Sympathy for the Player Character
Going on about movies that are spiritually video games.
Last week’s look at Backrooms and the cues it takes from gaming reinvigorated my passion for thinking about the ways cinema channels what it’s like to play games—”ludo-essentia” as I called it, though that probably won’t catch on. When I first drafted that sentence, I described this as an “extremely niche” topic, then realized that didn’t scan. For most of my life, movies based on games have almost uniformly flopped, and saying that a film was “like a video game” was one of the most damning cliched burns you could sling. But starting this decade, that’s changed. Basing a movie on a game is now a better bet for a billion-dollar return than making a Marvel or even a Star Wars, to say nothing of the smaller games that received lower-budget adaptations that became hits, like the Five Nights at Freddy’s films or this year’s Iron Lung and Exit 8. I wrote about game-like films last year for Little White Lies, tied to the release of the Until Dawn movie, which also did decent box office numbers despite pissing off fans of the game. But as I explore in that piece (which you should go ahead and read now, since this post is essentially Part 2), gaming aesthetics and formal conventions have filtered into filmmaking enough that you see them even in films not based on games, like Backrooms.
Let’s start with an explicit game adaptation. The Fallout TV show is one of Amazon Prime’s biggest series—possibly the biggest, now that The Boys has ignominiously farted out of existence. It suffers from the same pacing issues as many series that release eight episodes biannually, but it’s fun and an admirably handsome production. In a sea of overly glossy genre shows, I’m really taken with how much of it is tactile and lived-in (there’s a scene in Season 2 in which Kyle MacLachlan rummages through some kitchen drawers, and you can just tell that even the ones he doesn’t open have stuff in them). But what’s riveted me most is how dedicated the show is not just to replicating the look of the Fallout games, but to operating as if it takes place within them. In the first episode, main character Lucy gets stabbed in the side with a fuck-off giant knife—a wound that should be debilitating, if not fatal. She pulls a stimpak from a medical kit and instantly heals her injury, complete with the sound effect that item makes in the games. This is not a one-off event. MacLachlan’s subplot in Season 2 follows him refining a mind-control brain implant that basically works as if it’s rewriting NPCs’ scripts. He demonstrates its effectiveness by putting two soldiers from rival factions in a room and stopping them from mindlessly attacking each other.
Fallout is executive produced by Jonathan Nolan (who also directed the first three episodes) and Lisa Joy. They previously helmed Westworld, another series choked with ludo-essence. The show’s conception of robots gaining sentience brings the dynamics of games to the real world, with the AI hosts gradually evolving self-awareness through the suffering human guests inflict upon them. Thandiwe Newton’s character is distraught when a technician demonstrates her NPC scripting for her on a tablet, displaying her reactions seconds before she can speak them. Ed Harris’ Man in Black acts like the biggest asshole you’ve ever encountered in an online game. He gleefully griefs guests and hosts alike, and he talks about the rules of Westworld identically to how players discuss the mechanics of games; in the show’s final episode, he even calls someone shooting at him from cover a “fucking camper.” Westworld often worked too hard to beguile its audience, but its use of gaming tropes as a shorthand for the rules of its milieu prefigures the way such tropes are now much more enmeshed in mainstream film and television.1
A slightly earlier, much less successful attempt at setting a non-game in a game setting was the Warcraft movie. It doesn’t go so far as to quantify any of its characters’ stats, but there’s an identifiable gamelike rhythm to the way magic works in the film’s world. Wizards cast spells and then have cooldown periods. Were it made today, I wonder if the film would be comfortable going deeper with this aspect of its worldbuilding. This is outside my purview, but there’s a whole other realm of games influencing other media: books, namely litRPG. This genre heightens the natural anal-retentiveness of strict rules-based magic systems, making characters’ power levels and attributes explicit, concrete facets of story construction. I have not read any of these novels and cannot comment on them, but the whole business sounds abhorrent.
There’s an obverse to this tendency: Films supposedly set in game worlds that aren’t terribly gamelike. Free Guy is about an NPC who gains self-awareness and agency, but little about the vaguely GTA/Fortnite-like online game it’s set in feels convincingly like a metaverse people would actually participate in. Ditto Wreck-It Ralph, even though it gets to utilize myriad real arcade game characters. That film’s sequel, which transplants the leads from an arcade-based world to the internet, highlights the reason for the disconnect. These films aren’t invested in games as things people interact with, but rather as simple “intellectual property.” In Ralph Breaks the Internet, an arcade game can be interchangeable with various Disney properties. Having mostly burned through “cinematic universes,” Hollywood’s testing the waters of crossover blockbusters. (Fox McCloud showing up in the Mario Galaxy Movie is an obvious trial balloon for a Smash Bros. feature.)
The big kahuna here is, of course, Ready Player One, a sustained nostalgia-wank of a book that, in the hands of Steven Spielberg, becomes a half-chagrined victory lap for his imprint on pop culture (even though he demurs from including his own movies). I think the best showcase of the gap between the film’s vision of collaborative fandom obsession and reality is the first challenge posed to OASIS players. To finish an “unbeatable” race, the solution is to drive backwards at the start, which the protagonist figures out after years of zero progress. In reality, someone would have tried that on, conservatively, the second iteration of the race.
