posted 2007/10/21 at 21:33
Back a few weeks ago when Halo 3 was released, I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I came on a story on a television news broadcast that claimed that one of the reasons Halo 3's release was such a big moment for the gaming community was that the game had a "great plot." The sole reasoning for the so-called "gaming expert" gave for this claim was that Halo 3 featured two different races of creatures to blow up. In all seriousness, how could anyone make such a ludicrous claim? I could go on a long tirade here about how the Xbox was basically designed and marketed to young men who need both a huge brick of a gaming system and a lot of games features armoured men holding big guns to help them compensate for their lack of size in other areas, but I'm trying to be nice about the whole thing. (Before anyone asks about my own Xbox, I only got it for the DDR games that came out for it a few years ago and, the only game I've ever bought for it that wasn't a rhythm/music game was Chessmaster.) I'm not saying that first-person shooters don't have their place in the gaming world, and I have no problem believing that the Halo games are some of the best of that genre, but to say Halo 3 has one of the best plots in video game history is like saying Independence Day has one of the best plots in movie history.
I've been playing with this movie analogy in my mind for a while ever since this one incident, and I guess the best way I can explain it to non-video gamers is that all the "shooting games" are basically the video game's equivalent of "popcorn movies." Sure, you get to see a lot of stuff blow up in really cool ways, and they can be quite fun and certainly have their entertainment value. However, if all you play are shooting games, then video games move from a potentially enriching experience to, for lack of a better phrase, mindless entertainment. The tie between diehard fans of games like Halo 3 and diehard fans of movies like the Rambo series should be fairly obvious, I hope. The Metal Gear Solid series is the only real series of shooting games that I think tries to bridge the divide to be something more meaningful, but it's kind of obvious from playing them that the games' producer (Kojima Hideo) couldn't cut it with his stuff in Hollywood and is thus forcing it upon the video game world, plus the games get too caught up in their tiny little clever geegaws to create a really coherent experience.
I suppose I would have thoughts like this as I continue to replay the greatest video game ever, Final Fantasy VII, which I'm kind of famous for evangelizing at every opportunity I get. The temptation of the previous analogy is to call Final Fantasy VII an art house film, but I think analogizing it to the Godfather movies (at least the first two) is more accurate; Final Fantasy VII was both profound yet accessible, perhaps not the biggest box office smash of all time at the time of its release but a movie that has endured, and if anything gotten better, in the many years since its release. Games more apt for the art house film analogy would be those other games Square released during this timeframe that practically required taking extensive notes just to keep up with all the characters and plotlines and symbology and all of that, like Final Fantasy Tactics and Xenogears. No, I don't know how my dancey games would fit into the analogy, thanks for asking.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon