Putting Too Much Movie Into The Game

I tried out the demo of The Bourne Conspiracy last week and it made me ponder the wisdom of game designers to slavishly emulate the feel of movies in their games.

The term "cinematic" is bandied around a lot in the gaming press and it's been used as a much as a crutch as well as a real descriptor for talking about certain games. Yes, I agree that games like BioShock, Mass Effect and GTA4 are all very cinemetic experiences. With the exception of Mass Effect, I would go on to argue that these games give the impression of watching a movie not out of any sort of outward intention toi emulate the conventions of film. Their cinematic qualities are more of a natural side effect of the many design choices that were made to create a better game experience.

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In contrast, my time spent with The Bourne Conspiracy demo has given me the impression that developer High Noon Studios has created a game whose mechanics are in service to creating a cinematic experience, much to its detriment. What's curious about this design choice is that the game itself is not based on any of the Matt Damon movies but rather on the Bourne franchise as a whole as established in Robert Ludlum's series of novels. That didn't stop the developers from taking many stylistic cues from the 3 Doug Liman/Paul Greengrass movies, from the settings and scenarios and the choreography, right on down to the shaky cam technique so effectively used by Greengrass in the latter two movies.

And I can't really hold that against them, can I? After all, the books are old news and gamers are most likely to identify the Bourne mythology to the Matt Damon movies. And with both games and movies being such visually-oriented mediums, it really was a no-brainer for any developer to crib some style notes from the movies. My real beef coming away from the demo is that the developers went too far in that direction and are at a serious risk of releasing a final game that wants very badly to be a movie but ultimately fails at being successful at either.

Play the demo yourself and you'll find that all the ingredients for a good game are in place. The graphics and other production values are top notch and there's a palpable sense of urgency much like the one you feel when watching the Bourne movies. The level design and control mechanics, however, literally railroad you down a scripted path of events. Oh, not just any events, mind you, but the ever-popular quick time events are used quite liberally at key moments during a level. I"ve never been a fan of quick-time button press sequences for many different reasons, but as "gamey" mechanics go, sometimes having it is better than nothing at all. The quick-time sequences in the Bourne demo rely on you pressing a random button at precisely the right time. Failure to do so results in the game ending and a reload to the last checkpoint. Really? Video games have come a long way in the last 20 years and I'd like to think we've long left behind game design principles first introduced by the likes of Dragon's Lair. Apparently, some people think that so long as it contributes to the cinematic pacing of their level, an unforgiving, timed button press is an adequate play mechanic to use over and over again.

Movies and games are very different mediums that share some overlap in how they're consumed and appreciated, but they are still fundamentally different forms that require very specific skills and expertise to do them properly. As games become more sophisticated, I hope developers continue to exploit all the strengths that make games what they are and make that their prime directive. Games, by their particular design, story or genre WILL evoke cinematic qualities. Just look at GTA4 and all the memorable, movie-like moments that sprout from its masterful, open-world play environment. The game may make nods to movies, in the way it renders cutscenes or the option to switch to a dynamic, "movie camera" when driving a vehicle but it never feels like it's going out of its way to BE a movie.

I wish I could say the same for The Bourne Conspiracy, a game that feels indebted to movies so much that it loses its true identity.