Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#25]

In 2025, we mark 67 years since “Tennis for Two” was introduced to the public. While the progress is arguably a lot more profound, to put that into perspective with the previous reigning art medium, we would be in 1955. James Dean rebelled without a cause, Cary Grant fancied catching a thief and a Lady and the Tramp shared some spaghetti. Television was becoming a thing, as was the rise of colour film and the dominance of the studio system. And yet, we still had a lot to learn, the French new wave was around the corner, uprooting and altering the way films were edited, rear projection although long since invented, would take 18 more years before Kubrick made a believable looking film in space, and there is a stark difference in how music was used at the time if at all, compared to now.

But we also knew a lot by then. The 180 degree rule for example. Fade outs/ins representing a longer time passing than quick cuts, to the point that you may not have been aware of this until I told you, but you understood it. It helped, naturally, that the way a film today is made is much closer to the 1888s arrival of the train into the train station, than making even a simple game is to making Tennis for Two. Being such a dynamic, visual medium, and building from the shoulders of the film industry, games have always used movies as a crutch, with directors opting for cutscenes or full motion cinematics, instead of the primary distinctive feature of games: interactivity.

There are two levels to this. One is the more straight forward sin which we discussed last week in regards to Astroneer. While it’s much easier to forgive a solo developer committing such a sin, it is a problem that remains in much larger productions. Most notably perhaps, coming from Nintendo. Legend of Zelda, Metroid and Pokémon all feature unskippable cut scenes. That is referring primarily to The Ocarina of Time, The other M and Sun&Moon, as I’ve not played the most recent entries in the series. The other slightly lesser sin is making the video skippable, but having it feature a detail important to the game, without it being somehow recorded and available to the player afterward.

Quick time events were a trend that started in the early 2000s. Video games were being touted as ‘cinematic’ left and right. To this day I maintain that Square Enix would rather you watch their 60 hour movie rather than play it. Unrelated, Metal Gear Solid IV has an epilogue lasting 71 minutes for one. But what happens during development is, then someone usually steps in and demands some gameplay happens. Thus, beautifully animated Simon Says bits were invented, that snatch you out of the gameplay seat like an unbuckled midnight head-on collision with a drunk driver. In them, characters are displayed doing all sorts of cool things while you sometimes have to press a specific button in order for them to keep doing said cool things. Instead of building the game around the cool things the player can do viscerally through the controller.

We are now in the problems stemming from the 2010s. Perhaps one of the most famous culprits is (at this point Activision-)Blizzard, with the long awaited Diablo 3 (on PC). Under the guise of copy protection, a problem we’ll discuss another time, your very exclusively single-player game of “Diablo 3”, requires you to be constantly online. This is of course mostly just in case Blizzard might decide to want to sell you something. Getting your game online, making it a multiplayer experience, is a road that should not be taken lightly. Resources are always limited, and should be wisely distributed. This is a problem EA met head on with the awkwardly titled “Sim City” (obviously not the 1989 one, the 2013 one). They complicated matters with multiplayer, instead of focusing on furthering the game mechanics. This resulted in being steam rolled by Cities: Skylines, by a much smaller, Finish developer with 2 previous titles to their name in 2015.

Ludo Narrative dissonance happens when your writing team doesn’t speak to your developer team, and a game director thinks their genius has been blessed by the likes of Kojima himself. In the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, playing as Lara, there is a situation in which you will have amassed enough weapons and ammunition to overthrow a small government. As the slender, agile, Ms Croft, you will have already demonstrated the ability to overpower and extinguish the lives of elite soldiers, at least twice your size, who are wearing body armour, with nothing but the knife that seems magically attached to you at all times. So when a cutscene triggers where you’re ambushed by a group of nearly anorexic tribesmen, displayed to have found yourself unarmed, and forced to subdue, through no fault of the player’s actions, is ‘a little’ unnerving.

Launcher Hijacking