[GTA IV's New York]So although Slate does a "gaming club" each year now, featuring a fine cadre of Our Own (Croal and Totilo included -- hey, where's my invite, dudes?), I actually found myself reading Slate's movie club critical roundtable more closely.
The Me-Too Moment
I got sucked in when Slate critic Dana Stevens pointed out how the Times' David Carr likened the year-end film slate to "drinking from a firehose". -- Hey! We went through that too -- we're just like you, Mr. Carr!
Continues Stevens, "It's such a treat to kick back and think about whatever moved us, provoked us, or annoyed us enough to persist in memory, regardless of prestige level, release date, or marketing budget." Hey, hey! That's how I feel right now, too, now that the firehose-drink is over.
"When the club convened early last year, there seemed to be a consensus that 2007 had been a bumper-crop year for movies," Stevens goes on. "Everyone's top-10 list looked like a bouncer's clipboard at a velvet-rope club, with extra contenders elbowing their way forward.... there were so many movies that caused near-universal swoons...."
Whoa, now she sounds almost exactly like the prefaces that I and many of my colleagues placed ahead of our year-end favorites! "Compiling the list for 2008 was tougher," she adds. "I'll confess that, while I admired every movie I chose, in a stronger year some of them might have felt like filler. Did any of you find it similarly hard to sift the gems from 2008's dross? I'm not trying to get all end-is-nigh on you here, but didn't this year's field feel a little fallow? Not one of the posh holiday Oscar-seekers made me sit up and say 'Wow'..."
Just swap a few terms out here and there, and doesn't it seem like you could be believably reading a commentary on this year's holiday video game slate? I recently pondered the same "was it really a bleh year?" question with almost the same exact tone.
[The Dark Knight's Chicago-ish Gotham City]Stevens also says: "Then there were those movies that seemed important at the time but have diminished in retrospect. For me, one of these was The Dark Knight." Swap "Dark Knight" for "Grand Theft Auto IV" and I think I know how she feels.
I think you get the idea. We learned a long time ago that it's not always constructive to compare films to games, as the analogies tend to fall apart at almost every key point. That makes it all the more fascinating that, somehow, film critics and game critics appear to be feeling the same way about their medium at year end. Like "us over here" in video games, film critics felt overwhelmed, struggled to pick out a "best", and had wildly divergent, often conflicting favorites lists.
But, Like -- Why, Though?
So I read some more of Slate's movie club, wondering to what the critics attributed their mixed opinion this year. Critic Lisa Schwarzbaum added a thought: "You know, the way I've been explaining away the eh (or is it meh?) year at the movies that Dana identifies is: In 2008, real life trumped anything we might have seen on screen."
Oh-hh. That just might be it.
One key difference between films and games is that although both are, in general "entertainment" and "escapism," it's always seemed to me that film much more accurately mirrors ongoing, present trends and interests in broader culture. Take a glance back at any period in time and look at its films, and you'll see that they always bear some relationship to that era's zeitgeist, more often a reaction (a fiction that directly opposes or complements the reality) than a reflection (an accurate mirror thereof).
Games, I think, are too new to start showing those same tie-ins to either American or global culture -- the idea of a "global audience" alone is still fresh, and if we're seeing trends in the industry, they seem related more to maturing technology or evolving design rather than the idea of games playing a significant cultural role as escapism.
The most interesting trend to me alongside the climate now is the fact that games seem to be strengthening (did you see GameStop's record sales while just about every other retailer's tanking?) while film audiences are waning [*], but as far as subtle microtrends around the art and emotion in different genres that directly correlate to culture rather than insular, game-specific evolution, I doubt those connections exist yet.
I think that'll change, of course, since the biggest stumbling block most publishers hit this year was the failure to understand nontraditional audiences -- you know, "everyone else". But could it have been difficult, in the environment of 2008, to relate to films and games that attempted to march on as "business as usual," to ignore a recession, a war and an historic election as much as possible and produce reasonable facsimilies of the sort of entertainment they'd have had success with in happier times?
Especially with games, the titles that launched this Fall and holiday were generally planned years before, well into development long before this sudden sociological hard turn emerged. Slate's film club also seemed to suggest that the movies they were evaluating admirably aped all the traits of "important films," but alongside a sudden shift in their context, failed to capture what is truly important to audiences right now.
Escapism And The Real World
Says Schwarzman: "The logic doesn't track if you follow it through, I know—we're looking at projects that have been in the works for months, years, or, in the curious case of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, decades. But I do think that the global and domestic convulsions of the past year have been so gripping that something handsome and polished... feels even less satisfying. They're all movies that keep viewers at a distance... they're all received notions of what we think of as 'the good stuff.'"
There might be a more literal logic behind the sense of deliberate engineering to "the good stuff" -- I've heard film critics say that a lot of the year's film projects seemed expressly designed to engineer Oscar nominations for certain stars, just as a lot of the year's game projects aimed to follow a Metacritic-driven checklist of what makes a "good" game.Still, the idea of cultural relationship is interesting. I always felt that I related to music critics much, much better than film critics, but if it's true that games as culturally-important escapism seem to be even in some small way in step with movies, it might be a silver lining as we begin 2009.
What about you guys -- if you're into movies at all, did you observe any relationship between how you felt about them and how you felt about 2008's games? Does it come to bear on your social environment or real life at all?
[*I'm told this is not in fact so. That's what I get for watching the news!
**Thanks to Jackson for demonstrating that I might not have been crazy after all and possibly was even CORRECT]
