So, among gamers I think I count as among the older generation. While the NES came out before I was born, the "video game" as an artistic medium is not a whole lot older than I am. To be sure, the debate over whether games are art is still somewhat active, but I think most people born after, say, 1970 can recognize the artistic merits of video games.
I invoke my elder status mainly because I remember the times in the 1990s when a fair number of games experimented in using live-action, or it was called back then, full-motion video, in their games. One of the games that has had the biggest artistic impact and influence with me is Myst, which came out in 1993. The surreal puzzle game incorporated live-action performances by the Miller brothers who created it, with Robyn Miller (who also composed the game's memorable score) playing the refined but cruel Sirrus, while Rand Miller played both the brutish Achenar and the family's benevolent father, Atrus.
They shot performances in front of a color key screen (while green screen is more common these days, I think the standard used to be blue screen) and imposed these performances over the digitally created environments.
To give an idea of how influential Myst was, I think it may have been the first game, or at least the first really popular game, to have fully 3D-rendered elements that actually had textures, and while the game obviously looks very simplistic to modern eyes, in 1993, it was mindblowing.
Myst had very little in the way of animation - most of the game was still images, the illusion of motion created by simply shifting perspective as we stepped from one tableau to another, with occasional jaw-dropping moments of animation as the exception rather than the rule.
However, some of the big, exciting moments were when we brought pages of the prison books that held the two brothers (each claiming the other was evil - and neither actually being wrong) and we'd get a broken-up, static-y message from them. If the game is completed with the "correct" solution, we meet face to face with Atrus, who seems to be sitting at a digitally rendered desk but who plays with full live-action motion.
Lots of games had these filmed segments. The production quality was often not great, and even if they got big names for them (like Tim Curry) there was definitely not the budget or the expertise or the care required to produce top-quality stuff in most cases.
And then, by the 2000s, CGI got good enough that you could make dynamic characters with real facial expressions, and the industry started to move away from live action. Why bother when you could animate a character to be just as expressive as a real actor?
Just this weekend, Blizzard announced the next three expansions for World of Warcraft, and the cinematic trailer for The War Within focused primarily on a simple two-hander scene between former Horde Warchief Thrall, an Orc, and the you King Anduin Wrynn, the human king of Stormwind (the main human kingdom in the game). And Anduin looks insanely realistic. The young king, who was a small child when WoW launched, but has aged along with the game so that he is now roughly 30 (if we assume the 5-year time jump between the previous expansion and the current one is accounted for,) could almost fool you into thinking he was a live action actor.
Indeed, I think that as time goes on, our eyes become trained to spot the very subtle signs that something is CGI, and if I had seen this trailer only five years ago, maybe ten, I might have had a hard time believing they weren't just shooting footage of a real actor on a set.
Now, World of Warcraft doesn't actually look like that trailer when you play it. The characters and world are stylized in such a way that you can easily forgive less-than photorealism, because it's not even shooting for that. Indeed, in part this allows players with ordinary personal computers to play the game without too many issues, and while the graphics tend to improve with each expansion, those improvements are still made with the intent to allow older computers to run the game smoothly. The slightly cartoony style of the world helps lower the demands for graphical fidelity.
But the point is, graphics are getting better and better over time. Indeed, Remedy's games are often at the forefront of graphical advancement, with Control and Alan Wake II pulling off amazingly impressive lighting and pioneering ray-tracing technology.
And that's why I'm all the more impressed with their choice to use Live Action/Full Motion Video. It's not that they can't make gorgeous CGI cutscenes. It's that they choose, artistically, to incorporate this mixed media.
And it seems they're getting bolder and bolder with it.
Of the three Remedy games I've played, chronologically the first was Alan Wake. Alan Wake uses live action sparingly - pretty much only on some televisions you can find, sometimes with footage of Alan in the Writer's Room in the Dark Place, during the week in which he wrote Departure, and sometimes as episodes of Night Springs.
The latter of these is fun, conceptually, but if you actually watch the shows, the production value is... well, it looks a bit like someone shot it on a camcorder with non-professional-actors. As a background thing in a video game from 2010, it's fine, but it has a bit of that same 1990s FMV vibe, of being sort of a gesture toward what Night Springs is meant to represent in the world of the game more than what it would actually be like.
