Ideas for a Paper and Followup from Class

Alrighty – just some random followup from class today and some paper idea proposals.

I’m thinking about a few paper ideas here, but don’t really have anything super concrete yet… Initially, I’d like to do videogames…the most recent of which I’ve beaten are Soul Caliber IV, Peggle Nights, Psychonauts, Metal Gear Solid IV, and Grand Theft Auto IV.

Spore‘s narrative logic interests me in terms of its trademark Will Wright sandbox gameplay, but I’m not sure that type of narrative really applies to what we discuss in class. It’s not just games that tout infinite narrative options that will affect character and story (like Fable or Shinobi) that allow their users to create stories as they go. Any gameplay-based game without any significant plot (sports games, real-time strategies, massive-multiplayers games, or first-person shooters) afford their participants an opportunity to use their imagination and skill in order to create their own narratives, sometimes even cooperatively. These is just an extension of tabletop gaming. Also, I haven’t looked too far into Storytron, a communal, interactive storytelling program/website, but it looks pretty cool.

But I started thinking about focalization, slant, and filters in class today and what part of narratives are character-driven/subjective vs. the creator driven slants. Like The Sound and the Fury, in which the story of the failing Compson family is told three times over by three brothers; one who’s retarded, one suicidal , and one extremely cynical. Unreliable narrative techniques in film go back as far as Rashomon, an innovative Kurosawa film with unreliable narrators in which the audience acts as a sort of jury for a murder trial.

I’m trying to think about focalization in videogames and whether there exist games in which alignment and the idea of an unreliable narrator are important. In the stealth/espionage Metal Gear series (which span 50 years of political intrigue, combat, biology, and family opera), there are significant amounts of betrayals and twists, some of which come from intentionally deceitful narrators you’ve trusted for tens of hours of gameplay (Like Master Miller in MGS1 or Roy Campbell in MGS2). Were these betrayals portrayed in film, they’d simply be plot twists, but since they’re explicitly giving bad advice to the gamer for hours, I feel like the mechanism changes because if you fully immerse yourself in a game, you’re being expressly lied to, not watching a character getting lied to.

Final Fantasy Vii‘s main character and biggest twist (probably only in my opinion) is not Gamepro’s death of Aerith (and I disagree with most of their top 10, but try away from internet/blog lists as a general rule), but rather Cloud’s amnesia and inability to correctly remember the past…a serious game-changer 2/3’s through the game. The other thing that came to mind when I think Final Fantasy VII (which has remained my overall favorite game since I played it 12 years ago) is how the extended universe has been constantly expanded with cell phone games, a CG film, a few offshoot and follow-up games (of different genres on different consoles), and a short hand-drawn animated film. How the storyworld of media like FFVII and to a greater extent, something like Star Wars gets constantly added to in different mediums is pretty interesting.

The Cast of Final Fantasy VII, my favorite game.

Saying “favorite game” is also a complicated issue because the reasons for liking a game can be so diverse in terms of gameplay mechanics, story, replayability, multiplayer options, etc.

I also thought of the TV series My Super Sweet 16 (a show I have trouble turning off) as an example of filter and slant; with the filter being the spoiled teens’ skewed perceptions and expectations of the world and how they’re going to come across on TV, and the slant being MTV’s editing and extra writing, directing, etc. that makes shows like that not actually reality TV. The creator-driven slant seems really focused on making these teenagers a sideshow to be ridiculed, not admired or envied, but the teens don’t ever really seem to get this, seeing it as an opportunity to show everyone how privileged they are.

More organized/developed ideas to come as I scour my memory for games I’ve liked in the past.

also, does anyone need a partner for the remix project? I’m one of those guys that isn’t too experienced with video editing (especially final cut), but can rip and do other computer stuff pretty well.

Thoughts

I just read Brett’s blog and thought her idea for a research paper was quite good. I started writing this response on her page, but it got too long and I didn’t want to clutter it, but I’m pretty sure she’ll get an email because I just linked to her blog. The iconography, typography, and visual aesthetic of a film are all very important parts of a film’s poster and fame. Certain fonts are so iconic (Blade Runner, Spiderman, Back to the Future) you can just see a single letter to know what film they came from.

Here’s a game where you guess what film an individual letter comes from (I scored a 30). Anyways…

It would also be fun to analyzes changes in posters through the decades (from classical hollywood to summer blockbuster), or in different parts of the world (Japan, Russia, etc), or how posters get changed for different countries (differences in US posters vs international release). There’s significant variance in how products are depicted from country-to-country and videogames and films are no different. Check out the Japanese (Left) vs. American (Right) covers for Rachet and Clank or Kirby.

I am also a sucker for soviet posters and aesthetic.

Even more applicable to your post is the controversy and reason behind the Zack and Miri poster you presented. I’m not sure if you were aware of the reasoning behind such a simple poster, but the proposed original idea was banned for being too controversial:

and they were forced to compromise with this totally tongue-in-cheek striped-down version:

It speaks towards the dual-standard censors have concerning sex and violence.

Even less related is an article i read recently about team colors in group competitive games. A study that analyzed thousands of Unreal Tournament matches showed that the red team won 55% of all games, which is a significant margin over the blue team. Granted, this study doesn’t really prove any causation, but I assume this figure is because the color red is so often a signifier for stopping (stop signs, lights, warnings, etc.) that a milisecond of confusion on a blue players part is enough for the red player to get the jump on him.