Last week in my article on Romantic Comedy Video Games, I made mention that another difficult genre to recreate in video game format would be Documentaries. So guess what I’m talking about this week. First things first, a definition of Documentary:
Documentary – “Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.
n. pl. doc·u·men·ta·ries – A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.” (thefreedictionary.com)
From my own previous experience, it’s easy to say that video games could make a great virtual museum. I remember as a kid, playing edutainment games that were essentially a Wolfenstein clone, but instead of Nazis running around in corridors, you’d have paintings on the walls with little plaques containing information on the artwork, usually just a name and date. I also used to play with the Encyclopedia Britannica cd, looking through all the timelines and video files included on the disk. But these are not Documentaries.
To a certain extent, Eternal Sonata is a documentary of sort. Well, parts of it are at least. In between chapters, the game would offer short little stories about Chopin’s life. Included were pictures of various real world locals that may or may not be a part of the biography that they were telling. Although once these chapter breaks ended it went right back to the fictional drama of the game. These’s breaks were documentary style, but not at all interactive.
A note should be made about the difference between Documentaries and Historical Fiction. Many many shooters are doing an excellent job at Historical Fiction, or fiction that tends to be historically accurate. Much like sports games, World War II FPSs are often about accuracy. With sports the idea that the more accurate the simulation the better the gameplay. The same can be said for WWII shooters. And while historically accurate, it’s hard to say that the average shooter is a Documentary. You almost always play as a fictitious military personnel fighting along side real historical figures, but often in non-historical missions. Very close to the idea of a Documentary, but not quite.
All of this back story is nice, so say me, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Are Documentaries possible in an interactive medium? Adding historical (contemporary and before) film clips to games is an easy task, one that has been done in a number of times, but that’s all they are, film clips. Does player control create an atmosphere that is at odds with the Documentary style?
One possible form of documentary interactive media is the surveillance camera. A person watches actual events taking place, in real time, and at their control is the angle and zoom of the camera. The player decides what they watch and for how long. Taking it one step further, what if we mount the camera onto a movable stand? Now the player can move around the environment and view the work from many different perspectives, receiving a more “true” experience. The final step in this scenario would be to attach an arm to this jaunting camera. Now the player can interact with objects in the environment outside accidentally bumping into them with our mount.
But here we run into a problem, one that has been debated for decades within the genre. The player now has the ability to affect the outcome of the documentary. Are we okay with the non-partial observer in this genre? Sociologists are of two minds on this topic. One side thinks that observation without interaction is the truest form of documenting a situation, while another group calls that bollocks and says that the only way to truly document something is to interact with it, and that even by putting up a camera to record with no physical contact at all is still a form of interaction.
For the purposes of interactive media, even a documentary would require interaction, it’s in the name. But the question is at what level of interaction are we actually playing a game? Is a camera with only angle control enough?
There is a movement, in the broader realm of animation, to use professional modelers when recreating archeological dig sites for presenting to the general populous. Currently, an archeologist will take a summer course in 3D modeling if they want to display their work as a 3D model. Studies, such as Digital Archaeology (http://www.digital-archaeology.com/), are trying to change this.
Taking it to the next level, which Digital Archaeology is starting to do, it is possible to create factual representations of real world space that a character could then walk around in. The “goal” of these games would be to explore every nook and cranny of the local. It wouldn’t take much to add voiceovers to these games, so that as the player walked around they’d get information about real events that took place in history. It could even be possible to recreate events with characters, rather than showing film footage. So long as the player always stayed in control, and the information was correct (to the best of our knowledge), would these then be interactive documentaries? Or would they just be dynamic dvd menus? Perhaps those Wolfenstein clones from my childhood were early representations of documentary video games after all.