But Ready Player One is less about games than it is about culture devouring itself. The novel took inspiration from Snow Crash, and was further informed by how online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life (already influenced by that earlier book) had reshaped ideas of what a metaverse looks like. The film then brought that story to life within an era of ascendant “nerd culture,” presaging how works like Fortnite cannibalize popular characters as part of a Skinner box model, constantly rewarding players with dopamine hits of recognition. The most intriguing parts of the film are when grimaces of circumspection crack through, like the cuts from action in the fantastical OASIS to mundane headset-wearing people in the real world. I don’t think the film was influential, but it certainly was prescient.2
Adam Nayman identifies Ready Player One’s Overlook Hotel sequence as a forebear of Backrooms, but I think that’s slightly off the mark. Backrooms seems more indebted directly to The Shining—specifically, the greater understanding of The Shining sculpted by the internet. Earlier critical and academic scholarship on Kubrick’s film has been superseded by (and absorbed into) an ecosystem of clickbait articles and long- and short-form videos that fixate on the subtle details of the production, especially the many uncanny geographical inconsistencies of the Overlook. This urban legend of The Shining, even more than the movie itself, is a keynote text for the liminal horror genre. At this point, there may be more people (especially young people) who have watched/read and shared Ten Things You Didn’t Notice in The Shining memes than have seen the actual film. It’s the Room 237-ification of discourse.3
On the flip side of all these are the various iterations of Scott Pilgrim, all of which have a lot of fun with the concept of layering game rules onto everyday concerns. This ranges from a urine meter draining as a character goes to the bathroom to dispatched foes dropping loonies to a couple working through their relationship baggage via a series of combat encounters with assorted exes. In the same way that characters in a musical burst into song whenever emotion builds to a breaking point, when things run hot here, a Mortal Kombat-style announcer declares that it’s time to fight (and there are musical sequences). I have not seen the feature film since I was 21 (the ideal time to watch Scott Pilgrim), so I don’t know how well I’d stand Scott as a character now. Like Ready Player One, the critique of imagining oneself as the protagonist of reality may be better realized intellectually than it is properly encoded in the text.
Adaptations broadly tend to take an à la carte attitude toward their source material, grafting elements from games onto fairly standard blockbuster templates. The Super Mario movies are, well, Mario characters slotted into Illumination movies. That’s the only context in which putting Mario in a training montage set to “Holding Out for a Hero” makes sense (and even then, it’s very off to see Mario doing anything not scored by Koji Kondo). His training course is full of brick blocks and pinwheels and other familiar Mario elements, arranged like they are in any of the side-scrolling games, which looks odd in three dimensions. The films’ use of Mario elements totally unmoored from their original ludic context is almost mesmerizingly uncanny. Why do the characters traverse worlds by driving karts over Rainbow Road? I was told that kids in theater audiences went nuts for this scene.
You see this kind of recontextualization in other films. In the Sonic movies, rings are portals instead of point-counters/lifeforce-holders. It's rife through the Minecraft film. From the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, you wouldn’t know that the first few games are set entirely in security camera control rooms. But then, “lore” rapidly overtook that whole franchise, so it seems to work fine that the movie just uses the sinister animatronics and kid playplace location. Quite recently, I was struck by how the new Among Us cartoon sometimes adopts the top-down cutout perspective of the mobile game when its characters move from one portion of their spaceship to another. An integral part of the gameplay experience becomes a winking affectation in another medium. (I’ve only watched the first episode; maybe they do more with it in future ones.)
Sometimes, the details that make the transition in adaptation are baffling. The Last of Us games have a lot of move-the-ladder/scaffold/crate puzzles to give the combat sequences and cutscenes space to breathe. These puzzles are generally busywork for the player while characters converse. The second episode of the television series, “Infected,” almost entirely comprises such scenes, paying minute attention to the logistics of wading through a flooded building or making a plank bridge across rooftops. I found this weirdly riveting despite knowing it was mostly dead air. What was this doing in an HBO show? And that’s before getting to how off the episode-to-episode pacing feels, which is doubly strange given how much the games crib their story structure from the conventions of prestige television.4
When changing mediums, this kind of faithfulness to the time-consuming aspects of gaming can translate into something uncannily like slow cinema. My friend Esther made that direct comparison when reviewing the Iron Lung film. Contra stereotypes about young people and short attention spans, it appears the popularity of livestreamers and Let’s Plays may have helped prime certain audiences for long stretches of “nothing” happening. Or maybe Iron Lung’s many sequences of fiddling with buttons and levers or drawing charts are on a continuum with Twitch and TikTok footage of disembodied hands solving puzzles or restoring antiques.
