Today we will look at what games have done to enhance the power of their stories. We will then investigate what films can take from video game storytelling to improve in the future.

Game Storytelling

Over the past few decades, gaming has greatly expanded what it is capable of, both technologically and narratively. Take cutscenes for example. Often the default method of gaming story delivery, cutscenes are essentially movie clips rendered in the game’s engine. However, even this crude form of game storytelling has improved thanks to the more serious treatment of plots and characters. Games like the Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us series have placed great importance on creating well-developed primary and secondary characters to involve us in the story. As well as building plots that are emotionally and viscerally engaging.

Beyond writing better narratives and characters, using background environmental details to tell stories has proven hugely successful. Think of the Dark Souls series. Aside from a handful of cutscenes, these games’ stories are primarily told through background details that you can see and interact with. This allows players to investigate the story at their own pace. Making them feel instrumental in the storytelling process. It also gives the impression of a bigger world existing outside of the narrative.

Of course one of the best ways video games handle story is by linking it to the game’s mechanics. Think of Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line‘s stories. Which use game objectives and the gamification of war to make searing statements about the gaming industry and medium. Making the medium crucial rather than incidental to the narrative experience.

Films Meet Games

So, is there anything films can learn from video game storytelling? Some short films have already taken inspiration from gaming, using the Unreal Engine (Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line) to generate their visuals. Additionally, while some debate surrounds it, the use of VR to enhance an artistic experience is something both mediums are exploring. But what can a non-interactive medium take from interactive storytelling beyond CG and viewing peripherals?

Firstly, games prove that films shouldn’t fear using major and minor background elements to tell stories. Usually, films heavily emphasise background story elements to indicate their significance. But video games have shown people are willing to pore over every detail of a story’s world to be immersed. They just need the opportunity to do so. Something that’s very hard with constant cutting, dialogue and directorial decisions that foreground only “crucial” things at the expense of everything else.

Also, there is often debate surrounding movie length, however, games show if you are invested in the world because of good characters and worldbuilding, length won’t matter. David Lean’s epics are great filmic proof of this point.

Finally, films must centre the medium’s possibilities again. Games and TV shows are currently experiencing a golden age because high-profile creations are using each medium’s uniqueness to their advantage. Games have been experimenting with how to engage audiences in interactive stories. TV shows have pushed the possibilities of pictorial long-form bitesize storytelling. Meanwhile, with higher profile movies, examples that focus on the medium’s creative presentation of images and which are unique, complete experiences are shrinking. Many popular recent films are franchise properties that adhere to strict presentation parameters. Experimentation and completeness should be encouraged in all aspects of the film industry.

Conclusion 

We have seen a huge rise in the immersive storytelling possibilities of video games over the last few decades. As technology improves we will likely see more films utilising technology associated with games to create and deliver their stories. However, the biggest thing the film industry should learn from gaming’s story-driven success is that there is no substitute for engaging character-driven stories, detailed worlds that enliven the story and its universe and creative decisions that remind audiences of the medium’s importance.

Also Read: Five Video Games That Need To Be Made Into Films

Also Read: Adam Sipione Unravels the Inspiring Story of Shenmue In His New Documentary

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Spoiler Warning – everything that happens in the episode will be discussed.

Episode 3 – Long, Long Time

A very quick synopsis – the world has been overrun with zombie-like creatures – “clickers” causing the collapse of civilisation with a few territories maintaining a modicum of the modern world. The show’s main characters Joel and Ellie head out into the world and realise they need more supplies and Joel suggests heading to Bill, someone who lives outside the protected cities and could help. Most of the episode is then taken up explaining who Bill is.

