At a Battlefield: Hardline event this week, the design team mentioned quite an interesting theory about why the single-player stories in games never seem to live up to blockbuster status. It’s because we have made one hell of a false equivalence in our assumptions about what game stories are most like.
We like to compare games to movies. Games, of course, are their own artform and constructing a narrative in game space will always be different than constructing a narrative in any other media, but we still love to use the movie comparison. We direct games like movies, hire casts that would be reminiscent of a movie’s cast, and imagine them as one continuous narrative arc from start to finish.
However, the team on Battlefield: Hardline had different idea. If you were to ask what artform games most resemble, they wouldn’t say movies. They would say it was the TV show.
Think about it for a second. First just look at the length. Movies are 2, maybe 3 hours long. Even if you put together all the movies in a franchise that runs far too long for its own good, you are usually seeing three to five movies, which gets us six to ten hours. Only when we start looking at the very long franchises like Harry Potter or Friday the 13 th do we even start coming close to the average run time of a single game. So in the span of one game’s time, a movie franchise has told several stories whereas the game has told only one.
But examine the TV serial. How long does a season of a TV serial last? Thirteen episodes? Twenty-six episodes? When you consider shows that run for an hour long, like all our favorite binge watching targets like Game of Thrones , you see that a season of a TV show is about the same length as the run time of a game.
Not only that, but the very structure of a game mirrors that of a TV season, because a game has missions and levels. Each of these missions tells its own small story as a piece of the greater narrative arc. That’s exactly what episodes in a season of a TV show do. The season has its own narrative arc, and each episode tells a small piece of the story.
Now think about how long you end up playing individual missions in a game. These can be anywhere from fifteen minutes, an episode of Adventure Time , to an hour, an episode of Game of Thrones . They synch up far more with the runtimes of individual TV episodes than anything a movie has to offer.
Part of the key comparison here is the fact that movies aren’t broken up but TV shows are. Movies have a sense of momentum that carries them from start to finish. They are designed for everything to be fresh in your mind because one scene follows another follows another until you reach the end. As such, subplots have to be resolved quickly within a two hour time span.
TV shows, on the other hand, are designed to be stopped. Even if you decide to binge watch something from start to finish you probably aren’t going to get through all of it in one night. You put it down, let your excitement build, then pick it up again. No matter how much you watch at once, there is a natural break between episodes that separates subplots.
Games too are designed to be stopped and picked up again. Rarely do we play through games in all one sitting. In addition, the beginning and end of missions usually denote a separation of subplots. Heck, some games like Devil May Cry and Resident Evil go as far as to call these sections “chapters.” Once again, this falls in line with how TV is produced, not how movies are made.
TV and movies are not interchangeable. You can’t simply port format to the other and expect nothing to be lost. The same is true with video games. So if we are comparing games to movies, it would make sense why game plots aren’t holding our attention. Movie plots are meant to hold your attention for two to three hours and we play our games for fifteen, which would feel like the longest and most padded movie in existence. TV plots, on the other hand, are meant to keep you occupied for 15 hours in many short spurts. So maybe if we tried to develop game plots the same way we develop TV plots, our game plots would be a whole lot more interesting?
What do you think? Are games more like TV in their narrative style? Let us know in the comments.