Are Video Games the New B-Movies?
A few years back, Chris Orr wrote a column lamenting the disappearance of the B+ movie. It’s still lost in TNR‘s archives, but if it ever shows up again recently been unearthed from TNR‘s archives, and I’d urge everyone who hasn’t already read it to do so. I’m pretty sure Orr is right that, these days, there are far fewer better-than-average B films than there used to be. But I also think that part of the problem is that there are simply a lot few B movies — good, bad, or mediocre — than there used to be. Absurd, mega-budget summer blockbusters like Transformers and G.I. Joe have siphoned off a lot of the energy that used to go into making moderately priced genre flicks, but recently, it’s struck me that another part of the equation is probably the emergence of scripted, action-movie style video games — everything from the Halo games to Assassin’s Creed and Half-Life.
I’ve been playing a lot of Killzone 2 this week — which, by the way, I highly recommend — and, in many ways, it’s really just an interactive B-movie. The scripted bits that carry along the in-game action consist almost exclusively of tough-guy cliches pieced together from the last forty years of action movies, comic books, and war films. It’s silly, outrageous, over-the-top, and incredibly entertaining — just like a good B-movie should be.
Metal Gear Solid 4 makes the case even more. Like previous MGS games, it’s highly cinematic, with long, relatively complex cut scenes driving the action — in many stretches, there’s more movie than interactivity. And, like so many classic sci-fi B-movies, its story, about a near future in which war, conducted by a web of private mercenary firms, has become humanity’s dominant economic activity, is driven by a simplistic contemporary allegory. MGS4 is less to my liking than Killzone 2 — despite the more complex gameplay, the scripted bits are just too long and too ridiculous for my taste — but it makes the link between games and a certain type of overblown genre movie even more clear.
Now, I suspect that even the best games won’t really replace B-movies for a guy like Chris Orr, and in truth, I’d often rather be watching a movie about a disgruntled space marine than playing one on my PS3. But I half suspect that in twenty years or so, people (by which I mean men, mostly) roughly my age and a little younger will look back at today’s crude but effective action games with the same fondness that people a decade or two older than me look back at the crude but effective genre films of the late 70s and early 80s.
Peter can you give us a couple examples of what you would consider typical or archetypal B-movies?
— Freddie · Oct 11, 03:35 PM · #
You argument seems true enough.
One related point is how badly Hollywood has translated games into B-movies. I think the problem might be that they’re treating successful games assure thing rather than doing something lower budget but less tied up in existing licenses.
I think more of the B-movie spirit with games are the game fan studios, e.g. <a href=“http://www.x-strikestudios.com/projects.html”>X-strike studios</a>. I have a friend that knows some of those guys and thus have seen and enjoyed a few of their works at parties. I haven’t gone out and bought them for myself, but I’d also certainly see one of theirs over most order of magnitude higher budget adaptations in theaters.
— Greg Sanders · Oct 11, 04:42 PM · #
Ah, sorry, screwed up the link and wasn’t paying enough attention to the preview. Here it is done right: x-strike Studios
— Greg Sanders · Oct 11, 04:44 PM · #
Freddie,
I think of Escape From New York and Death Race 2000 as pretty much the prototypical B-movies. They were probably closer to B+ (especially EFNY), but they were definitional genre B-films from the mid 70s/early 80s.
Thinking in a more contemporary vein, I think of movies like Pitch Black, Starship Troopers (a little higher budget, but very much in the right spirit), and Blade II. Again, those veer toward the B+ side. On the B to B- side, I think of things like The Marine or Walking Tall.
Games like Killzone 2 are a little more focused on large-scale combat, but that’s more a function of the medium. First of all, the technology makes it far less difficult than when shooting live action. And second of all, most of these games are about shooting at things, and war zones provide lots of things at which to shoot.
— Peter Suderman · Oct 11, 05:55 PM · #
Yep. You’re right at least as far as the boy-audience is concerened.
Still, don’t sell the games short. I suspect some were scripted by Hollywood types who could have made (and maybe have made) made some fine movies, but dumbnifying the games shows wise restraint.
I reckon Half-Life snots all over most movies in terms of pacing, drama and telling-stories-with-pictures. Certainly, teasing out its revelations is much more fun than fighting real people in multiplayer games.
Yet if they raised the plot too high and and siezed too much control from me, the player, I just wouldn’t engage with it.
— Adrian Ratnapala · Oct 11, 09:06 PM · #
Yep. You’re right at least as far as the boy-audience is concerened.
Still, don’t sell the games short. I suspect some were scripted by Hollywood types who could have made (and maybe have made) made some fine movies, but dumbnifying the games shows wise restraint.
I reckon Half-Life snots all over most movies in terms of pacing, drama and telling-stories-with-pictures. Certainly, teasing out its revelations is much more fun than fighting real people in multiplayer games.
Yet if they raised the plot too high and siezed too much control from me the player, I just wouldn’t engage with it.
— Adrian Ratnapala · Oct 11, 09:07 PM · #
Sorry for the absurd multiple posts.
