Worlds in Repose
Whenever you think of a creature, think of a lion—how a lion can be absolutely malignant or benign, majestic, depending on what it’s doing. If your creature cannot be in repose, then it’s a bad design.
There is a fantastic podcast that was posted this week, in which Julian Murdoch moderates a discussion about games and movies between Ken Levine and Guillermo del Toro. You should absolutely listen to it. In it, Guillermo del Toro mentions the above quote from movie special effects creator Ray Harryhausen about designing a monster. He goes on to talk about how he designs a monster as a character rather than as a function. It’s a great point and immediately struck me as something that, in games at least, applies not just to monsters but to the world of the game itself.
I’m a big appreciator of place as a narrative device and a character in a story, especially in game stories. In most of the games where I’ve really liked the story, the largest part of that narrative was told silently by the world. Silent Hill isn’t scary because it’s filled with monsters, it’s scary because the town itself seems to have a soul, a sense of living presence that mirrors and elaborates on the psychology of the protagonist.
So in analyzing about what makes a world good or memorable as a character in the narrative, I think this principal of Harryhausen’s is useful: being able to imagine the world in repose, at rest. I think this is a big part of the appeal of open world/exploratory games to me, the ability to simply stop and watch the world go by, to see it existing independently of your goals, to however temporarily not see it as a function.
I think it also helps explain cases where a game world doesn’t work. Gears of War puts a lot of time and effort into establishing a distinctive sense of place for Sera, but I never get the feeling walking through it that I can imagine people living in those massive Gothic ruins, or walking to work past those networks of chest-high walls. And for all the effort that the Call of Duty and Battlefield games put in to building mundane and realistic settings, the constant push forward and never-stopping rush of enemies undermine my ability to imagine the world doing anything at all other than trying to kill me. Half-Life 2 on the other hand, despite being cut from the same linear shooter cloth as those other games, fills itself with quiet moments and quiet places - things you can run right past if you want, but that you can also stop and explore.
This principal is one of the ways in which games have a really unique advantage as a medium: they have the time to indulge the concept of seeing the world at rest. A movie doesn’t have this luxury, except in the odd art film like Koyaanisqatsi or Empire, they have only a few establishing shots allowed to set up a place on its own before they must fill it with people who have the business of plot to attend to and relegate the world to the background. Which isn’t to say that movies (or books, or plays, or operas) are unable to build compelling and alive feeling places, or to push them into central narrative roles - only that they must work harder to do this, sneaking them in around all the people and events that are working to steal the spotlight. They don’t have the option, as games do, of letting the audience stop and examine the space at the whim of their own curiosity. Of taking a break from the mad rush toward the end of the story to sit in some corner and imagine the world around them in repose.
Credit where it’s due: the image at the top of this article is from the cool Half-Life 2 Photography Flickr group, and the text of the Harryhausen quote is from a New Yorker interview with del Toro in which he also cited it.
