There’s a good chance you’ve heard:
“Grand Theft Auto V,” the latest installment of the storied video game franchise,
took in over $1
billion in its first week. That’s more than any movie released this year,
with the exception of “Iron Man 3” (which happens to be the fifth
highest-grossing movie of all time). At this rate, “GTA V” could be a
nontrivial contributor to the U.S. gross domestic product. It’s a cultural
event. Even Apple Inc. should be impressed.
It’s not a stretch to think that the people
who didn’t go to the movies this summer might have said, ‘you know what, I’m
skipping a few and using the cash for a different kind of blockbuster.’
In that case, the most interesting
number to keep in mind may be 100 -- the approximate number of hours of
gameplay that “GTA V” reportedly offers. For those diligent and conscientious
enough to explore all the side quests, excursions and games-within-the-game, it
provides weeks of entertainment.
That makes the $60 retail price a
bargain: 100 hours of gameplay at $0.60 an hour. Compare that with the price of
admission to a movie, even a two-and-a-half hour megaproduction. The other
advantage for video games -- driving the usage cost down even further -- is
that buyers get to keep the game.
So, could the multiple box-officedisappointments last summer reflect the beginning of a shift that goes well beyond
blockbuster fatigue?
Merging Forms
There’s little reason to think that
movies and video games couldn’t continue to co-exist. But if audiences are
becoming overly familiar with Hollywood’s version of the
three-act-structure and if games continue to grow as a form of narrative
entertainment, it’s tantalizing to think that the next few years or decades
might bring some more serious attempts at experimentation and
cross-pollination.
It’s already been tried. Most of
the results, however, have been marketing masquerading as “interactive
storytelling.” Despite efforts in both industries to find some creative
alchemy, most attempts, though admirable for the effort, fall short of true
invention. Movies made from games, games made from movies, movies and games
released simultaneously with added content end up being less than the sum of
their parts, more like two conventional forms of entertainment smushed together and repackaged
as a new product.
Movies and video games both take place
in a larger, common universe of possible narratives. But are they
fundamentally incompatible? Could anything interesting ever emerge from
recombining the DNA of the two?
That’s where a game such as “GTA V”
breaks through. It’s tempting to think of it as an open-ended movie: it’s
written and directed by storytellers skilled in the
cinematic form and produced by an expert group of visual designers. In that
sense it feels like a big movie production. As the scale and complexity of
these games increase -- and as our ability to simulate and render nuance and emotion
and ambiguity increases - - these games are starting to verge on something
entirely new. Whatever one might feel about the storyline of “Grand Theft Auto
V,” it is hard to deny that it is pushing the boundary of the form.
Open world games have come a long way
in a short time, but as impressive as they are, they’re still operated on rails
-- theme-park rides rather than free-driving cars. “GTA V” points the way to
games with a narrated openness in which players wouldn’t be presented with
options so much as they would have tools to model their experience. Giving
players the ability to create their own stories within the connected world of a
larger story creates a natural, social evolution within the system. In this
sense, “Grand Theft Auto V” and “Minecraft” show us what may be
coming when the mediums we have now are reimagined as virtual worlds that can
grow and evolve over time.
Next Generation
If anyone is going to invent a new form
of entertainment from this model, she’s probably 15 years old right now,
unbound by the conventions and assumptions of received forms. She’s growing up
in a world in which a significant number of her interactions with other people
are online (for better or worse). She consumes serialized programming in
13-hour blocks and doesn’t really distinguish between TV shows, movies or
Internet videos. She consumes these stories on her phone, tablet and laptop
whenever she wants, a few minutes at a time or maybe three hours at a stretch.
She makes calls on her computer and surfs the web on her television. She makes
no distinction between screens, small or large.
Maybe she’ll be the first auteur of
this new kind of entertainment -- an environment with infinite horizons. She
may imagine a platform where players are both the creator and the narrator,
able to write the game as they play through it. Perhaps she’ll create the first
Great American Possibility Space.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com
