A Rudimentary Analysis Of Visual Texts Presented By The Game Final
Fantasy VIII
The following analysis of screenshots is the result of a number of overlapping
assignments and lines of inquiry proposed by various faculty. For Danielle Kaplan's
class on TV we were asked to analyze 20 seconds of video footage to try to determine
the effect of cinematic elements. Another assignment was one suggested by Frank
Moretti: start to develop an understanding of what happens in a video game.
There are a number of ways one could come at the latter suggestion, and I appreciate
Danielle's flexibility in allowing me to bend her assignment to video games
to investigate one element of the "what's happening" question. Another
line of inquiry I intend to approach later is what happens when someone begins
to play a game for the first time, which should yield a different range of observations.
When analyzing the cinematography of a video game, angles and cuts cannot simply
be boiled down to a director's aesthetic intent. There are restrictions of technology,
considerations of gameplay, and delivery of information to consider. What ends
up onscreen in a Final Fantasy game is certainly affected by traditional conventions
of cinematography – much more so than the games I played as a kid –
but the game employs a range of other symbol sets, images, text, and contexts
to communicate effectively with the player.
A Note About Pronouns
My use of masculine pronouns here is a conscious
choice made to highlight the gender imbalance in the gaming population and the
male-focused development of the gaming industry.
A Note About Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy games are notorious for their rigid storylines. The decisions
a player makes are relatively constrained. A decision to say something snide
to another character or to not pick up a particular sword will most likely not
effect the outcome of a game. The use of full-motion video (FMV: pre-made video
clips stored on the game disc which appear at key moments) can be more integrated
into a game like this than it could in a game with a more evolutionary format.
The integration of FMV and traditional video-game elements makes for an interesting
set of visual texts.
One More Thing
Looking over this introduction one more time I'm realizing that I haven't defined
my terms well. I'm having a really hard time making differentiations between
where we are, what can be done there, what's being said, and what we see. But
then, where we are in a video game is in part defined by what we can do. What
we see can be controlled by clicks on the controller. What we understand about
the action is defined less by what we see, in some situations, than what is
said -- not much like a movie. Obviously there's a lot more work to be done
here, so I'm presenting this as a reflection of where my thinking about games
is at the moment. (It's not, like, scientific or anything ;) this is more or
less an excercise in making explicit what I know and can see in video games.)
I welcome help in clarifying confusions, teasing out half-developed themes,
finding material written by people who've developed more coherent theories on
the subject, etc.
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What's Going On Here?
At first, for Danielle's class, I thought I would just analyze full-motion video,
but as I thought about it, covering the range of visual presentations in the
game seemed much more interesting. I started out presuming there were four major
"modes" of play in the game: FMV, battle scenarios, town scenarios,
and the world map. It turned out that things were not quite so simple. For example,
I realized there were times in the town scenarios at which the player's only
input was clicking one button in order to progress through pages of dialogue.
At these times, the avatar of the character on the screen couldn't be moved
at all. The camera angle and motion were also preset in these sequences. At
other times in the towns, the player could exploit the character's full range
of movement and access menus, and the camera moved with the character. Knowing
this, I decided there needed to be another way to break down what's going on
onscreen.
Here are some crude categories of visual and other communicative elements in
Final Fantasy VIII which I developed. These will generally apply to other games
in the Final Fantasy genre, but not necessarily to other RPGs.
Camera angle
This Is Not A Movie
A big difference between the visual elements of avideogame – in many current
video games, I think – and movie or television cinematography is the constraints
of function. Angles are chosen in ways that allow for best view of where the
character is and what is in the local environment, for the sake of allowing
the player to exploit this situation. Angle for effect is possible, but generally
secondary. (In fact, I've had a number of people comment to me that Final Fantasy
games's jumpy cutting and peculiar angles actually make it hard to play them
or to orient onesself for the first time what's going on.)
The Actors Are Too Ugly
Game designers are clearly trying hard to develop emotion in the way that a
movie does through the use of full-motion video (FMV), which often employ s
close-ups of faces to further character development. It is worth considering
that while a film director can control the angle and lighting and issue directions
to actors, a full-motion video director can ask for control of everything in
a shot down to the "muscle movements" on a character's face.
But movie-caliber emotion in a video game is currently difficult to pull off
due to technological constraints. Even in the high-quality rendering of the
FMV segments, the faces of characters are clearly inhuman. When they smile,
it's so artificial as to be grotesque if you're really watching. As a result
the camera never lingers on these expressions for too long.
If you talk with people who are devotees of the Final Fantasy genre, you find
that despite this flatness of affect, players develop strong feelings for the
characters as unique individuals. Witness my roommate Charlie, a devotee of
slash fiction (gay erotica extrapolating from an established fictional scenario)
who is able to articulate why a romantic relationship between Zell and Seifer
is more "perfect" than one between Zell and Squall.
Not that this is anything new. I don't imagine moviegoers were any less moved
by silent black and white films with Mabel Normand than they are with color
talkies starring Jennifer Anniston. We all developed feelings about who Mario
and Luigi were long before they were more than squat ugly blocks of pixels.
While a newer generation of gamers has (anecdotally) demonstrated less empathy
for poorly-rendered characters, I figure our ability to project human attributes
on human simulacra will probably always extend to things which are barely lifelike.
This Is The Real World, Baby
Actually, the desire to present a "lifelike" situation seems to drive
a great deal of the visual content of the earlier Final Fantasy games, especially
the full-motion video segments. In these early shots, we see curtains blowing
by an open window and numerous human figures performing different activities
in a courtyard; when characters move from the foreground to the background of
a scene, the camera shifts focus slightly in a way that makes good sense to
a human eye. Obviously, the desire to present dramatic fantasy scenes is also
a major motivator for a lot of these camera angles as well – there are
a lot of low angles to emphasize how large a character or building is, a lot
of sweeping pans, etc. But the drive for realism is there, even in Final Fantasy
VII and IX, which have a more cartoony feel than VIII does.
It May Not Reach Out And Grab You, But It's Still There
After watching an hour of commercial television -- which is pretty rare for
me these days -- I was struck by the difference between commercial music and
video game music. A lot of video game music fades into the background. It loops
over and over. It might be dramatic music with lots of horns and drums, but
once you've heard the same relatively short phrase twenty times in the course
of a battle you don't notice it anymore. And the world-map music is positively
soothing. Commercials angered me even more than usual by the end of the hour.
They try to grab my attention. Video games don't.
It's quite possible to miss very important stimuli in a video game. You have
to hunt for some of the most useful objects in Final Fantasy. I think it's interesting
to note that unlike TV and movies, part of the experience of playing a video
game is finding things which you can't see. Sometimes this is an object on the
ground, sometimes a hidden path, sometimes a sequence which can be unlocked
through a special sequence of movements. I think gamers' orientation towards
seeking events like this could be useful to learning if we could get them to
generalize it. Of course, there are cultural factors undermining this orientation:
many players obtain guides to these secrets from magazines, Internet sites,
or friends, and never go looking for them on their own.
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