I played a good deal of Metal Gear Solid 4 this weekend. Well, actually, a lot of it I watched.
Konami’s flagship game series has always been defined just as much by its seminal stealth-infiltration action gameplay as it has by its intricate story, told throughout the game by means of lengthy cinematic scenes and extensive bursts of radio dialogue between main character Solid Snake (above) and his rogue’s gallery of remote mission operatives.
The latest in the series, released for PlayStation 3 on Thursday, further blurs the line between movie and game. The story sequences are much longer, with some early breaks in the action approaching half an hour. A videogame with extensive non-interactive sequences is not unprecedented per se. What’s new is that Metal Gear Solid 4‘s scenes can be so riveting that you barely notice you haven’t touched your controller.
I don’t think this is the future of videogames, but it’s going to be a big part of them.
As we were capturing footage of the game’s first hour for this week’s episode of Game|Life The Video (right), Wired editor Chris Baker pointed out that Metal Gear Solid 4‘s opening sequence actually goes against the common wisdom about good game design. During the first 15 minutes, we only picked up the controller for a few seconds at a time, during brief bursts of interactivity that punctuated the game’s opening sequences, which see Solid Snake getting dropped into a Middle East war zone for one last stealth mission.
The first few minutes of a game are really supposed to involve more action, if the player is going to be drawn in to the excitement. In fact, having too many non-interactive, movielike sequences in videogames is practically passé at this point — it’s considered to be a remnant of that awkward CD-ROM era where game designers suddenly found themselves with near-infinite storage at their disposal and no idea what to do with it all. After a few years of barely interactive piles of junk that made the marriage of movies and games seem like an unholy matrimony, the prevailing wisdom became that non-interactive expository story sequences should be brief.
Well, nobody told Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima. Actually, several people probably tell him this every year, but he ignores them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that well over half of MGS4‘s first hour is spent watching movies. This percentage dips a bit as you get further into the story, but it’s still a great deal of the experience.
So why, if MGS4 goes against all that is right and good about videogame storytelling, am I praising rather than slamming it for prioritizing movie over gameplay? Because it’s excellent. If these cut scenes were even a little lower in quality — if the graphics and camerawork weren’t so intricately detailed, if the motion capture wasn’t so lifelike, if the voice actors weren’t consummate professionals delivering knockout performances — they could easily become a total drag. Instead, they’re fascinating.
Is Metal Gear, then, going to become a breakout hit that sets the standard for all story-centric games to come? Probably not, for two reasons.
First, the things that make it great are not easily reproducible. It isn’t a Donkey Kong-like leap of intuition that games should have stories told by the onscreen action. And it isn’t a Final Fantasy-like revelation about how film and narrative techniques can be adapted for games. Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn’t come up with any particularly new ideas about telling a story in a videogame — it just brute-forces, through time, money and talent, a dazzlingly polished refinement of the form. You can’t copy that unless you have 100 million dollars and a machine that produces Kojima clones.
But Metal Gear Solid 4 does have a weakness. The story’s pretty much crazy. I’ve played the three previous Metal Gear games, and have only the barest inkling of what’s actually going on in them. There are so many expository sequences that deliver reams of information about the game’s military-industrial conspiracy theory back story, so many weird characters and so many last-minute twists and turns that it’s difficult to keep up.
And Metal Gear Solid 4 has a postmodern penchant for shattering the fourth wall — creator Kojima references himself twice in the game’s first hour — that makes suspension of disbelief impossible. Kojima and crew are masters at crafting riveting game cinematics, but the story they’re telling is such a bizarre tale that I couldn’t see recommending it to a random person purely on the strength of its narrative. Especially considering that it’s part four of a series.
And yet I wouldn’t have the same reservations about Grand Theft Auto IV, because its narrative is self-contained. Moreover, its narrative is significantly tighter. Even though GTAIV is longer than MGS4, a lot less of that time is taken up with story sequences. While it does have one of the best game stories in years, it’s told in less time and with more interaction throughout than MGS4.
GTAIV‘s story was so well-told that Rolling Stone’s movie critic Peter Travers reviewed it this week as if it were a movie. The piece is available online, but you have to see it laid out on the page of this week’s edition of the magazine to truly understand the import — it’s the lead review in the Rolling Stone’s movies section. "(In) terms of action, thrills, imagination and innovation, GTA IV has it all over the pablum currently passing for ingenuity at the multiplex," Travers wrote.
And yet neither GTAIV or MGS4 can really be considered the first of this theoretical new breed of hybrid movie-games. GTAIV‘s cut scenes are excellent, but they’re still just videogame cinematics. MGS4 goes far out on a limb and makes half the game non-interactive, but the story is just a little too out there to appeal outside the current group of Metal Gear aficionados.
But this spring’s one-two punch of Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4 will almost certainly be seen as an indication that heavily story-driven games are an idea whose time has finally come — for everyone who isn’t a fan of role-playing games, anyway. And MGS4 is showing that there can be a whole bunch of non-interactive story in a game, as long as it’s excellent. The stumbling block was never that movies don’t work in a videogame, but that terrible ones don’t.
I’m not saying that the entire future of videogames lies in these sorts of hybrid experiences, but it’s something we’ll likely be seeing more of. Why not just make a movie? Because there’s something fundamentally interesting about having control of a main character. When you’re moving Solid Snake around during the largely non-interactive first chunk of Metal Gear Solid 4, you’re connecting with the protagonist in an immediate way that purely non-interactive movies cannot offer.
On the flip side, why not make the game fully interactive and deliver story while the player is playing? Because that doesn’t work nearly as well. There’s a scene in Metal Gear Solid 4 where, while Snake talks with some other characters about big plot points, you can control a robot that moves around the room and finds hidden items. So what was I doing? Searching for hidden items, which took my attention away from the story, and now I forget what exactly they were talking about.
Ultimately, we shouldn’t have to split our entertainment decisively down the middle, with movies on one side and games on the other. There’s room for something right in the middle that uses interactivity when it’s appropriate and lets us just watch when it’s appropriate — whatever delivers the story the best. With CD-ROM, we attempted to blur the line before the technology — and more importantly, before game designers — were ready. That shouldn’t be taken as a reason to never again attempt it. We can have movies that are just movies, and games that are just games. But there’s also plenty of room for media that straddle the line.
Image courtesy Konami
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