Episodic gaming

Video games get a lot of flak from cribbing movies. The two producers that jump to mind quickest in this regard are Too Human's Denis Dyack and the brainchild of Metal Gear Solid Hideo Kojima. Both Dyack and Kojima have a great fondness for films, but often they fall too reliant on the grammar and structure of film.

Back in 2003 Dyack and his team over at Silicon Knights was asked to remake the classic Playstation title Metal Gear Solid for the Nintendo Gamecube. While the game featured many setbacks that made it the lesser of the two games, most notably the addition of a first person shooting perspective that reduced once challenging encounters into laughably easy sections, one of the chief complaints from story purists was the direction of the in-game cinematics.

While being technically limited, the development mind at Konami in the first Metal Gear Solid allowed for some interesting design choices in these cinematic scenes. However, many years later and an entire new console generation expanded the technological arsenal and resulted in overindulgence. Dyack and crew went wild with the cinemas, with the main protagonist jumping off of missiles and engaging in superhuman moves ripped from the movie The Matrix. Dyack may be a lover of film, but he has no sense of where to put his digital camera and lacks basic understanding of framing and editing. He is trying to emulate a medium and transfer it over into another medium to which his developmental track record is now questionable.

Kojima, on the other hand, knows his stuff. However, while a movie is roughly 2 hours in duration, a game is typically 10 to 12 hours. As a result, there is much more time to spend in cinematics. In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Kojima adopts a film style to his game, but because of this great time differential between 2 and 12 hours, the game's pacing drags and becomes wrought with embellishment and needless scope. What could and should have been the swan song to Solid Snake turned into a swan album, then a swan opera, and then the entire musical history of Mozart.

What I propose to these individuals and others who believe video games should become more like film is to instead adopt the style of television. Over the last week, I watched the entire series The Wire, which was 5 seasons consisting of about 12 1-hour episodes a season. While this is still much longer than a game, one season of a series could translate into a game. This would allow a much better pacing for a game as well as the ability for directors with lengthy tales to tell (Kojima). This shouldn't be confused with the idea of episodic gaming, which consists of games being released in small chunks of about 2 hours, resulting in a full game being broken into and distributed over months. Instead, allow the store to be compartmentalized within the game such that it feels complete and not rushed. As much as I dislike Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPG), they sometimes do this quite well, and in particular, despite its many flaws, Final Fantasy VIII.