I’m kind of a girl when it comes to emotion-driven cinematography. Filmmakers pull at our heart strings, and I soak up every ounce of it. That’s not to say I seek out shows that squeeze at my insides, nor do I break into uncontrollable fits of bawling (only one film still holds that distinction). I just allow myself to become drawn into the cinematic world. When I was a kid, I used to come out of movies with adrenaline pumping, eager to extend the film into my own pretend world and act like the characters. By and large, videogames have failed to do that. Maybe it’s because I’m already acting out the characters while I play, but I think it’s a failing of the games themselves to push the same personal buttons as films.
This post isn’t about a movie, actually, but a TV show. If you have never seen it, Fox’s 24 is one of the most powerful works ever produced for television. It’s not perfect – the tech talk sometimes grates against my brain, and its cliffhanger approach to closing an episode borders on the formulaic – but it does so many other things right on so many levels, I have little trouble looking the other way. On the surface, it is an exciting, suspense-filled thriller, a gritty, made-for-TV James Bond. It has some extremely talented writers, and its structure fits perfectly into its episodic format. I am continuously amazed at their ability to turn the crisis level up a notch with each new season. The second season revolves around a nuclear attack on Los Angeles! I didn’t think it went higher than that (I was wrong). What drives this show, however, is its characters and the human drama that underpins the main story line. In a movie, its creators have only a brief time to develop the characters and make the viewers care about them, but a television show has over sixteen hours in a single season. You meet the characters, learn to care about them, and watch them almost as friends going through the often traumatic events of the show. For an “action show,” there is a surprising amount of love and comraderie, and it’s the endearing elements that complete 24′s success. The onscreen relationships strike personal chords, in odd ways, in your own real life ones – Jack’s relationship with his wife and daughter, Chloe’s awkward bluntness, Mason’s situation in Season 3 – and for me, at least, it all works. It’s driven by characters who love each other, love their countries, love their causes (even the heinous ones).
I know another medium that often spans far longer than sixteen hours, features action, suspense, and a dose or two of drama. 24 reminds me at times of Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy, and at first blush has much in common with them. But were I stranded on an electronic desert island and could choose only one, it would be hard to sell me any one of these over something like 24. People (often ones “in the know”) like to talk about how the videogame industry is in its infancy as an art form, and insomuch as I believe developers have not even begun to scratch the surface of the medium’s potential for depth and meaning, I agree. I think it’s a topic worth pondering… how to create a meaningful videogame… and I don’t believe we really have an answer yet. Too much character development at this point is done by pretending the gamer is a moviegoer, and the emotion is too concentrated on the thrill, the zany, and melodrama without cause.
There has to be a way to take the superficiality out of the videogame and replace it with depth, without losing sight of what it means to play a game in the first place…
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I thought Microsoft had a decisive advantage over Sony and Nintendo in the next round of the console wars by launching the Xbox 360 an entire holiday season ahead of any competition. Nintendo dropped the ball with its delays to the next Zelda game, and Sony simply wasn’t prepared to produce the PS3, nor launch with compelling enough titles. Well, neither was Microsoft, it seems.
I still remember watching G4TV’s coverage of the Microsoft’s Zero Hour Xbox 360 launch event on Nov. 21. That was when the marketing hype, admittedly aimed squarely at my demographic, caught up with me, and I was out at 7am the next morning in the cold, in line to buy a system. As you might guess, I came home empty-handed, as did that vast majority of potential customers. Since then I have returned to stores at odd hours two more times with hopes that maybe these rumored shortages were only that, that the prospects of a much-touted “world-wide launch†(not launching in Australia until April, remember) wouldn’t be too much for Microsoft’s production capacity, or at least that the company’s promises of weekly shipments of units would bear fruit. I even engaged in a bit of futile sniping on Ebay to obtain a system that, but a few weeks ago, I professed wanting little to do with. Alas, it seems others’ desire for the system in any for any system consistently outweighed mine by several hundred dollars. At this point, I have lost most of the desire for the Xbox 360 created by the hype. I may buy one when the price drops and I don’t need to call stores in advance to find out if they can even sell me one, or I may just wait until I can buy one with a mod chip pre-installed (fear not, they will come).
So what has Microsoft accomplished with its launch? It succeeded in getting its next system out the door at least eight months ahead of its competition, which the definite advantage of giving developers significantly more time to produce exclusive titles for their system. By Christmas, it will technically be released in all major markets, with some exceptions, and it will certainly have the distinction of having its product be one of the sought after holiday gifts. But at what cost? It is released in all major markets, but only a fraction of their customer base can actually buy it, and many like myself who bought into the marketing are frustrated and actually turned off by the laughable inability to acquire one. In the end, the primary boon of the holiday season is the greatly increased sales it brings, and that is precisely what a thinly spread world-wide launch will hamper. I think Microsoft would have done far better to launch in their most important market, North America, with as many units as they could, and take full advantage of the holiday season in anticipation of the increased competition next year. The 360 might do better in Japan than the original Xbox, but there’s no way it will stand up to the PS3 juggernaut in that market no matter when they launch it, and the European market has never turned the tide of any console market share fight. Rather than distributing between the markets on the basis of number of units, Microsoft should have distributed on the basis of projected sales of all systems and their relative importance to overall market success.
Microsoft is still in a good position, however. With the Xbox 360 launch behind them, it is in a good position to fight Sony in 2006. A timely discounted price around the PS3 launch would do much to undermine Sony, especially with the potential for an already expensive PS3, and they would be fools not to release Halo 3 around the same time. Nintendo should be non-factor for Microsoft, due to Nintendo’s own market share and its alternative marketing plans for the Revolution; make no mistake, Sony is Microsoft’s only rival and each knows it. Sony will have to work hard in North America and Europe to produce a system better than the Xbox 360 in something other than graphics. By essentially wasting its holiday sales advantage, however, Microsoft may have already done some of Sony’s work for it.
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