Cinematic Games Are Dead! Long Live Cinematic Games!

[Music] okay when you say pretty quickly what do you mean okay okay okay okay okay uh hello everybody thank you for coming out my name is Matthew Weiss and I'm gonna go very quickly okay so I'm here to talk about cinematic games my talk is what you can see the title so I think traditionally cinematic games so in a historical sense cinematic games tend to mean games that adopt the language of cinema so you know dramatic camera angles cutting etc but I'm going to talk about how the term can mean so much more than that and how some of our confusion about what cinematic means in games sometimes trips us up from doing really interesting kind of cinematic adaptations so I'm gonna start with a little history as you can see these are two games from the early 80s from two films from the early 80s you can see et on the right there and try on the left and as you can see both of those images

actually refer to the exact same thing happening in the scene and I wanted to show these because I wanted to point out the what I'm calling the representation gap or the gap the visual gap between film and games which I think in the early 80s was beginning to really show itself and this is kind of the beginning of the obsession with trying to close this gap as you can see here just look at the image on the right of eet it's it's literally the exact same image but so anyway but and I think that you know games industry began to become interested in closing this gap for for better or for worse but there were really some interesting attempts to do so the image on the right is from a video game image on the left is from a film but they look exactly the same because they're from the same animation studio image on the right or excuse me a minute on the left is from the secret of NIMH the right is dragon's lair and these games came out at the same or this

game Dragon's Lair came out at the same time actually as the games we saw in the previous slide in the early 80s so you could be at an arcade and you could see that Tron light-cycle thing and then walk to the left and say oh my god what is going on in this game that looks exactly like a movie and of course this game at the time just stood with these like laser discs that were cutting between clips inside an arcade cabinet but it was it showed you just how powerful people wanted this idea of like they wanted something that looks like a movie but actually is interactive and I think that in the 90s there was this you kind of saw this tension get worked out because in the 90s the laserdisc technology had become CD technology that was now cheap and then of course there were all these those of us who are around remember it like a dark time the full motion video problem that video games had and and you know when you had all these cheap actors and bad writing and you know there are a few good ones to be fair not very many and over the course of the 90s I think that we went from this kind of pre-rendered pre shot

attempts at having narrative cinematic kind of dramatic angles and and and cutting and acting in games we went from that slowly as kind of real-time 3d came in to the stage to finding the techniques that of that that worked with real-time 3d of course you can see alone in the dark Resident Evil which we're taking these dramatic camera angles and we're using cutting actually as part of the real-time gameplay then of course you have games like Metal Gear Solid 1 which at the time it was a big deal because it was all there was a no pre-rendered cutscenes in it but it had a lot of cinematic cutscenes it also used some cinematic camera angles in some of the gameplay then of course and it's funny that we don't think of games like Deus Ex or other kinds of like highly immersive Sims this way but it used traditional kind of like film school 101 shot reverse shot stuff for the conversations and of course I think we still see this stuff today and I think that the dream of the interactive movie is still with us I think we're a bit smarter about using a lot of these conventions but I still think when you

say like oh that games so cinematic or this is cinematic that you run into this this the kind of the same set of ideas that kind of go back to dragon's lair that we're kind of better at implementing now but it can be much more than that so this this game I worked on I worked at Harmonix as a music designer I worked I was to my knowledge I was the one person who was there were many narrative designers on this project but I was the one person who was hired exclusively to do Nerra on the project and one of the things one of my Jobs was to try to figure out how to make how to make the lot of the different elements that were being kicked around at the time come together so you know why is this interesting to talk about as a as a cinematic game because it was actually presented one of the conceptual notions for the game is that it was actually being made instead of a third film there was the first Fantasia in 1940 the second Fantasia in 2000 and then it was kind of like okay we're gonna do this game instead of the third film it's like we're gonna make a game of Return of the Jedi instead of actually released a movie so that was kind of the idea so it was interesting

