6:45 pm Jun. 29, 20128
Last week, scores of gamers and video game industry insiders took to the warpath over a Capital article I wrote because it asserted that The Last of Us, a hotly anticipated new survival-horror game, left “nothing to the imagination.”
(Some of them even directed their rage at film critic Roger Ebert, whose only sin was that he tweeted a link to the piece.)
Lost in the ensuing scuffle was the larger point that the market is leading the video-game industry into the same kind of anticreative phase that the American film industry has been in for the past decade.
“The Last of Us,” as a title, inadvertently evokes how it feels to be a gamer, movie fanboy and film critic at the moment. What I believe has happened to "us" is a scenario straight out of apocalyptic video games and movies: Right before our eyes, moviegoers are being conditioned to accept increasingly machine-like image assembly.
Film editing used to consist of taking the shots that make up a scene and assembling them in such a manner that the viewer was unlikely to notice the transition, but only the emotional and conceptual content of the scene. The means to dismantle this elegant craft had already been in place since the late 1980's, thanks to digital non-linear editing. But classical form in mainstream American commercial cinema persisted right up until DVD players became ubiquitous household items.
With DVD, the home viewer had the same ability as digital editors to skip ahead (or back) to the "good parts" of a film or video program. TV commercials and music videos had already inured audiences to near-constant ruptures in the visual flow for short-form storytelling. Now the DVD gave the average home viewer (who, for the most part, had had no experience with DVD's more upscale precursor, the Laserdic) an extra dimension of voting power aside from the remote control.
Suddenly, a commercial director-turned-feature filmmaker like Michael Bay, whose split-second shots in his disaster epic Armageddon (1997) critics generally took as either brashly experimental or trashily commercial, could hold an audience captive without bothering much with narrative suspense.
The norm in 2012 is for shots to arrive on the screen with a silent crash, a new configuration of motion, light and perspective thrust on the audience, producing what film editing guru Edward Dmytryk called a "mental hiccup," or speed bump. Each of these disruptions, flowing not from dramatic necessity but from a fear of losing the attention of a superficially engaged viewer, is an act of sensory violence. And, like actual violence, it can imprint the victim. The past decade of having our eyes dragged across millions of violent ruptures in even the gentlest narrative situations has encoded us with this expectation.
So now big commercial films run at ever-higher speeds over thousands of speed bumps, catering to an audience the creators seem to think of as frantic shoppers. The time it takes to watch the chemistry blossom between two actors in a two-shot, or for a powerful realization to light up a face in close-up, is a luxury they don't believe they, or we, can afford.
Video games never had this problem. The most violent, flashy video game does minimal violence to our sense of temporal and spatial continuity; it's a built-in property (virtue, really) of the medium. The user is the protagonist and so must remain properly oriented to his environment as much as possible. In this sense, Mortal Kombat is far less "violent" than Bridesmaids.
What seems to be happening now is that big game developers and publishers are aspiring to become more like their movie-industry counterparts. Perhaps this explains the increasing prevalence of cutscenes in the game play and, for that matter, of graphically violent content.
Some game fans argued that basing my assessment of The Last of Us and its creators on the gameplay footage screened at the 2012 E3 expo was unfair, both to the game and to game critics. From their comments, I gather that The Last of Us aspires to the solemn profundity of Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf.
PSX Extreme editor Ben S. Dutka posted a thoughtful reaction to the controversy on his site, and also sent me an email clueing me into the game's pedigree: "I can tell you from experience that just about every journalist and critic in the industry is anxiously awaiting it; we all believe we NEED it to counteract the influx of flashy, pointless violence and gore... We all know [The Last of Us game developer] Naughty Dog, and while what they showed at E3 was bound to get the masses intrigued, the premise of The Last Of Us will absolutely compel all players to think, move slowly, and even consider the moral implications of their actions."
But it's that powerful edit, reminiscent of a classic cut in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, that leaves me full of doubt.
A shotgun blast to the face cuts to a title against black. Whereas Little Bill's revolver suicide in Boogie Nights, punctuated with the title card, "80's," provoked queasy mirth, sorrow and contemplation on the spiraling excesses of American life at the dawn of the Reagan era, that Last of Us cut communicates, to me, "Fuck yeah. Killing."
The hero's flippant sidekick, who sounds like Ellen Page flatly delivering Juno one-liners as she watches one of her protector's victims expire on the floor, seems ready to roam the ganglands of Grand Theft Auto (a game series which I happen to admire for its honesty about its intentions, its satirical edge and its affectionate rendering of American cityscapes.)
