What makes a video game cinematic? The answer is changing

For 20 years, the words “cinematic” and “blockbuster” have been synonymous for most game directors. God of War and HelloWe've enjoyed (or, for others, put up with) big-budget video game makers attempting to mimic big-budget movies.

Even if you've never seen a Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann film, you've likely experienced them through Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto, and pretty much every big game released this millennium.

but Indicaa game that sounds like a marijuana variety and feels like getting high and scrolling through the Criterion Channel, hopefully brings us closer to a tipping point in what it means for a game to be “cinematic,” with narrative video games.

What is driving this hope? Indicacreative parallels with low-budget indie horror films of the '90s;

The Blair Witch Effect

Can one game change the look of an entire medium, and why? IndicaA game that most of our readers have never played or even heard of?

25 years ago, The Blair Witch Project This film has inspired countless parodies because of one shot: you know it. You can see it in the trailer, on the poster, or at the top of this article: the lead actress and cameraman holds a cheap video camera inches from her face. Her eyes are full of tears, the flashlight casting harsh shadows on her parched skin.

She's scared. She's confused. She's barely in focus, not even in the frame.

At the time, few commercial directors were shooting anything so crudely, and celebrities had never given audiences such an intimate look into the inside of their noses. Moviegoers expected movies to conform to a certain look, sound, and feel. The Blair Witch Project It looked nothing like what I'd seen in the theater. It looked like one of those cheesy documentaries on your local PBS station. It looked real.

Photo: Hakusan Films

This amateur camerawork, which prioritizes “realism” above all else, achieved its goal of scaring people better than any expensive shot captured on an industrial-level camera.

The filmmakers have used the empathetic visual language of the documentary format. Look at that shot again. It's not an actress who is staring into the camcorder, it's a human being. And just like when you look into someone's eyes, a connection is made. You think this person could be you. Alone. In the woods. Something unknown creeping through the branches.

Camerawork The Blair Witch Project It wasn't cinematic in the classical sense. But over time, audiences' expectations of film and television changed to match that image. Would the vast found-footage horror genre have existed without it? office and Modern Family?

Creators The Blair Witch Projectlooking to inspiration where others didn't have to or choose to, because of their constraints (No money! No sets! No actors!) The success of this film gave subsequent creators big and small permission to follow suit, forever changing the look and feel of Hollywood movies.

Indica and Film School Games

IndicaOdd Meter's fantastic new adventure game is set in a fictionalized historical setting in 19th century Russia, telling the story of a young nun who loses her grip on reality. Tormented by the voices she hears in her head (which may or may not be demons), Indika partners up with an invalid who may or may not be God's chosen one. Together, the two embark on a perilous journey through beautiful forests, abandoned towns, and the literal meaning of biblical allegories.

Indica This is one of the latest and most impressive examples of a major shift in the cinematic look and feel of gaming.

No need to play Indica You'll have to watch this video to see what I mean (but you really should): In the announcement trailer, the game's creators borrow heavily from lesser known filmmakers: unable to afford the spectacular scale of big-budget film productions, these directors rely on bolder (and more affordable) techniques to make their work stand out.

“We tried to use a standard limited set [virtual camera] A lens for illustrating the limitations of cheap auteur cinema.” Indica “We're excited to be working with the team at NVIDIA,” game director Dmitry Svetlov told Polygon in an email. Poor thing He drew inspiration from film director Yorgos Lanthimos, Russian filmmaker and slow cinema pioneer Andrei Tarkovsky, and former Monty Python member and notorious eccentric filmmaker Terry Gilliam.

Image: Searchlight Pictures

in IndicaThe game's bleak exteriors and cold architecture are reminiscent of Lanthimos's striking but sterile sets. In the game's monastery, Snorri-Cam shots, in which cameras are strapped to actors and pointed at their faces, Blair WitchOf course, there are also the comedy sketch series by Spike Jonze and Robert Webb, who went from being a music video director in the 90s to being a film director in the 2000s. Sir Digby Kincaisar.

where Blair Witch Borrowing from the aesthetic of documentary to make audiences sit up and pay attention, Svetlou and company reach into the toolbox of low-budget filmmaking to do the same with Game.

Or, to put it bluntly, Indica Not only does it look like an art film, it feels like one too. The story begins with the player donning the garb of the young nun of the title and fetching a bucket of water from a well – then doing it over and over again. Her stalking up and down the convent's dirty, snowy slopes recalls Tarkovsky's deliberately boring long shots (such as the one in which a man carries a candle for seven minutes) and gives a sense of the passing of time not just in movies and games, but in the life we ​​experience.