because we had to think about it as a film in some way is kind of following this legacy but of course it was also kind of coming off the back of Dance Central and the other games that Harmonix had been making it was a Kinect game so it was very Heather's very like deliberate staging where you had to always be able to see the screen and it was hard not that we would want to but even if you wanted to we've been really hard to do something you know there was more like heavy rain of course because of okay I think I can skip this because I was just explaining that so one of the things that one of the things that you know we tried to do to draw it all together was to try to find the metaphorical through line between what is going on in the story of this original film which is a kind of a concert film with all these vignettes that has a concert it has a conductor kind of putting all this stuff together and of course people who know the film know that there's The Sorcerer's Apprentice been yet in the middle of it but one of the things that that was kind of clear about it is that it was funny if you actually watch the film even though this is kind of never explicitly

stated the film has a whole lot of people pointing at things and making things happen without touching them so there's a whole lot of like Mickey kind of pointing at stuff and even you know the the the the devil or as technically he's a Slovak God but when I was a kid I was like oh it's Satan but so it's you know so there's quite quite a lot of this kind of like pointing at stuff and making things happen you know and this is very much kind of the fantasy of magic and so we tried to bring this all together under this sort of central idea of it being kind of like the idea that in the 1940 Fantasia kind of already was a Kinect game in a way a Kinect game there was kind of waiting almost a century to kind of be made so one of them and so this is where the cinematic aspect if it comes in so it's not using cinematic camera angles it's not using these kind of traditional elements that we expect from games like you know the Walking Dead or heavy rain but you know for us there to some extent narrative design was an interface design right so it was not about looking at it was not about just copying cinematic language it was about looking for visual

elements in the film and not just copying the image but trying to figure out what the image meant and how that meaning could be transferred to a game by using the language of games and of course if you see on the those images on the upper left there's the conductor in the original film and another image on the left of these kind of like instruments from the original film and on the right this is like a UI kind of screen in the in the actual game where you actually see your silhouette embodied as this people who know Kinect know that that's the animation data that the game is getting from you so that was kind of a very clear take from the film and it wasn't about copying the visual language but it was about but you can look at it and you can see there's a very clear reference to a 1940 film so I don't I can't think of a lot of other games that use a 1940 film as the kind of a reference for their UX you know so this also came into this was also kind of like a general idea that kind of permeated every aspect of the game and kind of like ended up building it ended up making the story we ended up finding

a story that was kind of trying to find the intersection of all these things across all these different narrative axes so it became a story about you know the music and magic being all being kind of represented as this ability to control things without touching them and of course because it's a music game being able to control them through music and you can see this in the film you can see the film is like a blueprint not just for how the game looks but for how the game functions in a really deep way so another game I worked on last year was how many people saw this movie transcendence most nobody it was it was a it was a movie starring Johnny Depp where he gets his brain downloaded into a computer and Johnny Depp becomes showdown and that's the movie and so it's it was a we were so I was working at a we were a small team that was hired basically - with very little money they were like can you make the walking dead in two months we're like - no so so they're like well we want characters in dialogue and dramatic things happening we're like well if there's um literally

no animation and maybe we can do that so so we ended up with one of the inspirations actually is this um how many people know this film legit a so this is this movie is the original it if you're familiar with 12 monkeys but this is a film that 12 monkeys is based on but it's a movie with it's a movie without motion it's a story without motion there's no animation there's no it's just sound in still images and this movie always made a big impact on me and some of the other people making this game and one of the things that we noticed in the film is that when brain data is downloaded it appears in the world of the film as still images so we thought okay well this is a mobile game so you know if we're looking for something that you know can have characters but can't have animation and we can have sound and we can and UI art is cheap to make but you know how can we build this all together into a central idea so we thought that you know a game we were kind of moving these kind of

clips snippets of somebody's life that kind of manifest as kind of these still images we could make that into something that was like a kind of Instagram app or something that was like a kind of a phone app phone picture app that you could put a story together that way also stories without motion one of the cool things about this is that you know we got to go to LA and actually shoot all these we had actors we had sets we had lighting in all this stuff we didn't have motion camera we just had a still camera and this was interesting because this actually wasn't narrative design this was gameplay this was essentially like I was directing shots but it was puzzle design because I had to derive to choose a shot I had to choose series of shots that would make sense to be cut together and in this case the cutting together was not just about creating the story but also about creating like you know the design of how like well if it's the same object and all these shots maybe that's the clue for the player so there was a lot of puzzle design and we couldn't go back for reshoot so basically we just had to shoot everything we could possibly think of to figure out how to put puzzles together and then just use what we had but it seemed to work out