Control came out nine years later, and shows a big step up in terms of production value. But the use of live action is still pretty limited. We basically get two versions of it: Dr. Darling's various presentations about concepts involving the Oldest House and the FBC, and then the Hotline calls primarily from Trench. Oh, and how could I forget Threshold Kids, the horrifying, Candle Cove-esque "kid's show" apparently created to educate (and scare the everloving shit out of) kids... growing up in the Oldest House, which seems almost like it would have to just be Dylan.
The latter of these is meant to be amateurish and bad, but one gets the sense that that's something they're going for rather than accidentally achieving. Darling's presentations (which have a similar vibe to the Marvin Candle films from Lost) look real and true to the world, helped in large part by the fact that Matthew Poretta is most certainly a professional actor, but also because the admittedly limited sets are well-decorated and in keeping with the environments we see in-game. The Hotline calls are extremely stylized, but again, they're employing real, professional actors and shot with a sense of artistic intent and vision.
And I think here, the choice to use live action starts to take on a clear thematic purpose. It's supposed to feel a little weird that they're in live action. Control is all about Jesse entering into and fully embracing the strange and uncanny to become the hero she is meant to be, and in a literal sense, the live action elements of the game are all means for her to learn about that world - receiving the memories of the past through the Hotline, getting clear explanations in Darling's filmstrips, and getting the bizarre edutainment of Threshold Kids (which I think might also be Darling's woefully misguided attempts to introduce big ideas to kids in a way that is simultaneously patronizing and also tone-deaf, even if well-intentioned).
And that brings us to Alan Wake II.
Alan Wake II uses live action more than either of the other games I've mentioned (naturally, talking about Quantum Break here would be useful, given that I think it was intended to be kind of half-game, half-TV series, but I haven't played it).
The uses of live action come in a few different forms. Once again, it represents in-universe media. The Koskela brothers' various commercials are all shot in live action. Additionally, Saga's use of her profiling abilities depicts the people she's profiling in live-action shots behind her. But most of the live-action is used in the Dark Place. And here, it's often when Alan is at his most disoriented. The segments when he sort of warps from the dressing room to the stage of In-Between with Mr. Door have him find his own face on a TV before he enters the live-action world of that television for a time. A similar thing happens when he visits Room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel, his meetings with Tom Zane only taking place in live-action, other than the phone calls. There's also the whole fifteen-minute short film, Yötön Yö, which is all live-action, and can be seen on the cinema screen when the main challenges of the "Zane's Film" chapter are completed. We also get the videos recorded for Alice's "The Dark Place" photography exhibit in live action. And, we get important moments involving Alan's confrontations in the Writer's Room in live action.
Live action comes in at important points in the story, but also always seem to show up when the story is at its strangest.
Notably, there are a few characters we never see in the video-game-y, computer generated world - Mr. Door, Tom Zane (apart from over the phone,) and Alice (the latter of whom did appear in-game in the original title).
In part, the use of live action grounds the game, giving a little more weight to its events because Alan comes off as a little more "real" of a character than just a video game character. But I think it's also notable that the game calls attention to the switches to live action. In Control, there are some cutscenes where we get live-action Courtney Hope portraying Jesse, usually when the Hiss threatens to invade her mind. Interestingly, our single glimpse and line from Jesse Faden in Alan Wake II is during one of these live-action sequences, seeming to look in from the television set into Room 665, which sends Tom Zane fleeing, fearing that she'll find him.
Transitions for Alan into the world of live action usually require entering the medium in a manner that only works on dream logic. You can find television screens that show Alan standing still and staring at the camera, and focusing on them starts a live-action cutscene. In Room 665, the actual room we enter is empty except for a projector and a big blank wall, but the Alan in the film that we then see enters a fully-furnished Room 665 that contains within it his Tom Zane doppelganger.
My interpretation is that "game Alan" simply feels his consciousness enter this live-action world as he does this, but I suppose you could read the entire thing as "game Alan" watching the live-action segment take place (the reason I'm less inclined to favor this interpretation is the way that Alan finds himself in the "game" version of the talk show stage after the live-action talk show segments end.
But this use of mixed media I think really enhances the disorienting nature of the Dark Place and the paranatural in these games, offering us something both surprising and also exciting.
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