To make the game more cinematic, Svetlou wrote, the team would need to “place greater emphasis on dramaturgy, the quality and depth of characters, and the necessary level of presentation of events.”

in IndicaYou don't save the world or score cool headshots; you collect hidden collectibles to gain points, but they're worthless and a waste of time by other games' standards; the game's loading screens sometimes emphasize this (“Don't waste your time collecting points, it's pointless.”). Indica sometimes comes across a bench, and if you get her to sit on it, the game will hand over a “cinematic edit” to you, allowing you to switch camera angles; some camera angles don't feature Indica at all.

You can move on, telling Indica to get up and get on with it. Or you can give the camera a break and let your mind wander while you peer out at fields of mud and snow. In a medium filled with realistic 3D worlds brimming with athleticism, Indica It encourages you to enjoy a moment of peace and surrender of control.

Change happens slowly and then suddenly

We like certain games Indica Will it impact your larger budget peers? It already is.

Just one example: In 2009, Naughty Dog Uncharted 2is a game packed with some of the most iconic blockbuster scenes in video game history. The opening scene, in which the protagonist climbs a train dangling from a cliff, features Tom Cruise in a very, … very resemble.

but, Uncharted 2 is a sequence that stands in contrast to these set pieces. About halfway through, Nathan Drake hikes through a Tibetan village. He doesn't scale dangerous cliffs. There are no explosions. No one gets shot. This was a rare moment for the time: a moment where the player can exist in a beautiful 3D environment without having to destroy the village or its inhabitants.

The Tibetan village scene (which I'm sure was publicly acknowledged, but I'm having trouble finding the citation now) was from 2008. Cemeteryis a short art game created by the now-defunct microstudio Tale of Tales. In it, an elderly woman walks down a path in a cemetery, sits on a bench, thinks, and then heads back the way she came. To younger readers, this may have sounded boring. But to game critics at the time, this scene stuck with us like a new drug, shocking us all through the body.

Image: Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment America

and Cemetery and Uncharted 2 And like many other games of that era (mostly indie), the video game industry witnessed a proliferation of games that were dubbed “walking simulators” – a somewhat pejorative term for the powerful idea of ​​creating a beautiful, rich virtual space and giving players time to spend within it.

if Cemetery If you can reimagine a video game premise like a movie, why not? Indica Low-budget and art-house film style IndicaDo you have many friends?

That's the magic of this moment in video games. Indica It's not alone in its ambition to challenge our assumptions about what makes a game cinematic: indie developers have been pushing the boundaries of what games can look and feel like for over a decade. To the Moon. El Paso, etc.. Disco ElysiumThe title alone can double your word count.

But what has changed now, and what is Indica What's reflected is the independent games scene accelerating creative output exponentially like a hockey stick.

Image: Odd Meter/11 Bit Studios

Very similar The Blair Witch Project (and the countless indie films since its release) were made possible by the initial boom in consumer cameras and filmmaking tools. Indica and games like it reflect a new era of game production, where small teams can take on personal projects thanks to cost-effective and ultra-powerful development tools. Indeed, modern game engines allow indie game developers to achieve visual feats that indie filmmakers could only imagine.

“We've recreated a fairy-tale world that doesn't exist, which would have been prohibitively expensive to do on film,” Svetlou told Polygon.

After it ends IndicaI played three more weird “cinematic” games. Arctic Egg, 1000x Resistand Crow Country — And it feels like every week a new game comes out whose creators are doing something to subvert our expectations of what games should look and feel like. Every once in a while, the medium connects and opens up, resulting in a whole new style that artists pounce on like a child grabbing candy from a shattered piñata.

perhaps Indicawill in time prove to be one of these special games. Blair Witch In the field of video games, thousands of projects based on art-house aesthetics are being launched. Or maybe this creative abundance will not be about daring releases and inspired aesthetics, but will fundamentally change the concept of what makes a game “cinematic”, and we will no longer care so much about whether a game looks like a movie, but rather that these interactive narrative experiences that we have previously compared to great movies will have their own unique look that is recognizable and thrilling.

Hopefully I can get there. In the meantime, I'm grateful to play a game with an ambitious and inventive director to match. Free Guy.