One of the games we decided to use for our movie was Final Fantasy X. I was really excited to play it, as I finished it last summer and really enjoyed it. When I received my rental copy in the mail, I was thoroughly disappointed to discover that that particular disc was unplayable.

My replacement arrived yesterday. I started it up and this disc worked just fine. I was thrilled to hear the familiar music and load a save. I was looking for particular gameplay moments, and set out to record a few simple scenes.

I had no trouble transporting my characters to the areas I needed and recording the sequences I wanted (mainly fight scene footage). However, I turned the game off right afterwards. Surprisingly, I had no interest in playing anymore, not even for old times’ sake. Why?

The reading this week gave me insight. Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper described different types of rules in games and how following the rules is necessary to enjoy the game. The lusory attitude, which Suits defines as “where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity,” apply here. When playing the game, I went through ridiculously repetitive fights and spent a long time facing the same foes just so I could level up my characters. I accepted them as means to an end, much like the workers in The Grasshopper. Although I do enjoy a good slaying, I had spent so much time fighting these foes that it was no longer fun.

Also, it was in the context of a story or narrative. I really enjoy the stories in games. Once I had seen the ending, it was as if I had finally solved the mystery. Returning to a previous point in a complex RPG like this one only left me levels behind my satisfyingly high final-fight characters. There was nothing to be gained, so I turned it off.

So where does this leave me? If playing games has become a form of work, when do I play? Maybe play and work are interwoven more than most of us think. When I have a lot of free time in the summer, I go crazy if I don’t fill my time with books, movies, games, and projects. Even during the school year, I consider some projects (even assignments for class) to be a form of play, because I enjoy them. I am a person who thrives on business; my family tends to measure success based on tangible results. Perhaps I really am more of an Achiever type than I thought.  

Last Thursday, we talked about Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play. We read the section concerning games and narratives. I have recently had to confront this issue directly, as I am attempting to create my own narrative through games.

One of my other classes has a final project that consists of creating a movie using game footage (machinima). Whether it includes gameplay or cinematic sequences is up to us, but we must use games to construct a cohesive short film. While it would be amusing to create a movie using a engines and mods such as the plethora available for Half-Life, I wanted to go for a less complicated structure. Since I have not even played Half-Life and would not dream of creating a movie using a mod, I needed to create something that could build upon my previous movie-making experiences. I have made many silly movies for class and for fun. My favorite type of movies would probably be educational movies, so I decided to build from there. I abandoned the idea of creating my own fictional story.

After discussions with the professor, I decided to make an educational movie for recovering Video Game Addicts. It will poke fun at the ridiculous laws and rules of games and also has recent political implications due to the fact that video games are often blamed for causing people to become more violent. I made a script for it with my partner, and found that we would need about 10-15 games to demonstrate important physical and legal principles of everyday life.

In order to find the games for our movie, we brainstormed. Just as in Rules of Play, we had to think about all the important elements of many of these games’ narratives, such as situation, character, conflict, uncertainty, and story events. While thinking back through games we had played and their stories, we revised our lists of physical and legal rules that govern our lives. Games such as Final Fantasy X are completely fantastic, largely dependent on imaginary summons and magic. There are even levels that can only be completed underwater with a human who supposedly has trained himself hold his breath so that he can be underwater for long periods of time. More conventional movie narratives, such as that in Indigo Prophecy, provided an inspiration for the reminder on who can and can’t be killed.

A short while later, I was able to turn in my other game rentals (such as LEGO Star Wars II) for the games I needed for the project. I recently captured the first five minutes of Indigo Prophecy, in which the character you play suddenly discovers a bloody knife in his hand and a stabbed corpse on the floor in front of him. While this will help humorously illustrate how it is not appropriate to kill average people, the game takes itself quite seriously. The menu screen refers to games as movies (i.e. “Begin Movie” for a new game), and it certainly feels like a cinematic experience as the narrator’s voice drawls over the soaring cinematic sequence that follows a crow to the scene of the crime. I can see now how much of the narrative is embedded in the beginning, and the choice to call the game a “movie” certainly implies that the narrative has already been laid out for the player to discover it.

Unfortunately, I did not have time to play through more of the game, since I had to move on to complete my first cut in the next couple of weeks. I would like to continue playing Indigo Prohphecy, if only to see how much control I have as the player (and to see whether there is the possibility of creating an emergent narrative). While my movie will not be a fictional narrative, the narratives in other games will help to reflect the narratives that people create in their everyday lives and (hopefully) create an effective humorous teaching tool for Video Game Addicts.