The Limits of Entertainment Mediums
2023-11-22
Have you noticed that films and games seem to have followed the same trajectory? They start strong, with vibrant and creative figures pushing the boundaries of the medium, every title is different, but eventually norms become settled, and we start to see stagnation, and the same formulas repeated over and over, with minute differences, and a much smaller emphasis on creatives?
I think there’s a reason for that; it’s the natural course of an entertainment medium.
Phases
The Technology Phase
In the early days of both film and video games, technology was king. Silent films could only accomplish so much, and only convey so many things. Black and white films couldn’t reach us the way that color could. And better cameras led to more sophisticated lighting. Every technical advancement meaningfully changed what kind of movies could be made. You could never have an engaging version of 12 Angry Men as a silent movie, nor could you ever capture a Wes Anderson movie in black and white.
Games had the same first phase; primitive technology, with technical advancements pushing what could be done. 2D games led to sprite games, led to 3D games, which had their own improvements like skeletal animations, shadow mapping, or cross-platform compilation. Each step meaningfully changed what kind of games could be made, there were rockstar programmers like Carmack or Abrash pushing the state of the art.
But in both cases, eventually the technology takes a backseat. There isn’t a meaningful technological leap that either film or games could make anymore that changes the nature of games that can be made. VR? 3D movies? 165hz? IMAX? Sure these might be cool, or even greatly enhance the experience, but they don’t give creatives any new clay to shape. The technology was only exciting because it unblocked the creative minds, the directors and designers.
The Design Phase
Once the technology asserted itself, designers took the wheel. "talkie" movies may have been cool for the technology, but it’s figures like Hitchcock, Welles, and (Serghei) Einstein that used the opportunity to establish new design tools to connect with audiences. The structure of shots, framing, montage, cinematography and set techniques – audiences were wowed by the output of these figures because nobody had ever truly seen these techniques before, but their use and effect were readily apparent. It’s not that these techniques were genius, in fact in retrospect they seem quite obvious. But the designers not only discovered them, in many cases they provided the definitive use cases for how to exploit them.
In games, the same thing occurred. Sure, Doom and Quake represented technology leaps, but the designers working with it understood how to emphasize and work within those constraints. Not too many years later, games like Half-Life or Sin were breaking ground on gameplay pacing, storytelling, and cinematics. The famous core group of people who went on the create Call of Duty (and later, Titanfall and Apex) started their careers working on the expansion pack to Sin, and notably it contains lengthy cinematics with levels made entirely to emulate B-roll footage or establishing shots.
Design languages started to become solidified. Control schemes, standard features, conveyance techniques, pacing, length of titles, even just the structure of titles (a long continuous story, rather than multiple disjointed "episodes"). We can point to the genius of Valve or Blizzard or 2015/IW/respawn, but again, these things seem obvious in retrospect.
The Scale Phase
After the design and technology start to stagnate, the next step is to break barriers. It’s not enough to have a film with great direction and actors anymore. Audiences start to get bored, and say things like "it’s the same formula over and over". They stop caring so much about auteur directors, and titles become separated into mid-budget and a new category - the blockbuster. A movie so large, so expensive, so incredible, that audiences will overlook the fact that the story, characters, technology, and even just basic composition is the same as any other movie. It didn’t just cost \(100m to make, it _looks_ like it cost \)100m to make. Audiences eat it up, especially internationally where their domestic studios would never secure that kind of funding. Suddenly, the market isn’t just about making a good story or a neat trick, it’s about international audiences and budgets. Anyone can make a movie, but what makes a hollywood movie?
Games have the same thing. By the time of the Xbox 360 (and i’d argue, continuing to current day), studios put more and more effort into bigger, bolder, more cinematic, less mechanical games. Games that are artistically stunning, or breathtaking in their scope and scale. Even games that focus heavily on good gameplay and interesting choices seek bold direction and some amount of cinematic flare. It may be the same third person cover shooter you’ve seen a hundred times, but have you ever seen Uncharted 4’s car chase?!
Eventually, audiences get accustomed to scale. And worse - they expect it. Every movie starts becoming a blockbuster, and audiences lose the ability to distinguish between a \(200m movie and a \)20m movie. Studios keep greenlighting big bets, but it’s not a risky invetment anymore, it’s more of a science. Blockbusters didn’t need Spielberg, it turns out that studio heads can use a rotating cast of directors to push a premade script with pre-selected actors. The scale remains, but innovation happens in a different way – something like the MCU occurs, where a producer tightly guides a decade’s worth of films, all headed by different directors. It demonstrates that directors aren’t the real bosses, that producers can be the driving force of success, and that scale across titles can be as valuable as scale within a title.
