Sorry Lana, maybe later

For the past couple of months I have been living in a house without a video games console. It must have been the first time in around twenty years that this had been the case, having cohabited with consoles since the McIntosh family owned a ZX Spectrum back in t' day. Since my housemate Tim's PS3 died of old age I can't say I had really been missing video games, despite them taking up quite a big part of most of my teenage life (who needs girls, right). They'd just not really fitted into the dynamic of our new house, with the living room much less prominent than before.

That was before Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch showed up.

It's like Studio Ghibli decided to mash up Pokemon and Final Fantasy!

Due to the existence of this game, Tim and I decided to club together to purchase a new PS3. Since acquiring the game on Saturday I have managed to play it for a few hours, and I know that this game poses a great threat to my ambitions of doing productive grown-up things like job hunting and regular cycles of laundry. It's like Studio Ghibli decided to mash up Pokemon and Final Fantasy. If you were asked to describe what the ultimate JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game, yo) would be like, responding with saying, "something like Studio Ghibli deciding to mash up Pokemon and Final Fantasy," would undoubtedly gain you some sage nods of approval.

In terms of culture, video games are still a long way behind the rest of the pack in the prestige stakes. Although the games industry is now able to boast higher earnings through sales than cinema, as this Guardian article rightly points out, it still has some way to go to compete in terms of the amount of people accessing its products. This will be mainly down to the relatively high cost per unit (Ni No Kuni, a new game, cost £45, whereas an adult cinema ticket will usually come in somewhere under a tenner at the moment), although in terms of how many hours of enjoyment you should be able to get out of a game the game should win every time. Now, working out how cost effective games are is a long road that I don't wish to go down right now. My position is that I think, in terms of enjoyment, they are more cost effective than films, but the fact that they reach out to a much smaller section of the population hampers their cultural impact severely. This is a great shame, as in my experience they have the potential to offer so much more than films can and generally do.

The line between films and games is blurring all the time. The game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is renowned for the length of its cinematic cut scenes. The average length of these, where the player watches passively as events pan out, is 9 minutes, with the epilogue at the end of the game clocking in at around 1 hour 9 minutes. The film adaptation of Coraline was structured incredibly like a computer game (well, both myself and Tim thought so); level, boss encounter, level, boss encounter etc. There have always been game adaptations of films, but film adaptations of games are becoming more prevalent. This illustrates that the ideas and patterns of creativity within both industries are mutually relevant, giving the relationship between the two a feeling of parity. Thus for me it seems as though both industries deserve an equal respect.

The strength of games for me comes with the agency that the consumer has with the act of playing. This is what sets film and game apart. The role of consumer is no longer a passive one but an active one; the gamer has a degree of control over the story. The extent of this agency varies from game to game, but as the best films are often those that deliver characterisation with subtlety so to are the best games those that do not restrict the gamer to a linear playing experience. When this agency is combined with interesting ideas, plot devices, philosophy, social commentary, you feel as though you are actively engaging with these concepts and the experience is heightened stratospherically. You are, in a sense, living them, in the same way that you would if reading a book for example. Reading is also a more active role than watching a film as you are having to create the scenes within the confines of your own self, rather than having them delivered to you. Sure, there is always some level of interpretation going on with watching a film, but this is dwarfed by the amount of world creation you get to do as a reader or gamer.

I also think that games (good ones in any case) tend to get the fun and intelligence factors balanced much easier than films do, which makes that intelligence more accessible. When it comes to writing, I have definitely been inspired more by games than by films. My MA dissertation piece, for example, as seen elsewhere on this blog, was inspired in parts by the ideas of cause and effect that are present in the masterpiece, Braid. I would compare it in many ways to the film Memento, which is currently ranked at number 33 in imdb.com's Top 250 Movies of All Time (tied on points with films such as Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove..., Alien and Spirited Away to name a few), and it is a sad thought that such a small percentage of the people that enjoyed that film will have even heard of this game, let alone experienced playing it.

As a result of my renewed zeal for video games, I shall endeavour to write about anything particularly exciting that may come up whilst I rediscover playing them. One of my favourite blogs in the past was that of Angelo Comet. I got reading his thoughts through his superb journal that followed the TV series Lost. He was able to write with an impressive amount of intelligence and knowledge and was basically producing one exciting mini-essay a week about the latest episode to air. Then I noticed he had other blogs going for games and films. It's a nice idea for charting one's progress, so if anything inspiring or interesting arises, I'll try and clear the floor for it on here.

 Now that I've finished splurging these thoughts out it's time for job-hunting and a laundry cycle.