The Dead Island Trailer And Video Games As ‘Art’

This trailer for Dead Island, a zombie survival horror game set on a remote holiday resort, is not only already a viral success but the chief inspiration for an in-development Dead Island movie ( http://uk.movies.ign.com/articles/115/1151065p1.html ). According to this article, “the film will will follow a Memento-like storyline, even though the video game does not”.  For those unwilling to sit through the clip, it concerns a young married couple and their pre-adolescent daughter as they’re the victim of a zombie attack in their hotel room. The Memento influence being that the clip largely plays in reverse, from the freshly-undead child being flung upwards through a five-story window to the father heroically leaving her in a corridor full of zombies. This backwards carnage is accompanied by a Sigur Ros-style piano and string arrangement, with intermittent forward-motion cuts of the terrified girl being chased and ultimately infected by a crew of flesh-hungry holidaymakers. It’s equal parts affecting and obnoxious. The evocative music and dramatic irony acting as a form of emotional sophistry that the game and subject matter presumably can’t live up to. Also, as the clip below highlights, it does give the impression that this was made by people who don’t have children.

Despite the somewhat cynical and exploitative overtones, there is at least an attempt to be taken seriously and to dabble with a slightly different approach to marketing. It also helps dredge up the ‘video games as art’ discussion, which interests me as it cuts a way into the heart of my affinity with pop culture as a whole. Despite very much being the billion dollar industry its been for quite a while now, video games are still more or less languishing in the same patch of artistic antipathy as pornography. Taking the collective goodwill and sheer denial of gaming fandom into account, Games are still culturally ghettoised in a way that books and films aren’t. Dealing in really broad strokes here, it’s partly down to the inverted snobbery of the non-gaming literati, and partly the fault of the gaming industry and its followers for making Inverted Snobbery’s bed and tucking it in at night. As it stands, a cut-scene from even the most high-profile game still has the relative production values of an Asylum mockbuster, with stiff acting/performance capture and even stiffer dialogue. Rockstar’s upcoming LA Noire appears a genuine step up in terms of allowing a more human performance, so perhaps the technology (not to mention the budget) is more of a barrier at this stage than anything implicit about the format.

The more pressing problem lies in the fact these games are largely imports from genre fiction. War movies, zombie movies, gangster movies etc. The gameplay effectively takes the familiar action beats and tropes from those movies and extends them, until they are not just central but all-encompassing to the experience. For the most part, the plots serve as simple backing to the main course of gameplay, while still absurdly convoluted enough to give an adequate context for the parameters of its particular scenarios. For example, if the game level is set at sea, then the plot will need to explain why, rather than vice-versa. Obviously this is because gameplay, level design and controls are and should always be more important than story, or characters, or believable dialogue. The trouble is, that’s fairly similar to the attitude in the porn industry, to which few are in any real hurry to tag artistic merit. Whatever creative decision-making lies at the heart of Busty Cops Go Hawaiian is in the service of a product largely intended to be taken at face value. Of course, this kind of dissonance is also very much alive in Hollywood, but a movie is arguably more capable than a game at complimenting the demand for both CG eye candy/gore/explosions/action beats and story/characters/nuance/dialogue. The latter lends credibility to the former, but the interactivity and more flexible reality of a game makes those scales harder to level out. Even a relatively cerebral, plot-heavy game – say Heavy Rain or the Final Fantasy series – the aim is more to provide an immersive experience than to tell a coherent, rewarding tale for its own sake. Alternately, Uncharted 2, more or less a straight action/stealth game, is certainly a high watermark for the industry. Fat-free mechanics, responsive controls, gigantic set-pieces and impeccable presentation are all neatly buoyed by characters that, while archetypal, have greater dimension and personality than is demanded by the gameplay. However, the plot is still just a convoluted hunt for mythical merchandise, during which our plucky adventurers commit the kind of large-scale genocide that even the worst excesses of 80′s action movies can’t equal. The ‘art’ of the game is in the acute rendering, celebration and sheer amplification of the action genre template. The problem lies in using movies (and Hollywood movies at that) as a template to begin with.

For a game, or indeed anything, to be taken seriously as ‘art’, it helps to focus primarily on what is only or best achieved by itself. By that token, the real artistic successes in gaming lie in the kind of visual and conceptual abstractions that gameplay facilitates. In retrospect, the stark, reductive territories of 16-bit platformers like Kid Chameleon and Decap Attack are wholly unique and compelling in their own right. Horizontal landscapes fixed in the sky. Squares marked with the letter ‘P’, dispensing magical hats when destroyed with a jumping headbutt (or, if you’re wearing the right magical hat, a jumping foot stomp). Enemies that are impossible to define, dispensing over-sized artifacts when squashed. It adds up to a world that is as compelling as it is, well, very much a place you wouldn’t want to be. The Mario franchise, now in its 26th year, is a far more positive affair and maintains a commitment to very straightforward plots. It even has the gall, in the year 2011, to still centre said plots around a falsetto princess, decked entirely in pink and perennially in need of rescue. This appalling sexism is more or less excused by its adherence to not just an efficient model of success, but to a potent gaming (as opposed to movie) archetype. It’s just as much a part of the abstraction as the smiling clouds, or green pipes that unaccountably warp you elsewhere. It’s this surreality, more so than its rendition of other media, that should the prime artistic legacy of gaming, alongside all of the hours spent to make them fun and exciting to play.