Games find the same thing, with live service games realizing that a single title stretched across several years greatly reduces the amount of duplicated effort needed to make several individual installments (it’s so bizarre that gamers resent asset reuse – how many variations of a concrete texture could you really notice?). Some might continue to make yearly bets on blockbuster titles, like cod or fifa, but sprinkled in there are live service offerings that reduce cost and monetize better.
But, both start to get stale.
The Upstart Phase
I know i fudged the timeline with live service a little here
Both mediums found that the 2010s and the proliferation of the internet led to a surprising result - amateurs can actually compete with professionals. Indie games see a number of breakout hits, and shoestring-budget films like John Wick bring in surprising dividends. Consumers, tired of constant scale, start to appreciate mid-budget titles. It’s not like outsiders never flourished in either medium, but the internet makes it surprisingly viable for a lot more of them to do so.
The old studios are institutionally designed to have committees and thousands of employees doing absurdly specialized jobs to put together a predictable product. They’ve lost all of the talent, leadership, and culture that would have even allowed for mid- or small-budget titles. The upstarts in both industries make inroads, but they can’t replace the big, sagging studios. All they’re really doing is capitalizing on the big studio’s unwillingness to pull back from blockbusters. So we end up with an AAA and AA space, where a studio like Netflix greenlights practically any idea that crosses its desk, trusting that there is an audience to be made for it, and small publishers like New Blood, Tinybuild, or Devolver carve out a brand identity for themselves and fund $20 games. They’re not all beloved hits, but that’s to be expected, the point is that audiences finally have choice again. The market had a gap, and they happily filled that gap.
The Next Phase?
We’re at the present day with both industries, now. So far, the parallels are kind of hard to ignore. But, everyone has to wonder what’s next. The trouble is, it’s hard to tell! Extrapolating from current trends would never give us the actual future. If you were alive in the 90s, you might have imagined that more powerful computers would give us games like the Matrix, where everything is simulated – because you’re largely seeing advancement mean "technological advancement". It might have been hard to predict that technology would just… stagnate, and something else would take it in.
Others might say well, really it’s not phases so much as cycles. At some point the old studios will collapse, and we’ll see a surge of talent, then we’ll be back to where we are now. But I’m not sure that’s true – film may have had that with the whole United Artists affair, where a major studio collapsed because it ran out of money after funding a dud movie. But that really just marked the end of the design phase, where companies realized that auteurs don’t bring in the cash anymore. It wasn’t part of a cycle. None of these phases look like they’ll form a cycle, to me.
Personally, I worry that the next phase is "reduction". Generations will have grown up without seeing these phases, without the expectation that something new is equivalent to something amazing. They’ll see an endless sea of live service games, remakes, reboots, remasters, and sequels. Does anyone really care about the next James Bond? Does anyone really care about COD 2024? Or is it just filling an obligatory entry in a studio’s ledger somewhere? What happens if consumers, god forbid, pull back from consumption? We’ve seen some amount of this, where younger members of an industry seem to view it with hostility, opting to push bizarre religious ideas into the products, degrade the quality of the storytelling, and blame audiences for not liking the product (timely note, The Marvels just came out, was atrocious, and has very predictably flopped; the response has overwhelmingly been to blame audiences).
I don’t know if that could happen, but unless the industries give newer generations a real hook, it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll lose interest at much younger ages than the older generations did. I’m in my mid-30s, an i’ve "seen it all". My dad is in his 60s, and only got tired of the formulas in his 50s. People grow out of entertainment all the time, it’s usually a natural part of life. But what would happen if the 13-30 demographic shrinks to be 13-25? 13-20? How young could a person be before they roll their eyes at yet another live service looter shooter?
It could also be that older studios will simply fail. It’s less likely, since when you’re a multi-billion dollar business your funding isn’t a big bank account somewhere, it’s a web of investors with effectively infinite pockets who prioritize your continuity and the restoration of your money fountain over letting you fail. And at this point, the monied interests of the world have firm grips on both industries. I can’t imagine that Hollywood will ever collapse, it’s simply too valuable for anyone to light on fire.
Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that there is a safe route in creativity. Indie games like Teardown or Valheim or Rocket League are hits, not just because they’re mid-budget, but because they represented new ideas, or innovative takes on old ideas. Sure, the formulas might be entrenched, and expectations set, but a product with heart put into it, and a design dialogue worth having, will always sell.
