Monday, July 30, 2018

Movie Game

Ever heard of this terminology?

What about Walking Simulator?
Interactive Experience?
Pure Kino?

A movie game is where the cinematic quantities of it become so overwhelmingly large, that the game sometimes forgets most, if not all of the gameplay involved, or it simply considers that and arguably even the plot itself as secondary.


Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a great example. With over 8 hours of cut scenes filled with voice acting, conspiracies and nano machines, it's a polarizing title in a beloved franchise, and yet people continue to talk about it.

Or take Quantic Dream's modern games, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Soul and Detroid: Become Human. Each of them adds new layers of storytelling, while the power to control dialogue and event outcomes gets more vast in richness.

What about the Uncharted games? To me, they shape the mood of a movie game very good, as while there are plenty of voice acting and dialogue options, the mandatory cut scenes are very few, and actually pretty much all of the storytelling is done dynamically next to the gameplay, and yet the Uncharted games still feel like Indiana Jones to me!


Walking Simulators are a relative modern term used on video games such as Firewatch, Gone Home and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, 3 games of which I have 3 very different opinions about. I would consider The Stanley Parable as a thought provoking ride of a walking simulator though.
They often feature little to no gameplay,  but they attempt to overwhelm with narrative.

So a movie game can actually be pretty of things when looking at all of these examples, and when thinking about it, the term might be outdated, not needed or unnecessary. And yet, video games are turning more mature than ever with all of these recent years, where emotions are getting more involved, I wonder when a new classification regarding the video game genres will happen?

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