on the bottom of the screen. CUT TO: CUT TO: And suddenly, the movie you were just watching has given way to the game you're about to be playing. Terrorists scurry from building to building in a siege of downtown DC. Logan, the star of Studio 989's Syphon Filter, stands front and center of the screen, motionless, waiting under your thumb. How does it feel? You've just made the jump from audience to star. Now, as the technology catches up with audiences' visual acuity, the cinematic interludes are getting harder and harder to separate from the game itself. Konami's Metal Gear Solid seamlessly develops these film-story-moments on the fly through the game's dazzling graphics engine. At key points, my little gun-toting avatar (named Solid Snake) is unexpectedly wrested out of my control to exchange a crucial bit of dialogue with his latest, expiring victim. Other great games make the visual gymnastics an intrinsic pleasure of playing, like Mario's dizzying camera angles or the nerve-wracking perspective tricks in the horror film game Silent Hill. But for all gaming's ingenuity and billion dollar revenues, film critics smell the loss of a single auteur's shaping aesthetic sense and disdain the form. It's as if interacting with the story prohibits games from becoming art. (They won't look at Zelda, but they'll trudge off to the next Carrot Top movie all the same.) Take a close look at the cinematic moments in games, and the evidence is to the contrary. Gaming has stolen enough from film -- the cinematic inventions at this point are all its own. These enveloping devices are precisely what weave us into the story -- in place of characters, plot and suspense. They are the tiny mental stitches that slowly suture a player into the first person personal. Hollywood has its own code for this -- the master shot/shot/reverse shot formula that lifts audience members out of the theater seats and into the screen. We're conditioned to it. But there is more at work in Syphon Filter than just specialized looking. After all, Doom and Quake are player-character identification machines, but you wouldn't confuse them with cinema in the same way you would Syphon Filter. This is because their gameplay only refers to itself. Syphon Filter, meanwhile, "cuts" from the image of Gabe sighting down the rifle barrel to a close-up of some poor unsuspecting schlub with a target overlaid on his dome, and then back again. Not only have you got yourself a powerful echo of the movies, you've also got the basic, immediately legible ingredients of genre.
READ ON for Part Two: Games are beginning to upstage movies. We've created a single Loop discussion about this game issue -- click here to join the conversation. Available in multiplayer only.
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Washington,
DC. Logan now paces a government office. A whole laundry list of action
movie cues fly off the screen: his sunglass-wearing, super-spook superior
delivers marching orders from behind a huge, polished desk. The window
over his shoulder reveals a dramatically illuminated Washington Monument.
The actors sound like refugees from a badly dubbed foreign thriller. The
shots move briskly through a series of set-ups -- two-shots, fade-ins
of classified files and mug shots, expressionist low angles and
slow pans -- all of it rendered with a slickness of a standard issue Tom
Clancy flick.
This
is the way cinema ends -- not with a bang, but with a blending. In the
past two years, videogames have gone from plagiarizing film to upgrading
it. The formal mixing used to be relegated to a simple handful of Full
Motion Video (FMV) sequences -- like the ones from the opening of Syphon
Filter. They have been the hallmark of high-end console games for years.
When good, they rivaled any Hollywood teaser in thrills-per-second; the
impressive three minute preview for the 1997 release Parasite Eve features
an array of exploding battleships, choppers ducking the Brooklyn Bridge,
and heaps of demonic ooze that even Die Hard couldn't match. But
where the FMVs sublimely overpromised, the games nearly always painfully
under-delivered.
IT'S
OUT IN the killing fields that these games reveal their utter dependence
on movie conventions. But it's also where they can upstage film altogether.
Once bodies begin falling in earnest in Syphon Filter, the gameplay and
cinematic sequences become less about rogue viruses and killing and more
about certain generically coded kinds of seeing. The game arms Logan with
an ever increasing arsenal of gadgets and imaging devices -- palm maps
linked to Global Positioning Satellites, telescopic rifle sights that
rack through realistically rendered focal lengths, green tinted night-vision
scopes, and the old "target lock" trick where fatal haloes blossom around
the heads of marked terrorists. Movies exploit these moments of visual
fetish, but they never quite satisfy them. In a Tom Clancy flick, you
get a five second shot through a rifle scope, and then it's over. In Syphon
Filter, you can sit and play with it, firing into the shrubs until you
master the tool.