I may be one of the only writers who ever worked on a "live-action" CD-Rom game. Yeah...way back in the day. I wrote scenes for the CD-Rom upgrade game of "Sim-City" which had live actors playing the first person and secondary characters. It turned out not to work so well. For years I wondered why computer gaming necessarily had to go away from live-action, away from movies themselves. Certainly, there was plenty of talent to go around. Big studios bent over backwards to forge relationships with gaming companies, to license their intellectual properties to gaming companies, and even to merge with gaming companies. So, why didn't it follow that movies merged with games?
The assumption that somehow there will be games on the big screen is flawed for a very good reason it turns out, and it is so very simple. In games, we are rewarded for making good choices. We get to new levels of challenge and opportunity by making good choices. Bad choices lead to one conclusion: Game Over. In drama, comedy or tragedy, action or romance, the audience is rewarded with entertaining moments because the hero makes the wrong choice over and over and over again. Only when the hero makes the right choice, which is even sometimes really a wrong choice in the right moment, do we experience "the end," and have that elusive experience we go to the movies for: catharsis.
Nearly twenty years ago I went to an experimental game environment film with high hopes. The audience chairs were outfitted with clickers to choose the actions and outcome of the movie en mass. Oh boy, was that ever boring! The majority of the audience was so smart they always made the "right" choices which led to the reward of getting to the next bit of story. I learned nothing from the experience except that film and games were a bad marriage.
You see games and films are diametrically opposed. In film the tension created by the hero making one stupid mistake after another is what makes a film exciting and moving. We identify with the hero making mistakes. We identify with him or her landing in pile of proportionate doo-doo and scrambling for redemption, because that is what life is all about.
This is the reason studios will never reach their dream of a first person shooter game-like experience on the big screen, because gamers expect to be rewarded for the right decision, and that is boring for everyone to watch. When a hero makes all the right choices a drama ends up being flat, lacking conflict and fails to hook us into emotionally identifying with that hero. Villains in that scenario are completely over-blown and have no nuance of empathy or even superiority. We know that the hero will overcome infinite scenarios with them because they can be so one-dimensional at each level, and because it is set up that he or she can figure them out somehow. While that's fun for the person figuring it out we know it is possible, probable even that it will be figured out, and how many of you have enjoyed an afternoon of watching someone else play? In a movie we don't really know that the character we love is going to finally figure out what we've known all along, and that is where the poignant beauty comes into any film.
Does this mean that there is not a hope in the world of bringing interactivity into the cinema? Hardly. Yet it must be done with the knowledge that screenwriters really do know what they're doing. Grin. I can hardly wait.
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