Bill (played by the always brilliant Nick Offerman) was a survivalist before the apocalypse, meaning he had thought some manner of the disaster was coming and he had prepared for it. The area where he lives is protected by an electric fence and numerous traps. Not long into his new isolation, Bill finds a non-infected human caught in one of his traps, Frank (played by Murray Bartlett, best known as the hotel manager in season 1 of White Lotus). Bill is exceptionally cautious, helping Frank while keeping a gun trained on him, intending only to point him in the right direction. But Frank asks for help and reluctantly Bill grants it. Bill’s home is a paradise compared to most of America, with electricity, hot water, great food and plentiful wine. Frank explains that he will leave soon and thanks Bill for his hospitality. But that isn’t quite what happens. After a moment of piano playing the tension that has been evident comes entirely to the surface and the two have sex. Frank again explains that he will leave after a couple of days. He doesn’t. This is the start of a relationship that lasts years.

I expected The Last Of Us to be good, in fact, very good. I didn’t expect it to be this good. Already this episode is being hailed as one of the greatest episodes of television ever and while I think it wise to always wait a while before making such proclamations…I feel the same. One of the great strengths of The Last of Us game was that you cared about the characters and again, I had anticipated caring about Joel and Ellie, but by the third episode, I cared immensely about two other characters.

There are several jumps in time, showing Frank and Bill’s relationship. Whereas Bill could have quite happily stayed in his isolation, even if isolated with Frank, his partner wants more. He wants to work on the neighbourhood, make it better, make it look nicer, he cares about their home. To Bill, this is a needless waste of resources but he agrees.

The Dinner Party

Perhaps a slight exaggeration but Frank has invited guests, Joel and Tess, who he had been talking to on the radio. Unsurprisingly Bill has brought a gun to the dinner table. While Frank and Tess chat happily, Joel and Bill have a more serious conversation. Each of them sees themselves as the “protector” in their relationship, Joel points out about what they can do for each other, trade, for example.

Inevitably raiders find Bill’s house and try and take it but through a mixture of traps and Bill’s gun collection they are repulsed, not before Bill is injured and Frank takes care of him. Time jumps forward again and we have now entered heartbreak territory. Frank is now in a wheelchair and clearly very ill, there is much talk of tablets and medicine and how even before the apocalypse there wasn’t a cure for what he has. We see Bill taking care of Frank, helping his partner with whatever he needs, in a gentle and caring way. Then one morning Frank announces his intention to take his own life at the end of the day. After coming to terms with Frank’s decision the two spend the day together, get married and have a last dinner. At which point Frank takes an overdose of tablets with a glass of wine and then realises Bill has done the same, they go to their bed so they can go to sleep and die together.

This episode was one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking things I have ever seen.

Humanity

A lot of films, books, tv shows etc that feature the apocalypse often focus on the idea of characters retaining their humanity, in not simply abandoning morality and civilisation and doing whatever it takes to survive. With Bill there is a distinct difference, it seems like before the apocalypse he was isolated, he didn’t have anyone he cared for and he was alone. Bill’s relationship with Frank allows him to experience humanity – Bill was never some monster who attacked people but he was alone and didn’t see the need not to be. Not everyone is looking for a partner or companionship (apocalypse or not), they do not want it or need it, but Bill did want and need these things and it took “the end of the world” to find them.

Frank’s insistence on beautifying their neighbourhood, on having friends, on reaching out is about having humanity. The post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven has a travelling theatre troupe that has the motto “Survival Is Insufficient” – to be human is not simply about surviving. For Frank survival was insufficient. He wanted friends despite the obvious danger it put him in by inviting people to their house. Frank is not naïve about the dangers of making friends but he does it anyway, if he dies tries to reach out to people so they can all have a better life…so be it.

The skill and ambition of the people making this show is astounding, taking a minor part of the video game, and making it into a beautiful decades-long romance with the main characters of the show barely in it is risky but they have had spectacular success.

Also Read: The Impact: How Dozens of Filmmakers Around The World Crowd-Created A Film About The Apocalypse

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The idea that the migration crisis of the novel is part of the “apocalypse” comes later in the book, when certain cities, such as London or San Francisco, into which many have arrived through the aforementioned magic doors, have been ghettoised. There have been violent clashes between “natives” and newcomers, political policy has failed to control this new influx of people, and the boundaries and borders of countries appear “to be somewhat illusionary”, meaning people are left questioning “what role they to play” in this new order.