In my Backrooms piece, I also discussed how Iron Lung could be read as an adaptation of Mark Fischbach’s Let’s Play of the game. Another game adaptation from this year, Exit 8, has much the same vibe. Considerable attention and runtime are paid to the protagonist’s process as he experiences his bizarre looping-space situation and slowly comes to grips with its rules. Much like a Let’s Play of The Exit 8, we are invited to play the game of spot-the-difference alongside him, and the movie even draws dramatic irony with shots in which it knows we’ll succeed while he fails. Both it and Backrooms lean heavily on liminal horror ideas of drawing out the little things you’re likely to overlook in transitory spaces. In Backrooms, these details are made disturbing as the eponymous space poorly recreates them, while in Exit 8, they’re conspiring against the protagonist/player, creating a lemniscate trap and taunting through their sameness.
This mimicry of gaming visual language in film brings us back to movies not based on games that still do this. Interestingly, a widely cited early example, the single-shot “side-scrolling” hallway fight in Oldboy, is more a case of convergent evolution arising from the circumstances of shooting that scene than it is a deliberate evocation of brawlers like River City Ransom. Park Chan-wook makes no mention of games in his explanation of crafting the sequence. The logistical constraints the production faced and the thematic ideas he wanted to convey in the scene align with the conditions that created side-scroller fighters in the first place. Form often arises from function.
Similarly, as far as I can research, the making of the first-person combat sequence that opens The Villainess was not informed by any games, despite how much it reminds me of titles like Mirror’s Edge. The overlap isn’t as close as it is in Hardcore Henry, though. An actual first-person fighter would show the player character’s hands dipping into view as they run. But the matter-of-fact pace of the violence and the cartoonish callousness with which opponents get picked off are unmistakably gamey.
You increasingly see game language bleeding into film in minute ways. A firefight in Avatar: Fire and Ash is interspersed with first-person shots that look straight down a gun’s sights in a manner identical to any shooter game you can think of. And that’s before getting to a drug trip that seems straight out of a Far Cry game, with its shimmering first-person imagery. Here, the ludo-essence is enhanced by the technical convergence between blockbuster games and films. A PS5 game won’t look quite as real as Avatar, but the quality of the light and especially the high frame rate mean the figures in both look vividly similar as they move.
28 Years Later uses and then subverts the impact of game language. During its first half, every fatal blow on a zombie is depicted with a “kill cam”—a moving freeze-frame captured via a specialized iPhone bar rig. It makes the violence deeply visceral, a fist pump with each arrow buried in a neck. This is a considerable part of how this portion of the narrative apes traditional macho father/son adventure cliches, lulling the audience into thinking it’s a different kind of story than it actually is. In the back half, when the young protagonist rejects his father’s paranoid worldview and embarks on a journey to see a doctor with his mother, the kill cam is abandoned.
But the most talked-about gamey scene in any recent movie is the top-down shootout in John Wick: Chapter 4, which everyone saw and immediately Leo-pointed at while crying “Hotline Miami!” In games, omniscient cameras are often a way to compensate for how a player lacks the directional auditory signals, peripheral vision, and other, more subliminal sensory inputs that they would naturally have in whatever scenario their avatar is plopped into. John Wick 4 reverses this, using the overhead camera to demonstrate John Wick’s supreme situational and spatial awareness. Also, like in The Villainess, the pure coldness with which Wick kills all these guys is extremely gamey. Innumerable additional minor details enhance the gamelike vibe—note how at 0:21, a guy gets hit with the dragon’s breath and doesn’t appear to react, like an enemy at full health absorbing your first shot (a split second later, a second blast drops him). Hell, the scene’s sheen and lighting make the thumbnail image for the YouTube video look like a screenshot from a PS4 game:
In promotional videos and set reports about his upcoming Resident Evil film, Zach Cregger has freely described how he hopes to capture the series’ ludo-essence despite the story not coming from any of the games. The technical details of how he incorporates visual language from gaming are interesting: I shoot in on a wide lens in an over-the-shoulder for most of the movie, so it feels like the way you play a game where we’re kind of perched on his shoulder, and as he turns a corner, we turn a corner with him. By now, multiple generations of creatives have imbibed games as much as they have other art forms. We’ll see such formal and aesthetic blending both proliferate and grow more complex in the years to come.
That’s all for now. She’s ready to see you in her office:
Nolan and Joy also created Person of Interest, which is about a supercomputer that sets the cast on quests based on predictive modeling (reading everyday people’s “scripts” through their behavior and circumstances), and The Peripheral, which is about controlling drones in parallel universes via VR equipment. I haven’t watched either series, but both sound like fruitful further variations on the themes we’re discussing.
Regardless, it is a hideous, dogshit picture.
I’ve long appreciated that documentary as a study in apophenia and amateur film interpretation, and never really understood the critics who took umbrage because they thought it was seriously endorsing its subjects’ off-the-wall theories.
I had nowhere else to fit this into the main text organically, but I badly wanted to talk about it, so it’s going here: The early seasons of The Mandalorian feel distinctly like they’re adapting an open-world video game, replete with episodes devoted to side quests. Certain installments even begin with characters telling the titular character, “Ah, yes, traveler, I’ll gladly give you the information you need! But first, I need your assistance in another matter.”