300 Sets of Rippling Abs
By Steve
300 is one of the gayest movies ever made, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s about a bunch of sweaty, half-naked steroidal men fighting an enormous army led by a drag queen who sports all manner of body piercings and a giant codpiece.
It’s also a videogame, full of in-engine, 360-degree spins and pre-rendered backgrounds. Gamers may reflexively reach for their mouse, keyboard, or gamepad to reposition the camera for maximum viewing impact. It shares with games an obsession/fetishization with cool violence, cheesy macho posturing, and an adolescent view of sexuality. (Most women are useless unless they’re lesbians, in which case they’re awesome! The oracle has nipples that could cut glass!)
It’s a giant comic book… oh, wait, that’s intentional. Never mind, then.
Still, it makes you wonder how much, or if 300 is influenced by videogames. It’s all very God of War-esque. Director Zach Snyder is 40, and since Hollywood will no-doubt think he has his “finger on the pulse of youth culture,” that’s likely to include videogames.
The reality is that games and 300 share the same inspiration. Games routinely rip off comic books, and so are more movies nowadays. (It’s a quick and easy marketing hook for them; there’s no reason 300 had to be based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel.) Most “cinematic” games aren’t using actual cinema as their source material. They look to comic books for storylines, action, characterization, and dialogue. (And fantasy/sci-fi novels.)
At the risk of sounding like a pretentious, snobby twit, it’s why most games—and movies like 300—are so narratively shallow. There’s no subtlety to let viewers/gamers fill in some of the blanks. Everything is obvious and in your face.
In most games, narrative is shoved down your throat. “Here is our narrative, and you will digest all of this pseudo-Tolkien shit our designer created on weekends.” Gamers tend to view the games with the most detailed and largest storylines as being the best, but in reality they’re just that; the most detailed and largest. (It’s also I suspect why some people dig anime; they look fabulous but the storylines are simplistic, the themes overdone. But there’s a lot of storyline, and quantity=depth for a lot of people.)
300 dispenses with most storytelling, which is to its credit. The voiceover gives you the setup, and it’s mostly just balls-out action. Since this is all about eye candy and action, it’s preferable to the leaden clunkiness that overwhelms most historical pieces—and most games, for that matter.
The movie version of Children of Men said more about the future and society by telling you less about its specifics. I can’t help but think the game version—which would look a lot like Half-Life 2, visually at least—would have laid out everything for you. It would have given all sorts of backstory about what happened in other places in the world and tried to come up with some sort of scientific justification for women being unable to have children. Had the movie gotten into this, the movie would have lost much of its strength and buried its overall theme about discovering hope in the face of despair. (All of the details are in the movie, just on the periphery because they’re ultimately secondary and largely irrelevant.)
Games should either be 300 or Children of Men. Either dispense with the narrative and just go for the action, or relegate it to the periphery where players can choose to follow it or just as easily ignore it. In both cases, the games would move a lot quicker for most players, much like the lean and mean 300 and Children of Men get everything over with in under 2 hours.
Of the two, only Children of Men sticks with you; 300 is disposable. It’s gloriously stupid, or stupidly glorious. I’m not sure I want to see it again, much like I rarely want to re-play a rigidly linear, narrative-heavy game. But it’s the best videogame I’ve watched someone else play so far this year.
March 20th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
[…] so Steve Bauman has started blogging, opening with a reflection on what 300 and Children of Men can teach game designers about narrative. Read his wisdom at Manic Pop […]
March 20th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Sorry about the mag. You were by far my favorite and the only one even remotely adult. Very glad I found your blog thru QT3 and can continue to enjoy your musings. Hope you are somehow back in the industry soon.
March 20th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Hey Steve–
Longtime subscriber of CGM here. I’m bummed about the magazine, and hope you guys all land on your feet.
Regarding the movies in question, I haven’t watched either yet, alas– CoM came and went and I vainly search for it in the listings of movies showing at second-run theaters here in Portland Oregon. Guess I’ll have to wait for the DVD release, but since I don’t have a fancy schmancy HDTV yet, I’m not going to get the full impact (my TV doesn’t even do prog. scan!). 300 looks pretty darned silly. If I were twenty years younger I wouldn’t be embarassed to be seen in the audience, but at 45? Hmm.
Anyway, good luck with the employment search,
José aka Papageno on Qt3 and OO
March 21st, 2007 at 11:44 pm
300 is silly, but you don’t have to feel too old. It is, after all, a historical epic. The Persians had giant rhinos, right?
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:10 am
I don’t even consider 300 a movie. It’s “multimedia entertainment” (or something). It’s GOOD multimedia entertainment, but I didn’t come away from it thinking that it was a good movie. But I was entertained. And I didn’t think that it was gay - per se - but I did find myself thinking while I was watching it that the movie had something for everybody…. women and gay men included.
…Do you like Gladiator movies…?
March 29th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I still haven’t seen 300, but I find myself very curious about your thoughts on The Prestige, which I’ve only recently seen. Personally, I thought it was the best revenge story I’ve ever seen in a movie; it had the best visual style (perhaps barring Letters from Iwo Jima, although I think I liked the audio in that one even more so than the visuals) of 2006 films; and it was one of the first movies since Raiders of the Lost Ark to promise the world in setup and then deliver on that setup. Okay, so The Matrix had an impressive result after the build up too, and there are probably a lot of other movies that I’ve forgotten that also did…
But still, it was the first time in years I found myself wondering “How are they going to get out of this one?” without being disappointed.
March 31st, 2007 at 7:16 pm
I saw this movie yesterday and really liked it, Steve. You came off sounding sort of negative about it from all your snark :). I see what you’re saying, though. I thought the gritty filter they turned on for the whole movie was too much, but I guess it’s an awesome example of how to film a movie in just two months in a studio.
April 11th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
If you want a modern game that relegates narrative to the periphery in favor of immersion into the gameworld, look no further than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl (stupid name, I hate typing all those periods, and does it really need the colon?). I would go into detail about how it goes about drawing you into its universe, but Eurogamer beat me to the punch:
http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/launchreview.asp?reviewid=767700
May 17th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I’m coming to this a bit late, I know.
One of my favorite games is Deus Ex because I found the story so engaging. In part, I found it engaging because it did not lay everything out, even though the story overall was fairly linear. Bits of information could be found, but the player had to make connections among all the bits. A number of events were reference in newspapers and e-mails, but it turned out they were unconnected with the player’s activities.
Partly by design and partly through accidents of the development process, Deus Ex made the world seem to extend beyond the player’s direct experiences. I found that immersive.