Synergy

Finally back to research, blog reading, catching up on various things, I just read this NYTimes article about the King Kong video game. Seems that the makers of the Halo movie (Halo movie?!?) wanted to use the set of King Kong, and Peter Jackson signed on as executive producer, as he finishes up s\the technical tings for the King Kong video game release. We can all probably agree that historically most video game movies suck, and most video games based on movies suck. Some exceptions An exception in the first category are Tomb Raider, which I guess also sucks but was a box office hit (even I have been coopted by H’Wood $$$) ; in the 2nd category, the Matrix video games, LOTR, Star Wars, maybe some others are pretty good. The best video games expand the movie universe, adding new characters and settings, and, most importantly, advance the themes of the film. from the article: “In the case of King Kong, Mr. Jackson wanted to create a video game that allowed players to experience a universe he created that otherwise would be confined to a two-hour movie” The word “confined” is important here, as film is now seen as a limiting medium, capable only of a short narrative/thematic exposition, and vg is something that can expand on this, lasting many hours and promising at least some interactivity. In the end, it’s a strategy to make more money from branding, and the quality of the objects often suffers. Until now:

Video game development has mostly been left to computer programmers who are experts at writing code and have less skill in cinematic storytelling. But with a new generation of game consoles and more lifelike graphics being released, the line between the two worlds is blurring. Major movie studios, with their vast libraries, want to make their own games. And video game companies are seeking new Hollywood-style franchises to compete.

I agree that the line is blurring, but film is still a privileged storytelling medium. The language we use to talk about video games has to be different than that used to talk about film, even as the two share many traits. Which brings me to the next point of interest, articulated over at Digital Poetics, about liberal arts education and media, and the role of resistance. Nicholas rightly argues that much today’s new media scholarship is more descriptive than argumentative, and that that is in part because of the proliferation of screens, our complete immersion in media, and the demystifying function of new media to reveal its own codes. From here he asks: “Why does a student today need to be told how a movie or a video game “works its ideology on you” when the movie or game itself can’t wait to confess this fact?” I would argue that revealing codes and “making of” featurettes does not reveal ideology, and, in fact, gives the illuson of transparency even as the code-revealing mechanisms reinforce the same ideologies. In many ways the demystification process puts film in the postiion of one among many media, less dominant, but flattens the media landscape into a more or less homogenous set of images, complete with commercials for more hardware to watch more images. He ends with a provocative paragraph about media studies itself:

All media, all the time. A contagion of screens, in the form of TVs, laptops, portable DVD players, cell phones, IPods…And a crisis for a new media theory discipline that denies that it, too, is complicit in the promotion and spread of ever more effective ways of using the screen. And because universities and colleges today are imagined and governed increasingly as businesses, what place is there for a discipline whose goals are not the “appreciation” or the “mastery of” but rather the “opposition” to the logic of the screen today?

The opposition eems nonexistent in part because of the ubiquity of the media, and the rapidity with which they mulitply. I don’t have an answer to this, but it is certainly a thought-provoking question. (Actually now that I think about it, something like Shaviro’s Connected comes to mind as resistant through a mixing of style, a reliance on science fiction, a further “reveailng of codes”…maybe more on this later).

What does this have to do with King Kong? The function of video game/movie synergy is an expansion of narartive universe, a totality that crosses media not to demystify, but to spread, viruslike, to make the ideological impact more ubiquitous, powerful, inescapable.