Imagine an adult gaming icon that didn’t commit genocide. How brilliant would that be?
While listening to the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s critically acclaimed film Drive, it dawned on me that video games don’t have much in the way of cool. And when I say cool I don’t mean it in the Call of Duty dude-bro way, I mean in the effortless Steve McQueen way.
Films seldom achieve the kind of cool I’m talking about – that sense of wanting to be a particular character or live in a certain world – but Hollywood still achieves it with more regularity than the video game industry.
Why not then? It’s hardly an unwelcome concept. When it works for films like Drive and Reservoir Dogs, or TV shows like Mad Men, it’s a consequence of the whole production. Soundtrack, acting, direction, costume and production design all come together and should cool be a consequence of that then you have yourself an instant icon.
Video games, despite the leaps and bounds made already are still, as a medium, trying to nail story-telling. That is the first step towards the “complete” video game experience. It’s my belief that there is a game just out of sight on the horizon that will capture the attention of the masses and make video games the medium that they can be.
That game most likely won’t be the kind of cool I’m discussing but it will be the point where the creativity of game designers is fully unleashed. When consoles find their plateau and technology is no longer one of the driving forces of a production.
There’s always something relaxed about the very coolest pieces of entertainment, and in a world where the pressures of money and a very vocal audience are more apparent than ever, it’s hard for any designer to be composed and intelligent about their design, let alone a whole team.
This is not to say that these qualities don’t already exist in games, or in their creators, it’s just needed at a time when the industry as a whole finds itself more able to meet its ambitions.
A still from an animated tribute to Drive, but more on this later...
What I’ve said in the last few paragraphs is for large scale productions, but when you look at a film like Bullit or Pulp Fiction, you don’t see budget or blockbusting scale.
Bastion is a cool game made on a small budget, thanks in no small part to its unforgettable narration. It is cool in other ways though, design and gameplay mainly but it’s hard for such a combat heavy game to be effortless in its tone. If a game were to lose some of its combat and do less with its time then there’s an argument that it doesn’t become a game at all.
It’s this balance that games will continue to find difficult to strike. The Uncharted series often finds its tone undone by the abundance of action and insane body count, which only ends up being detrimental to the story trying to be told.
It affects performances from the actors too. For all the hard work Nolan North put into the motion capture for that game, it loses a little something when he goes rolling off the side of a half sunken ship for the eighth time in a row.
Linearity and sparse gameplay could be the key to any kind of suave cool in games, or for that matter games as art as I recently read. Look at Shadow of the Colossus or Ico. Gameplay is thin on the ground but both are unquestionably great. Flower too mixes minimal gameplay with an engrossing world that makes you want to keep playing.
This post wouldn’t be complete without me at least attempting to pitch an idea for what this cool game could be. Well here it goes. Imagine an Ouendan style game with a style similar to this….
In which you play along, making motions or pressing buttons to complete actions, to a song like this.
Of course it’s easy to link those as they’re from or inspired by the same film, but it would make for a cool game if other combinations of music and visuals were seamlessly mixed with that kind of play.
Well, I’d want to play it at least.
You raise an interesting point and it’s something I’ve thunk upon a lot recently. Perhaps I don’t consider ‘cool’ to be the crux of the point at hand but I certainly feel that a game feels a lot better when it is completely comfortable in itself, as you allude to when mentioning the fact most games are caught up in a money and power race and so are too busy to look inward.
What games do I mean? I mean the Metal Gears, No More Heroes, Shadow of the Collosus, old school Resident Evils. These are all games with a clear directors ‘stamp’ on them, designed to a concept instead of a market research document. They are games with heart, and with soul. Games completely happy to be what they are. Games that know what they want to be.
And as you say, excessive bloodshed and the pure act of gameplay itself is often the biggest hurdle for a game to overcome, but there are games that have. Games like Bayonetta make the simple act of fighting a flamboyant spectacle, while the likes of Zelda focus on puzzles before anything else. Unfortunately, people like pointing a gun at murderising hundreds of people a little too much.
Anyway, nice post.