Comments on: The Play's the Thing

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:29:53 +0000

Good to know someone else disagrees with the perception (supported by Hitchcock himself, for whatever reason) that Rope was little more than a gimmick.

By: Brett Douville

Brett Douville — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:38:18 +0000

I totally agree (and blogged about “disparate influences” a million years ago). I feel like the games I remember most have more influences — Grim F, of course, and Psychonauts. Heck, the Iliad has about the same body count as a modern shooter, and yet every single death has at least a little meaning (references to the parents they leave behind, or the wife who will be alone, or what have you). I’d love an action/adventure game set in the mythology of the Ramayana, or hey you know, I just read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and why not have more games set in the Victorian era? Even if we must have the same gameplay year in and year out, can we at least have *something* different?

I was amazingly invested in a movie by Aki Kaurismaki Friday night, I highly recommend it to you — called Man Without a Past, Netflix has it, definitely check it out as a fairly straightforward story which is nonetheless completely unique.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:48:25 +0000

Yeah, you should definitely watch Rear Window and The Birds again. The thing I like best about Hitchcock (apart from his brilliant sense of humor) is that he made movies that you could watch and appreciate as great movies even before you understood everything that's going on inside them. I took way too many cinema studies classes in college (as film majors are prone to do), and didn't get a lot out of them that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own. Except for Rear Window: once I watched that in context, I could finally appreciate what a work of genius it is. He didn't just know movies, he knew audiences. That's why it frustrates me to see game developers being so insular with their influences. There's this insistence that Hollywood has nothing to offer apart from the surface — so you see games liberally borrowing from Aliens and Saving Private Ryan and shallow horror movies like the Castle remakes (entire sections of BioShock seemed to be lifted from The House on Haunted Hill). But people talk as if "gameplay" were this completely separate thing, totally undiscovered country, and ignore the deeper stuff that goes on in the movies they're borrowing from. It's all about connecting with an audience, something movies have been doing for 100 years.

By: Brett Douville

Brett Douville — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:10:37 +0000

Bah, go take your balanced, nuanced opinions and take them back to a magazine or something, this is the internet. :)

That’s interesting about Rope, I wasn’t aware that Hitchcock considered it a failure. (While I’ve always been a movie enthusiast, it’s only been in the last six or seven years that I’ve gotten really into thinking about them beyond entertainment, long after I had watched all of Hitchcock… I might need to revisit.)

I think your last sentence is bang on — and with just a tiny bit of editing, I bet you could fit it in fewer than 140 characters.