The game, as marketed by the company that made it, seems to me to be less about prompting consideration of moral implications than it is about keeping viewers in a reactive state, like the worst television does. And it doesn't just seem this way to me because of how violent it is.
Crude, ultraviolent Quake II for the old Nintendo 64 is one of my all-time favorite games. I remember spending afternoons blasting hundreds of mutants, dogs and guards straight to hell as I jetted from planet to planet. The best part was tossing grenades over an icy cliff, down among the rabid alien dogs below. They whimpered as they exploded out of sight. Each time they did, I snickered like Inspector Gadget's cat.
The N-64 Quake II was as eerie and immersive as George Lucas' THX-1138 or the original ALIEN, coaxing the player along with mysterious ambient sounds and encounters with aliens that passed without endless explanation or flippant Marine chitchat (the standard of post-Halo combat games).
By contrast, the Playstation version of Quake II featured hard-charging heavy metal music and clear explication of the mission. It seemed designed for kids who hate surprises or mysteries and just wanted to enjoy a monster killing spree. The N-64 offered the same space cowboy pleasures, but without those "cool" elements that keep the player narrowly focused on the outcome (like a slow-witted sniper who nevertheless shoots real good) rather than open to the experience in full.
Even my beloved old Grand Theft Auto is liberating mostly because the criminal avatar is running wild in the streets of strange but eerily familiar cities, not because he can shoot hookers in the chest. And when you plug in certain cheat codes, you can go flying over a fake L.A. in a lowrider full of homies. There's more moral humanity in Grand Theft Auto, any more than there is in any of the war games of the past decade.
i lold
You should probably play a Valve game. Then cry.
This may sound like a Michael Bay movie, but it really is art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenogears#Plot
"Whereas Little Bill's revolver suicide in Boogie Nights, punctuated with the title card, "80's," provoked queasy mirth, sorrow and contemplation on the spiraling excesses of American life at the dawn of the Reagan era, that Last of Us cut communicates, to me, "Fuck yeah. Killing.""
Hmm...so I suppose my lingering question is is a video game not worthy of such dissection and interpretation as a film is? I believe games and game storytelling have evolved to such a point that they are now worthy of such thematic dissections as movies. To be honest, and I don't mean to offend but rather observe, I think your view of the ending of The Last of Us' gameplay demo is a bit simplistic and one-sided, and deserves more thought.
Now bear with me here. I don't consider myself a major gamer, but I've been around long enough to understand that violent video games make up the majority current gaming market. I have played countless violent video games over the years, and it's come to a point where video game violence rarely ever fazes me. What struck me about the violence portrayed in The Last of Us is the very fact that I even took note of the violence at all. I've been through the Call of Duty's since Modern Warfare, I've chainsawed my way through countless opponents over countless hours of Gears of War, and I have never been more genuinely disturbed by video game violence than The Last of Us. I haven't seen video game violence portrayed with such gritty, grim realism that it was actually unsettling to me. It's not the actual violence itself that intrigues me so much about The Last of Us, it's the context of that violence.
And frankly, that's the way that most violence in movies tends to be interesting and compelling. Would No Country for Old Men be a better film without the violence? Of course not, because violence is such an integral part of the movie's themes and plot. Of course, the violence is graphic and horrifying, but that's what makes it so fascinating, it's context in the story. Video game and movie violence on its own has become hollow and mundane without important characters for it to happen to in service of an important story.
I believe violence serves the story more in a game like The Last of Us than a game like Call of Duty, primarily in the way its implemented and the general storytelling pedigree of Naughty Dog. No one has ever really lauded Call of Duty for its storytelling, and as a result, the violence has very little impact on most players. It mostly comes down to pumping bullets into faceless enemies and upping your kill/death spread, which is fine, because a game like Call of Duty doesn't need a compelling story to be successful. Developer Naughty Dog, however, has made a number of games that are universally lauded for their storytelling (most significantly, the Uncharted series), so it is fitting that their The Last of Us should serve an ulterior purpose than Call of Duty.
The Last of Us takes place, obviously, in a post-apocalyptic setting, a setting that is almost defined by themes of societal collapse and the use of violence to claim power/dominance. Naughty Dog has claimed that they want their game to be less about the zombies and violence but rather the father/daughter bond that develops between the characters Joel and Ellie. From the gameplay trailer, we get an immediate sense of this relationship between the two from their back-and-forth banter; before we even get close to any on-screen violence, we get a feel of the kinship between them. When we do finally encounter an enemy gang, the video game violence takes over, but something is different about it. It didn't occur to me until well into the action scene, but there are small, subtle touches that separate it from other games. In particular, it's the realism of it.
