More on backflipping men
This was a Plastic response to a debate over whether it’s appropriate to make a Holocaust-themed video game. I liked my response so much I thought I’d put it up here:
Yeah, but the technologies and languages behind film are far more developed (I was about to say “mature,” but that might give the wrong idea) than those for video games. For now, that gives artists working in film a far wider choice of emotional possibilities.
I mean, photography, the technological ancestor of all cinema, was invented in 1827; true motion picture film dates from 1895; the language of modern film (in terms of editing decisions, a mix of different camera angles, and so on) didn’t emerge until 1926, with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. So that’s a full hundred years from the invention of the core technologies to an approximation of the movies we know today.
In contrast, computer graphics are still in their “man doing a backflip” phase. We start off with a U.S. military demonstration in 1958; video games themselves follow in 1962, with MIT’s Spacewar. In comparison to film, video games today are stuck in the year 1872 (coincidentally, the year that Muybridge began taking pictures of running horses).
So I think comparisons to film are kind of unfair. Subtlety, emotional sophistication–in cinema, these things require equally subtle and sophisticated technology. Demanding a complex and moving Holocaust video game in 2003 would be like asking Spielberg to make Schindler’s List in 1862. Give it some time…