pretty well and then the final groups the final game was this game where you can move these uh these these little icons around that represent the memories and you can kind of zoom in on them to look at them and then when you're done with them you kind of put them together out of order and then you have to try to figure out what's going on and it's very much using the gaps of the narrative as a way to try to get the player emotionally and intellectually engaged and what's going on of course because they really wanted talking in the game and moral choices we were like okay well we can't do the Walking Dead with talking moral choices with this shot reverse shot 3d characters but hey what if the game just all takes place on tablet and you're a graduate student who's using a tablet and one app on the tablet is the memory shuffling and the other app is actually a chat window with Kate Amara on it talking to you about stuff so that's what we did and so you know the thing I thing I want to emphasize here is that obviously you know in in some even in some of the examples I think especially in the second one in the transcendence one there was some use of like

traditional cinematic language but the point is that you know you don't have to reproduce the language in this in a particular in exactly as it is in the film right it's not about just like looking like a film obviously it's about choosing the aspect of a film I don't want to say that already fits in with the existing contours of game design because I think we should also use cinema as a way to kind of push us in new directions it's not just about what are the blank spots we have and oh we can drop this in there right I mean that that sometimes works but I think that you know we would have never come up with the idea of using logit a as an inspiration for a game if we you know if some of these other constraints hadn't been hadn't been apparent so you know I think in our particular cases in the potato in the case of these particular particular games there was kind of narrative as interface design and narrative is editing as as a kind of approach to what it means to make something cinematic or or you know at least inspired by a film and I just want to end with by saying really quick that

you know obviously I'm not against using the idea using kind of what we traditionally think of more as cinematic language in a game I mean I think that some games use a very well liked the running animation when you're running it and Gears of War is basically just ripped right out of Saving Private Ryan but it really makes a lot of sense I think in that game and of course there's other games where you have these kind of micro cutscenes that actually don't take you away from the game at all and I think that's fine I mean I think that one of the problems can happen when we get like really obsessed with this and it's kind of like you know the kind of you know the holy grail of this kind of obsession that kind of goes back to the original like ET and Tron game can get in the way of you know usability and the player being kind of in the world of course any of you familiar with heavy rain and I think there's a lot of really good stuff and heavy rain but the scene where you're kind of in the it feels like this scene where you're kind of in this tunnel really it feels like you're the challenge is not trying to get through the tunnel to try it challenge is trying to get through the tunnel with a cameraman that is constantly trying to you know show pictures of you and I just

want to end with this quote that I really like from this film this is a from from a audio commentary that comes with the film so this this is a shot the shot on the on the right is from Pleasantville which is a film about these people who get sucked into kind of magically sucked into a 1950s TV show and one of the things that the director says in the commentary is that he defends the kind of fact that beyond being black and white the film doesn't look at all like a sitcom doesn't look at all like a 56 calm you can see from the lighting here it's like dramatic it has all it has this kind of like dramatic camera angles and lighting they are not anything like a sitcom and he says in the commentary track that we're not in a sitcom we're in the world of a sitcom we're using the language of cinema to describe what it feels like to be in the world of a sitcom and I can't think of a better way to describe for me what it means to make a cinematic gamer to make a game that is inspired by cinema in some way for me it's not about the you know it's not about being in a

movie it's about being in the world of a movie and using and not necessarily using cinematic language but using the language of games the language of interface the language of action to recreate what it feels like to be inside that cinematic world and this is just one really final example is is a really good example it's not cinematic at all just the fact in Metal Gear Solid Ground zeroes that you can choose to play right of the Valkyries in your helicopter allows you to replicate the scene from Apocalypse Now but it has nothing to do with cutscenes has nothing to do with anything it's simply a choice of using a particular music track in conjunction with a set of mechanics and I really I think as hopefully as we move forward we can again if we use cinematics angles when we we feel like it's really necessary it fits that's fine but I think that we should really not be trapped by that and we should really find these kind of interesting organic and new ways to really have this more fruitful relationship between games and

cinema where they really help each other and take us into all these new directions thank you you