Hamid’s description of the apocalypse as terrifying but also not yet quite apocalyptic can be so easily lifted from the novel and applied to the state of 2021. After all, in the past few months, we’ve witnessed horrendous images of men on horseback forcing back Haitian refugees along the American border, the ocean caught fire and burned in a wild fury, and we’re still in a global pandemic that has, to date, killed an estimated 4,771,122 people worldwide. In the UK, we are being led by a government that only sees what it wants to see, that is happy to sit back and watch the country fall apart as their friends line their pockets with money from shady contracts which they will then squirrel away in tax havens. It doesn’t quite seem like the apocalypse we were expecting, and yet it feels like, perhaps, that isn’t too far away. 

Earlier this year, Barack and Michelle Obama acquired the rights to Exit West via their production company Higher Ground, which currently have an exclusive deal with Netflix. It is set to star (one of my biggest crushes) Riz Ahmed as Saeed, and Yann Demange will direct. It is one of many projects, both recently made or in-production, that deals with what might be the end times, in worlds that don’t seem too far from our own. To look back at the dystopias of the previous century is to look at beautiful utopias, years in the future, that turn out to be less than perfect. Now these worlds we seek out that appear so grim are merely a stone’s throw away from our current experiences. As Ed O’Loughlin worried in the Irish Times: “Our reality has overtaken, or will soon have caught up with, many of our best/worst fictional futures.” Why is it, then, that we are so obsessed with these worlds? Why does it appear as if they’re becoming more prevalent as our current times get worse? 

It’s true that genre films and television have often aimed to reflect the issues of their time. Horror, famously, is filled with metaphor while fantasy has often reflected our political systems or histories. Perhaps, in their allegorical nature, those who enjoyed these in the past (or even now) were able to do so as a form of escape, the messages washing over them without be too direct. Yet, it can’t be denied that, in our current times, interest in dystopias has risen, and studios are trying to meet that demand. Production on a television adaption of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven began before the majority of the world shut down due to Covid-19, and the finished product is due to air on HBO Max later this year. An adaption of the 2013 videogame The Last of Us, set in a post-apocalyptic future, is coming to HBO too. Over at Hulu, The Handmaid’s Tale has just aired its fourth season and is gearing up for a fifth. On top of that, the streamer recently premiered its post-apocalyptic series Y: The Last Man in which, all at once, all the men in the world bar one die mysteriously. Apple TV+ has just premiered Foundation, based on stories by Isaac Asimov, about a new empire, long in the future, that is not all it’s cracked up to be as it’s led by those who are driven by self-interest. As for the big screen, The Matrix is returning, as well as A Quiet Place for a third time. 

This craving speaks to what might be considered “anti-escapism”. In an article for NPR, Jason Heller wrote, “The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.” Is this true? That our obsession with the end of the world is more than mere schadenfreude linked with some defeatist mentality, but rather a form of affirmation? Proof that our world is not yet as bad as it is in these shows or movies – that it can be salvaged? For how long will that be the case, though? We seem to be living in the times that novelists and filmmakers of the past warned us about as, day-after-day, the likes of Atwood, Orwell, and Bradbury are proven right. 

Still, I can’t help but wonder if it is better this way. To look the future in the eye and, perhaps, inspire some sort of saviour. I keep thinking of Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film adaption of Ready Player One, in which the opposite is true and citizens of a ravaged world escape into a more exciting, virtual one as a means of coping. In the age of the internet, it might seem like that would be what we want, yet it doesn’t appear to be the case. We are not yet ready to give up on the physical world just yet, we’re not content with disappearing online, and perhaps that is what our appetite for dramas on the end of the world proves. In all the bleakness of the futures they present, we can see the one thing we need most: hope. 

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