Advent Calendar 15: Great Movie! When Do We Play?

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here today for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

The wonderful thing about putting games on optical discs is that you can include as much full-motion video as you want! The terrible thing about putting games on optical discs is also that you can include as much full-motion video as you want. 

The first FMV games were constructed not by leveraging the capacity of a CD-ROM to add video to a computer program, but by grafting a simple program onto the video format. LaserDiscs are a non-contact medium. Unlike video tapes, which are worn by every pass across the playback heads, an LD can be played through repeatedly or left paused on a single frame forever without damage to the disc. The first LD game, Astron Belt, was a shoot-'em-up that took advantage of this longevity to display a detailed background sourced from the LaserDisc, while the computer part took care of overlaying everything that might change from playthrough to playthrough, like the player ship, hazards, and messy explosions when you crashed into a wall.

Soon, however, games emerged which took advantage of the control features built into LaserDisc players to give a more directly interactive experience. The disc specifications include encoded frame numbers, and players could seek to any frame on the disc on command, which allowed for "seamless" branching during video playback. (In practice, it took the laser a little while to move; the discs were also ungodly heavy and some of them rotated at different speeds for different sections of the disc, so acceleration/deceleration might also cause a noticeable hitch.) In 1983, Cinematronics published Dragon's Lair, an arcade game cobbled together out of quick button presses and video clips animated by the legendary Don Bluth, whose recent split from Disney was acrimonious enough to deserve its own article. It was quickly followed by Space Ace, which was more of the same, only with lasers instead of dragons.

Gameplay in these titles was minimal at best. The idea was that at certain points in the video, the player character would run into a hazard, and you had to smash the correct button to get him out of it. Your choices were generally limited to left/right/up/down/hit something. This paradigm still happens in modern games, where it's known as a Quick Time Event and is generally hated by everyone. It comprises the entirety of Dragon's Lair's gameplay, and everybody thought it was boffo at the time, because the animation quality was exactly what you'd expect from Don Bluth, and no other system displayed such clear, vivid full-screen video on an arcade monitor. It looked like you were playing a movie.

'Playing a movie' sounded like such a good idea to everyone else that they immediately set about trying to reproduce the effect at home. It took ten years, and results were... mixed.

In keeping with human nature, the first thing game makers brought to the home-FMV genre was something they pretended was not softcore porn. Night Trap for the Sega CD, although it technically qualified as a game, was mainly an excuse to show the player attractive women in flimsy nightgowns. This pissed off a lot of people to the point of Congressional hearings. It pissed off other people to the point of not buying the game, not because of the offensive boobies, but because it wasn't any fun. Viewers found it annoying to hit a button every few minutes to make their movie continue, and players found it annoying to wait through a movie before they could hit buttons.

Efforts to integrate video and gameplay generally floundered until home games made the jump to CD-based formats, at which point it took off like a rocket. Japanese console RPGs had long been refining a format that rewarded lengthy segments of gameplay -- like, say, clearing a dungeon and defeating the big boss monster at the end -- with a 'cutscene', or a scripted scene of character interaction that advanced the story and set up the next plot point. On consoles like the SNES or Sega Genesis, these had been presented either in the game engine or as still frames accompanied by written dialogue. With the Sega CD/Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation offering as much storage space as you were willing to press discs, these scenes could instead be produced as animated or pre-rendered video, complete with audio tracks. The example that brought the JRPG to the North American masses was 1997's Final Fantasy VII, which crashed onto the scene with three full CDs of content, including an ending movie that lasted nearly twenty minutes and took up most of the third disc. Similar paradigms were incorporated into PC CD-ROM games like Wing Commander, which alternated gameplay missions with live-action story scenes featuring Mark Hamill, who is a national treasure.

Like most other cool things, this ballooned to the point of excess. Console JRPGs were the worst offenders here; Xenosaga for the PS2 was very pretty and inscrutable enough to satisfy all the Evangelion fans out there, but the main complaint about it was the amount of time you spent with the controller on your lap just watching characters do stuff without you. The game was just shy of 40 hours for the main story, 60ish for 100% completion with all bonuses, and a solid seven hours of that is non-interactive cutscene. And that's Part One of Three, a Lord of the Rings director's cut of a story that basically nobody ever finished.

We seem to have backed off a bit, perhaps because mobile gaming has destroyed everyone's attention spans. More recent games have taken advantage of the better rendering capabilities of both PCs and consoles to incorporate scripted elements into the gameplay directly, no longer having to pause the interactivity and load up a video file to tell the story. First-person shooters, led by Half-Life and Mass Effect, have gotten oddly good at giving you exposition while you are blasting away at things.