real. Telltale are very good at whacking you over the head with horrific choices and consequences, and anybody who didn’t shed a tear during The Walking Dead has no compassion and should be made to stand in a corner and think about their cold, black, lifeless heart.
So now we’ve got decision making that’s based not only on a goal of getting to the end of a game, but also based on emotion. You don’t watch a film or a TV show just to get to the end. You watch it to laugh, cry, worry, be scared, or any other human emotion you can think of. Games like The Last of Us tuned us in to story and emotion in games, and experiences like The Walking Dead make us directly responsible for that emotion. Watching a person get shot on TV can be harrowing. Watching a character you’ve been controlling get shot is worse. Actively making the decision to shoot your own character is absolutely awful and the best god-damned entertainment money can buy. Both The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are spinoffs of TV shows. They are episodes that you can play, that you can essentially be in and experience for yourself. TV and video games have begun to slowly merge.
"Actively making the decision to shoot your own character is absolutely awful and the best god-damned entertainment money can buy"
Hard Rain took interactive games to another level. Like Telltale, we could make decisions that affected the outcome of the game. Many of us had a soft spot for it at the time. Its film-like ambience gave us another opportunity for deep immersion into a game. Glancing fondly back at the game now, it looks a little old, a little PS3-ish. Still, much better than Telltale’s much-loved but dated engine. Do we need great graphics for great immersion? Well, time will now tell. The PS4 just knocked out the incredible Until Dawn. Frighteningly life-like graphics and characters, all of whom can be killed and all of whom can survive. Filmic camera angles, a movie script and all the wonderful tropes and clichés of a fantastic slasher movie meant that Until Dawn felt like you were playing a ten hour movie. I tried watching an actual slasher the day after I completed Until Dawn and got nowhere near the end before I was looking at my phone, checking email and chucking a squeaky fish across my carpet. Bored. Are we on the cusp of losing interest in normal TV and film? It suddenly feels like a very passive activity. What are we supposed to do with our hands? Our brains? Where is our involvement?
It’s lucky then, that things seem set to continue forward. While many of us are unsure about VR, development does mean that the industry is homing in on different ways we can interact with our games and TV, and perhaps we’ll see more Until Dawn style games over the next few years, and not just within the horror genre. Lucky old Xbox One is getting Quantum Break, a part decision-based third-person shooter and part TV show. How you play the game affects how the live action show plays out. Impressive. This isn’t only a glimpse at the future of gaming. It’s a window into the future of how we enjoy TV and film. Passivity, it seems, is soon to be a thing of the past. It time for the viewer to take control.
37