Indy and the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark

I’ve enjoyed a slew of Indiana Jones video games, like The Fate of Atlantis and The Emperor’s Tomb, but I haven’t played the Indiana Jones video game I really want right now. It doesn’t exist. Yet with Uncharted and Tomb Raider paying homage in some ways and setting precedents in others, I think the time is right for a new Indiana Jones video-game adventure.

Here’s what I want an Indiana Jones game to be: an adventure game played in the third-person style of Lara Croft and Nathan Drake with rich exploration of engrossing environments, puzzle-based combat, dialogue scenes that count, and rollicking set pieces. The idea is not to recreate the forward momentum of an Indiana Jones movie, because the movies do that already, but to create a uniquely interactive experience that draws on cinematic techniques and ludic mechanisms in equal measure.

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I don’t quite have it yet, but there’s something here. Spoilers for Indiana Jones movies follow.

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Again with War in the North.

I’m using this game to explore some questions because (a) I am currently playing it and (b) because it’s a relatable property even if you’re not playing it—I feel safe assuming that many of you have seen the Lord of the Rings movies or know of them. War in the North is a third-person action RPG set in the movie-adaptation version of Middle-earth (or something so close to it that its familiar characters and locations resemble actors and designs from the films). It focuses on a cast of new heroes battling Sauron’s forces mostly in environments drawn from Tolkien’s lore but not seen in the films.

This isn’t really about War in the North, though. It’s a flawed, fun game that I’ve been enjoying as a fan of Middle-earth and as a gamer looking for light RPG elements, a dose of combat, and some handsome scenery. Still, I can understand why it’s not connecting with some players and reviewers—it’s not a richly complex combat challenge or a deeply varied RPG experience. It’s a light, straightforward affair for casual co-op play and a good deal of Middle-earth sight-seeing.

No, I’m singling out War in the North again because of Game Informer‘s review of it, in which Joe Juba writes:

The conceptual framework is solid, and with some extensive tuning and polish, it would be fun to play. Just thinking of War in the North reimagined as an old-school isometric adventure (à la Dark Alliance) gets me pumped up…but it’s too late for that now. [via]

That bit got me thinking (again) about how games get reviewed.

How much should a game be marked down for driving a reviewer to want the game in a different form? Is it fair to penalize a game for not being another game? How much responsibility does a reviewer have to buy into a game’s premise when reviewing it—and how much of the premise must be accepted?

I mean, if a reviewer thinks that RTS game would make for a great shooter, is that a fair mark against the game—the fact that it is not some other game? I feel like that’s somehow analogous to complaining about a film’s genre or casting; these can be legitimate gripes (“The lead actor was a bad fit for the part”) but they can also go too far (“Tommy Lee Jones should have played the curmudgeonly mentor—I like Tommy Lee Jones—so this movie isn’t what it could have been”).

It’s not that a reviewer is out of line to say “This game made we wish for a new isometric RPG” or “This developer has had greater success with isometric RPGs” but to what extent should a game be faulted for not being something else?

I’m all for reviewers reporting their honest opinions. Isn’t there a difference between reporting one’s opinion and faulting a game for not sharing them, though? To some extent, I should not review RTS games because I objectively suck at them but were I to do so anyway, I think I’d separate my opinions of the medium from a value judgment of the game’s success at fulfilling its own promise. The very best RTS game still makes a crappy FPS.

To what extent should a reviewer grant the game its premise and measure how well it executed that premise—and not how close it came to what the reviewer’s prefers?

I think you should review the game you got. That can be tricky, though, especially as borders between game categories continue to blur. A game with RPG elements might make for a lousy full-on RPG but a great shooter. If a game’s marketing plays up its RPG elements, but the actual game focuses on its job as a shooter, is it fair to fault the game for the expectations set by the marketing department?

As artworks, as products—reviewing games is a complex business.

Over the weekend, Will threw up a tweet pointing to a relatively short GQ piece called “The Day the Movies Died.” It laments Hollywood’s apparent wall-to-wall dismissal of Inception‘s critical and commercial success.

[I]t’s really bad news when the industry essentially rejects a success, when a movie that should have spawned two dozen taste-based gambles on passion projects is instead greeted as an unanswerable anomaly.

The article goes on to lament the slew of mindless sequels and adaptations we’ll see this summer and the next. (You can be part of the solution by not buying tickets to see them, by the way.)

But here’s the good news, and there are two pieces of it:

First, the truly great Hollywood movies of 2011 and 2012 are the ones that we haven’t heard about yet because they’re not major studio tentpoles and so the major studios’ marketing departments are geared up yet—not now, in February—to tell us about them. I think it’s fair to say that there was not widespread public knowledge about, say, The Kids are All Right months in advance of its wide release in July of last year. And yet, great film. More like it will be released this year.

Second, movie-making is continuing to democratize, and continuing to disperse geographically from Southern California. I decided late last year that part of my long-term screenwriting strategy was to stop relying on the green lights of small-minded yes-men in the modern studio system to get movies made. This year, I’m going to make a short and next year or the year after, I’m going to make a feature. I’m going to do it here in Minneapolis. As I’ve started to lay the groundwork, I’m shocked at how much infrastructure and enthusiasm there is for it. I don’t think there’s been a better time for insurgent movie-making ever in the history of film.

Hollywood’s unwillingness to tell stories anymore will be a good thing, for some of us.

Apropos of my earlier post on Steve Long’s licensed games op-ed piece:

• Roleplaying games are not very easy to adapt to traditional narrative forms like novels and films because the most important thing about traditional narrative forms are their protagonists and the things they want, but nearly every RPG begins with the premise that the protagonist is something the player develops, and which is not part of the game-as-published. In an RPG, the more you say about how the protagonist needs to be, the more sketchy a proposition your game becomes.
• Comic books have a nefarious leg up in movie licensing compared to other creative forms because their for-publication format amounts to a film’s storyboard. The numb Suited Human evaluating a comic book property for his production company needs to expend nearly no imaginative effort to see the movie in his mind.
• Even low-circulation comic books benefit from the point above. Even RPGs with a vastly larger fan-base than Indie Comic Book #4,572 can’t compete with them in terms of scoring a movie license, especially given the massive money that’s been earned in the past by high-impact comic licenses like X-Men and Iron Man. (Never mind that there’s no comparison between the comics in question. The Suited Human making the evaluation is simply concerned that, if the movie fails, he will be able to say, “It wasn’t a stupid decision to make a movie based on a comic book. Look at all these other, massively successful comic book adaptations!” And then, the logic goes, he can’t get fired. Not so much with an RPG adaptation.)