I don’t think games will ever have this – for all the diversity of cinema, it can always be distilled to a universal – filmed images and sound telling a story or showing a progression.

Games are such a wild beast, each one acting in a different context, using different mediums, that no one game will be able to push them forward or set the bar for everything as it will only represent what it’s own universe, and not how the others work. Try Tetris, try WoW, but you’ll likely never see anything that becomes a definative example of games that is recognised by all. (Tetris meets pretty much all my criteria for the perfect game, but that’s another story :))

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I have hope, but I’m also sceptical.

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Folks, he’s the guy behind that whole ‘primary-colored bob haircut’ mystery/love interest that keeps recurring in one form or another in many comics, games and animations since the mid-eighties. As with Moebius, a great many staples of game-oriented conceptual design are at least inspired by his visual antics.

Anyway, like many already said, the ‘realistic’ approach doesn’t work with the subject matter in those screenshots. After Okami, I can see how they could have aimed for a more ‘hand-painted’ 3d look that stays reasonably close to the dynamic flourishes of Bilal’s drawing style.

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@Dinger’s most recent post
Great post.

I think the basis of the Citizen Kane thing is people don’t think we have the equivalent level of maturity (in terms of cinematic devices in Kane which I guess Welles was partially establishing) for our medium yet. Something that does everything that you explained Kane does for cinema for games on a similar level.

I’m not sure I explained that well and I get your argument is kind of saying we are already at the level. I don’t know if we are or not.

And with you 100% about Kane’s editing, framing, shots, etc

And are those guys watching the newsreel newspaper editors?
If so, I missed that. Way out of my depth here.

Also Orson Welles is such a great name.

@Matt
Isn’t the Cahiers du cinema thing why we visit sites like RPS, not for the news posts and that which anyone could write (though not as witty as you RPS) but for interviews like that one with Rod Humble, the Pathologic piece (even if I haven’t read it yet, the retro/game revisited articles, the big discussions on a game i.e. stuff like Jim’s stalker piece.

Also people like Jon Blow and game discussions are in that kind of area I think.

I want a ‘Cahiers du cinema’ of games to be doing a re-appreciation of the works of David Jaffe in a few years.

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That is why I don’t agree with its use, it is just a lazy term that doesn’t actually mean anything. To analyse the statement in that way is to manufacture meaning into it that doesn’t exist.

Cahiers du cinema:
As I said I used the term metaphorically. What I am saying is not “Why doesn’t someone copy exactly what they did?” What I am saying is games could benefit from a critical reassessment to help them move forward as a genre. More than this is needed though, it needs to be an effective movement and taken up by people who go on to develop games. Maybe I’m not explaining exactly what I mean, so misunderstandings are inevitable, perhaps it isn’t the best term either, perhaps it was just a lazy throwaway term I wrote to generate some debate that doesn’t deserve an extensive explanation.

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Citizen Kane: Yes, a fine flick. above all for reasons that have everything to do with how it’s shot, and very little to do with its epic narrative. But the narrative is good, and since (perversely) people seem to bring up the missing Citizen Kane of videogames to refer to the development of videogame narrative (or “storytelling”) with respect to the genre as a whole, let’s take a look. Citizen Kane tells the story of a mass medium coming to maturity, becoming aware of its power, then collapsing when it is supplanted by another. Charles Foster Kane is above all the newspaper man: torn from his idyllic childhood home and raised by a bank, he buys a newspaper and sees its true force in providing the truth, not reporting it. In pushing those limits, everything collapses, or so it seems.
But just as Kane slowly drifts into meaninglessness at Xanadu, so do his newspapers.
Film writes the obituary for newspapers. The film opens at the gate. Kane dies, uttering the famigerate “rosebud”. The next shot is his obituary, told by newsreel, viewed by high-paid journalism execs who don’t realize what they’re watching (“It’s a tough thing to do in a newsreel.”). The movies frame focuses on a print journalist seeking a hook — the to an article — to draw the viewer in and make sense of a life and a form now foreign, almost incomprehensible, but towering in cultural memory like Xanadu itself. But at the same time, he is searching for a word. At the end of the picture, the reporter states “I don’t think any word explains a man’s life.” The camera then pans (deep focus) across all the assorted junk of Kane’s life, including Rosebud, and we realize that no written narrative has the power to convey what we just saw.

Many of the actors (and Welles himself) largely came from radio (the Mercury Theatre, and were being thrust into a new medium themselves.

This makes the “Where’s our Citizen Kane?” complaint tiresome: the complaint inevitably focuses on the quality of (cinematic) narrative, but the film’s narrative impact comes in its conscious supplanting of conventions from other media. The complainers become like the magazine executives in the screening room: they try to understand the new media in terms of the old, and they fail. The witnessing the obituary for print as the dominant mass medium, but they don’t get it.

So, move beyond considering games in film terms, and you’ll see not only a Metropolis, but a whole slew of your Citizen Kanes.

Cahiers du Cinema: What do you mean? People appreciating a medium for its artistic merit, and pointing out that what is commonly considered popular entertainment often has greater merits? Or arguing about the meaning of words?
I’m sure somewhere on the internet people are doing that with videogames.

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Actually my argument would be that because games are not cinema is the reason they do need deconstruction from a critical perspective, rather than simply using film theory. The “Cahiers du cinema” is a metaphorical reference.

As for it being in the early stages, well I agree there as I said before it is still a dramatically unstable format.

I agree (generally speaking) with your point about writers though not entirely with all of it.

Sorry for getting off the original topic a bit by the way I must confess I know virtually nothing about Enki Bilal.

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oh and we’ve had our Citizen Kane since the dawn of 3d: heck, only recently are we getting over the magic of deep focus!

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The strength of character design is one of the things that takes you through the game.

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