Joel is armed only with a pistol and limited ammunition. He takes down one gang member silently by strangling him and then searches his body for bullets. In a lesser game, you'd already have a 50 bullet clip and start rampaging down the hallways shooting everything in your sight. But here, you need to be stealthy, strategic, and precise with how you attack your enemies and how you use the limited ammunition at your disposal. Later on, Joel takes a gang member hostage at gunpoint and confronts another enemy non-playable character (NPC). The NPC yells at you "you fucking drop him!" Joel takes aim, his meat shield thrashes about and screws up his first shot.
I'm going to stop right there to dissect what I believe is revolutionary for video gaming, specifically, the humanity of the NPCs. NPCs have long-served the function of being faceless targets for players to unload clips into, rarely do we ever consider their own thoughts or motivations. But here, we see one NPC showing empathy for another by demanding Joel let him go. Why does the NPC do this? What relationship do these two have that he would be compelled to try and save his friend here? Since Joel disposes of both of them within seconds, it's a question with far-reaching implications that will never be answered, but linger nonetheless. The fact that the vaguest of notions exist that these nameless, faceless computer characters have their own lives, backstories, relationships, loyalties, etc. is something that few have ever really considered in video gaming, which makes the violence you inflict on them (as the game's protagonist, no less) makes it all the more disturbing and unnerving.
Skip ahead a minute or two to that final smash cut you mention so much. Personally, I thought this was one of the most effective gut-punching moments in the entire gameplay trailer. It's one of the most brutal and shockingly graphic video gaming moments I can remember in the last several years, yet I find myself returning to this moment again and again because of how effective a moment it is, despite how disturbed I am by it (the same reason one returns to, say, the hotel shootout sequence from No Country for Old Men. It's an absolutely unnerving and intense scene, one that is not necessarily enjoyable by regular standards, but so enthralling and well-executed that we can't help but love this scene). Joel is pinned down by a rather large gang member and looks like he's down for the count when Ellie jumps on his back and stabs him in the shoulder. Her brief distraction has allowed Joel to grab his shotgun and butt his assailant in the face before taking aim at him.
It's this brief, less-than-a-second moment that completely sold me over. In a split second, the macho bravado of your assailant completely evaporates. He cowers beneath you, bleeding out of his nose and mouth, a hand blocking his face, barely able to utter a terrified "N-no, don't-!" before Joel splatters his brains and teeth across the floor. This is the moment that turned the entire demo on itself. I no longer felt like I was the "hero" of the story, but rather just another survivor, desperate to stay alive as he was, and took his life not because he deserved it, but because it had to happen one way or another (it's either him or me/Ellie). I have never seen a NPC avatar express such immediate desperation and terror at the prospect of death as him. I watch that scene and get the feeling that perhaps this enemy isn't a "bad guy" in the usual sense, just another survivor that happened to get in the way of Joel and Ellie's well-being, and ended up on the losing side this time. I'm left with the feeling that Joel and Ellie may have just taken the lives of half a dozen (or so) otherwise-innocent people all in the effort of self-preservation; in order to live, they must die, and that's the way it has to be. Video game violence, to me, has never felt more morally ambiguous than this. It's a life-or-death situation that doesn't leave you a lot of moral outs, but a life-or-death decision nonetheless.
And life-or-death situations are a staple of the post-apocalyptic genre, which is why violence is so prevalent in it (and lends itself nicely to the video game medium). We've had games that have treated this with tongue-in-cheek sensibilities (Left 4 Dead) and games that blow up these tropes to soap opera-levels of melodrama like the Resident Evil games, but very few that take this on with such realism as The Last of Us appears to. Then you have to consider all of this grisly violence in context of what Naughty Dog claims will be the most important aspect of the story: the relationship between Joel and Ellie. We have to now consider the necessarily lengths that Joel has to go to not only to keep himself safe, but also this young girl that's under his protection, and just the kinds of things that he'll have to expose her to and desensitize her to in order to survive in this world (recall the throwaway lines after Joel molotov cocktails an enemy: Ellie: "Holy shit, Joel!" Joel: "Keep it together...") If anything, the brutality of the violence shown in the trailer makes me even more interested in the relationship between Joel and Ellie, and how they'll stay latched to their humanity in the face of such a bleak reality.