— Adrian Ratnapala · Oct 11, 09:08 PM · #
In some cases, this certainly isn’t a coincidence. The creators of Gears of War said that they imagined the game as a big, fun, gloriously stupid summer blockbuster of an action movie, except one where you controlled the main character rather than just watching.
For another example, take a look at Left 4 Dead, where each level is actually introduced with a big movie poster, and the players who control each in-game character are introduced on the “billing”: “Starring… EVAN JAMES as LOUIS, PLAYER 2 as ZOEY” etc. Of course it hardly needs mentioning that zombie apocalypse is the king of the B-movie plots.
I would think that some of the feeling also comes from the need of game-makers to use settings and scenarios the player can easily understand. Games can be fiendishly complicated and there’s a lot you need to understand in order to win: Where do I go, what do I do, who’s on my side and who do I shoot, etc. Using a familiar setting – a cliché, in other words – lets the developers explain the game’s fiction easily and painlessly. Instead of boring the player with an hour of exposition, it’s just “You – gun! Nazis – shoot! GO!” A shocking amount of good game-making involves making sure players don’t get lost or confused, and everything the player can easily grasp right from the start is a valuable shortcut. Using a backdrop that’s a pastiche of other pop-culture touchstones is a great way to both orient players and ground the game in its genre setting.
— Evan James · Oct 11, 11:03 PM · #
As an avid gamer, I’m not sure this is true.
I think the simplest argument to be made is that, some twenty years onward from the hayday of the B-movie (the 80s), video games have become a dominant form of entertainment among the demographic that ‘classic’ B-movies catered to and, as such, have upped the competition for this demographic’s attention. This demographic’s tastes have changed very little, so the video game competition addresses the same over-the-top genre themes (science fiction, action, etc.)
So not necessarily that video games have become the modern B-movie as much as supplanted them. (Maybe this argument is too subtle and I’m actually agreeing with you. I’m not sure.)
— Kevin Glass · Oct 12, 09:03 PM · #
Well of course. B-movies were cigarettes. Video games are cocaine.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 12, 09:06 PM · #
Not on topic: the tea leaf precipitate is happening right now. Flag stolen.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 13, 05:25 AM · #
Huh, that’s a good point. And I suspect they might occupy similar economic roles, too. The whole idea of the B-movie, really, assumed an audience in the habit of regular moviegoing, people who had already decided to go to the theater, and if you could c
Now with two and a half generations raised on television, we don’t have that habit anymore, and the movie industry has oriented itself around tentpole and “event” movies. Even your more humdrum movies have to create their own audience and bring it to the theater, which is why there’s not much point for studios to make cheap or narrowly targeted movies, because you’re still going to have to slap a $10m ad campaign on them.
In contrast, a lot of the gamers I know tend to maintain at least one “active” game at any given time, and will go seek out whatever’s new and available in the marketplace when they tire of it. (Also, in video games, studios maintain a sort of brand differentiation more akin to American International Pictures or Troma than to the interchangeable studios of today.)
— Senescent · Oct 13, 08:17 PM · #
Good point about studios, Senescent! When you buy, say, a Valve FPS, or a Relic RTS, you know you’re getting both quality and a particular style of game. And there’s a big audience who will buy the newest offering in a particular genre or from a favorite publisher as soon as it comes out, every time.
— Ethan C. · Oct 14, 05:41 AM · #
Jeez, I just noticed that I left that first paragraph unfinished. It was supposed to be something like “if you could have a film – any film – out that weekend in their favorite genre, you stood a good chance of claiming their allegiance”.
— Senescent · Oct 14, 05:56 AM · #
The “branding by reputation” is an important point, and I’m reminded of Harvey Weinstein’s quote from 15 or so years ago, “Even if I buy a film for a dollar, I still have to spend $20 million marketing it.”
And $20 million is cheap. The last figure I saw was that the average Hollywood film cost $60m to make and $40M to market; and that ratio get worse the lower the budget. I have more than a few colleague how had their films bought (almost always at a price lower than the cost of the print), and then saw them get saddled with a marketing budget of 5 or 10 times the cost of the print. None of these films ever got out of the hole the marketing budget made, and there were never any residuals.
A few years ago I was befriended by a fellow who is a pretty high-end entertainment attorney, as in head of legal at a pretty big studio. He gave me some really really good advice that goes for anyone making flms, games, records: Don’t start your first film unless you’re committed to finishing your third.
He was thinking about it from the point of negotiation. If you’re some chump with one movie, why should anyone care about giving you a good deal? But if you are a reliable supplier of good movies, then a distributor is going to want to do business with you over the long haul.
But it’s just as good advice on the small budget, b-movie, video game, indie record side of things. You’ll never see a return on all the time and effort it takes to get your first film, record whatever out. But if people like the first, they’ll buy the second. And if people like the second they buy the third. And once you have three, you might just be making a enough money to make the fourth.
— Tony Comstock · Oct 14, 12:15 PM · #