Article: Book-like and Movie-like Games

I often try to categorize games in new ways, to see if it helps players to figure out what types of games they like best.  I've previously discussed games in terms of their story, their protagonist description, and even their emotional content.

Now let's split them up in a new way.  There are games which are movie-like, and games which are book-like.

Movie-like games are games that go for as much realism as possible for graphics, physics, sound, and so on.  They try to make you feel like you are truly in another world, battling aliens or terrorists or whathaveyou.  Movie-like games are more common today than they ever have been, particularly in the hardcore market.

Book-like games are games that abstract out a lot and require you to use your imagination.  They may have simple graphics and unrealistic mechanics.  Book-like games are the way games began, and they continue to be popular for both casual and hardcore gamers.

The line on the scale for differentiating the two is fuzzy and is constantly moving.  In general, however, you can say that the clearer the image, the more movie-like it is.

Way back when, book-like games were all there were.  Pong is book-like.  You have to use your imagination (if you want to) to pretend those lines are Ping Pong paddles and the little white square pixel is a ball (this was before we had color... or circles).  Text-based Adventures are book-like, of course.

Super Mario Bros. is book-like.  While the forms are there, and you don't have to use much imagination to see what you're supposed to see, that fire flower isn't all that flowery.

I'm pretty sure that's ET, not a flower.

Indeed, consider the current picture of Mario, and compare him to his first appearance as Jumpman in Donkey Kong.  As Mario evolved, artists used their imaginations and skills to give Mario more detail.  His basic form is there, but heck, you might not even consider that he's wearing overalls.  Who can really say?  You must use your imagination to fill in the details and decide what Mario looks like, until we have better images of him.

Some games tried live action shots, particularly Adventure Games like The 7th Guest; others only used live actors in cutscenes, like many games on the Sega CD.  Now these are pretty much extinct, because graphics in games are becoming so good, CGI is just as good.

That is, we think so, until the next round of impressive graphics appears.

I used to think that MYST island was photorealistic.  I believed I was walking around a real island.  But then graphics got better, and even its sequel, Riven, completely destroyed the idea that MYST was ever anything more than a detailed cartoon.  You can look back at MYST now and wonder what the big deal was.

And then they remade it to be even more realistic, and even the remake looks a bit meh.

So as games become more realistic, the like between what is movie-like and what is book-like shifts.  What was once thought to be photorealistic is now most definitely not.  But that doesn't mean MYST takes the same amount of imagination to understand as Donkey Kong.

In fact, MYST takes hardly any imagination at all, in terms of graphics.  The bookshelf still obviously looks like a bookshelf, the sailing ship looks like a sailing ship, and no one in their right mind would question it.

Yet if you were unfamiliar with Donkey Kong, would you know what everything is?  Do you know what everything is, even though you supposedly already know?  Sure, you know about the barrels and hammer and gorilla and ladders, but what are the platforms you are walking on?  Those are more than just platforms.  Those are supposed to be steel girders and catwalks.  You're not climbing an abstract series of platforms; you're climbing a building under construction.  And that takes a ton of imagination.

Yet many modern games mix the two.  Take any RPG, for example.  The cutscenes are, of course, movie-like.  Depending on just how good the graphics are, the exploration might be movie-like as well.  But if the battle system is turn-based, menu-based, or in any other way not strictly action-oriented, then it's being abstracted out, and is book-like.  Even in the world of that RPG, battles aren't really turn-based, because sometimes impressive action sequences occur in the cutscenes.  So the game offers a place for your imagination to take over.

That is not to say that either type of game is bad; my favorite games cover every piece of the spectrum.  God of War is a 99 on a 100 point movie-like scale, and Dwarf Fortress is a 99 on the book-like scale.  Both games are awesome.

I do wonder, however, about how smooth the transitions are in games that are somewhere in the middle.  For some, it's no problem at all.  RPG players bounce back and forth every couple of minutes.

But I wonder if bouncing takes getting used to or if we can easily do it without experience.  I grew up playing book-likes, movie-likes, and mixes, so I never considered the difference.

But suppose someone who has never played a videogame before is being introduced to one.  Do you give them one extreme, the other, or something in the middle?  Perhaps what matters is how much the inductee likes to use his imagination.  Perhaps an avid book reader would like a book-like game, while an avid movie watcher wants a movie-like game.  To give them the opposite might turn them off from games.

"Who keeps throwing these bricks down this well?  That's what I want to know."

Think about someone you know who doesn't play games.  Think about their personality and interests, and consider which kind of game they are more likely to take a liking to.  Introduce them to a game you think they might like based on this dynamic, and post the results in the comments.