The fact that Naughty Dog is producing this game is the reason I'm so confident that they'll expand on that, because they have my trust to tell a complex, multi-layered character study of these two characters thrust into an unreal situation. The Uncharted games are proof of this: a series of excellently-produced adventure games featuring a cast of unique, fully-developed and rendered characters and well-written stories and dialogue. However, whereas the Uncharted games felt more akin to the Indiana Jones series in its brash, sensational action set pieces and casual violence, The Last of Us felt very much unlike anything seen in Uncharted. The Last of Us relies more on evasion, stealth, effective use of limited resources, and, when the time comes, moments of brutal, merciless violence. To me, a game like this has the same appeal of a movie like No Country for Old Men or a book like The Road. It does not look like an enjoyable time in the usual sense, even in context of violent video games, because the violence in this game appears to have real weight, gravity, and meaning to it. Yet for all its bleakness and apparent amorality, I can trust Naughty Dog to give us characters that we can latch onto and project myself onto as a gamer, so I may experience the world of this game as the characters do (not to mention the extraordinary technical quality that goes into their games, providing some of the most realistic-looking animation and character interaction I've seen yet).
By the end of the trailer, I wasn't thinking "Fuck yeah, killing," so much as...well, I don't remember, because that last cut sort of left me speechless for more than one reason.
I really appreciate this thoughtful, well-written response, MrMindGame.
I plan to play and review "The Last of Us" when it comes out. I was definitely familiar with Naughty Dog's past work but nowhere near as impressed by the complexity and realism therein. That isn't to say that complexity and realism aren't present in "Uncharted" or TLoU; just that those qualities aren't the top prize from my perspective, in a media landscape that has gorged on the unfathomability and volatility of this world since 9/11. That's one reason why I pointed to "The Dark Knight" as an exemplar of the complex/real post-9/11 style. TDK tells us that its facing up to new realities and dangers when, at bottom, its really just the same old militaristic triumphalism with a rougher surface, in high-definition. I think our movies have hardened us far worse than 9/11, and, as I said in the article, it's more a matter of violent form than content. Games are naturally less violent in this sense than "Puss in Boots" or "Chipwrecked."
We'll talk. I won't go any further into abstraction here, lest Capital suspend me for weirdness.
My problem with your last piece and current one is your whole argument is based around a game not even out. To derive a whole argument from something you haven't even experienced doesn't exactly lend you credibility enough for me to keep reading (I did read your article if you are wondering.) And since the game isn't out you instead have to look over preview materiel, much of which has explained in detail that the "shotgun to the head" approach isn't a necessity, and that whole combat scenario can be avoided entirely. The survival mechanics in this game are promised to be more than "shoot guy, take his stuff". Naughty Dog has gone into detail that if you try to avoid that particular combat situation you will miss out on some good items to keep you alive later in the game because the looters will eventually pick them off. This creates a nice sense of urgency when deciding if you have enough supplies to avoid conflict, or will you be forced into a firefight to survive.
Sure I'm projecting a bit but that's all I can do considering the game isn't out. It feels as if you have purposefully left out quite a few details coming from the developer or just haven't done your due diligence in researching it. There is plenty of promotional material/interviews that go into detail about the expanded linearity of this title.
Also let's not forget this is a post apocalyptic game, bad things occurring throughout the game are inevitable. I didn't see anyone make a fuss over War of the World's when Tom Cruise's truck was stolen and the thief was then shortly shot thereafter following a mob trying to overtake the truck yet another time.
I do believe you are projecting your thoughts on film and I feel you are doing it lazily. If you pay attention to only hit blockbusters like Call of Duty then you are narrowing your perception of the craft. There are titles after titles that have zero killing that are doing amazing things in video games. To put them all in a single room and say "you aren't doing good enough" is disrespectful and I say again, lazy. Games like Machinarium, Braid, Psychonauts, Lone Survivor, and others are striving to be something more than a mindless killing game. My advice? Broaden your mind a bit, you have a case of the E3 Press Conferences and it shows. Gaming isn't in any creative danger just like film is. You can't take a single title (or a few) and sketch out a whole medium's movement. If that were the case I'd like to have a sit down with you and watch "Speed 2" so we can later cry about the fall of film as we know it.
I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill here, honestly.
Apologies for the numerous typos. It's 6 A.M. here and I have barely woken up.
I wrote a wee article on the topic myself...
http://bit.ly/QH10pw