Perhaps you’ve ever heard someone saying “This game feels exactly like a movie” from a person who were playing Detroit: Become Human or watching The Last of Us.
What does it really mean when someone says a game feels like a movie?
Let’s take a step back and think about what does it mean to liken a game to movie. I invite you to a collaborative metacognitive exercise to answer this question, throughout which I will be providing necessary tools to ease the process. Metacognition is to think about a way of thinking, and ultimately being aware of its rationale. And you will be thinking about why you think that some games feel like movies.
This proposition or thinking involves an intuitive awareness that there is a similarity between games and movies but, as far as I witnessed, it puts little effort to specify the source and elements of it.
To initiate your metacognitive exercise, it can be a good start to expand the list of games that would fit here. The most popular ones may include Life is Strange, Uncharted and Red Dead Redemption. Other titles like Mafia, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, L.A Noire, Heavy Rain and Alan Wake can go into the list as well.
For sure, those titles share certain aspects that make them fall under the same category of “movie-likes”. Inspecting those common aspects requires a mapping framework that is inspired by the proposition itself. When people say that a game feels like a movie, most of the time they refer to either of those:
- vibe
- audio-visuals
- plot
Let’s start with presumably the easiest one: the audio-visuals. I will be referencing Detroit: Become Human to prepare the stage. It is clearly seen that the game accommodates both playable and non-playable scenes that can be compared to those of movies of the same genre. What makes it comparable to movie scenes is that the thrill, trepidation and sensation are delivered through a cinematically satisfying lens and profoundly powerful soundtracks accompanying those cinematics. There is also a story fed by modern-day overarching sci-fi themes on robots and AI, offering hero-savior-vigilante-statusquoist sentiments through ethical inquiries and decisions. It is nearly impossible not to tingle with excitement when watching the beautifully crafted cutscenes and environments with the music increasing in the background.
For vibe, Life is Strange’s way of approaching a teenager’s story with intriguing additions can be highlighted. Rather a mundane and super relatable teen life drama turns into a poignant turn out of events that brings you to the edge of the seat. The game has a soul, it has the power of changing your mood for the rest of the day just like a good movie.
Finally, I will provide an example for the plot. Uncharted is a game that makes you feel like you’ve seen it before, not even played. You play as a charismatic treasure hunter with a few friends and a lot of foes. You constantly face deathly challenges but you end up avoiding them and find the ancient city you were looking for. Sounds familiar right? The game is full of moments where you need to make instant decisions while in action and that’s how you live up to the legend of your ancestor Sir Francis Drake.
Since it is inevitable to feel a certain acquaintance towards these games because of those familiarities, whether a first timer or not, people tend to overlook the components that render them unique and fail to properly distinguish games from other media. Actually, it is unfair to treat those games we earlier categorized as “movie-likes” solely as interactive movies, because in reality they offer an experience that extends the capacities of any other medium.
Going back to the title of the essay, my ultimate goal here is to equip you with the necessary tools to recognize a game as it is; without resorting to the act of comparing any game to the other media you have encountered before. Games are tailored with intentional and conscious choices of design, structure and mechanics. Instead of reutilizing the elements proposed by other media, it forms a brand new functionality by self-defining its own boundaries and purports to bring forward an experience that can only be digested and internalized through “playing”.
Games, even the movie-likes as you may call them, are bounded by ontological characteristics that produce an actionability. As such, the players, even though they control a character who has their own personal traits and values, can make decisions within the rules and systems of the game. Interaction with the surroundings is allowed through free movement and the results of interactions are moulded by player decisions. Although movie-like games almost invariably aims to tell a story with realistic audiovisual elements, they are delivering the core sentiment only through what the player chooses to do and not to do in the game. Thus, the interaction between the playable character and in-game environment depends on the interaction between the player (us) and the playable character.
This may strike as an obvious statement. But there are some strong examples that prove how games behave like living organisms and offer much more than just a fun way of making already defined and expected interactions to watch pleasant scenes. I want to talk a little bit about The Last of Us (2013) to strengthen my point. In the game, you play as Joel and the story grows into a nerve-shredding adventure where you need to take Ellie to a very distant location for a life-changing cause that may cure the world for good. Throughout the game, the player is expected to navigate Joel to overcome challenges, find the right paths and collect necessary resources to survive. That’s how the world works in the The Last of Us. All these actions are not even optional, they are mandatory for anyone to stay alive. However, as a player, you can choose to stay still and not do anything.
While the game is not paused, you can choose not to move Joel and just stare blankly into the screen or just wander around without doing anything useful to progress. It would still be a choice of interaction as well and you always have this option when playing games. And it would not be less effective than moving your character or finding where to go next. Your non-actions or unreasonable actions have also effects in the game. How do we know it? Because when you do nothing, it catches Ellie’s attention and she reacts. She interacts with Joel, and you, by saying things like “What are we doing, this is taking entirely too long, you doing nothing and walking around doing nothing. You are literally walking around in the same exact spot.”
This little reaction in The Last of Us that may go easily unnoticed reveals the unique nature of play. While you remain constant just like you would when watching a movie or listening to a song, the game gives a reaction and realizes your non-action as a form of expression. It produces an answer to your choice and calls you into participation.
Through this cycle of actions & reactions, we, as players, internalize the aesthetics of the game. We do not only consume the ingredients, we form them and choose what goes into the final recipe. That’s how video games work. And that’s how you should see them, think about them. Even the most movie-like experiences in games are shaped by the player’s interpretation and choices that led to it. So next time you play or watch a video game, keep that in mind.
LUDO-LOGICAL 