Inception & Video Games

If you haven't experienced Christopher Nolan's wonderful Inception, I urge you to do so. It uses visceral staples (car chases, shootouts, explosions, complex set-pieces) to explore its lofty intellectual concepts with an astonishingly detailed intellectual and visual ambition. Inception's dream within a dream within a dream device is unlike any other film exploiting the same notion, but what is so clever about it is how it uses the language of films to explore the language of dreams: jump cuts emulate the fractured vividity of our dreams, real time events play out over lengthy periods of time, the same we dream a day in hours... It provokes debate about dreams, fiction, the internet and perception. But what I was most struck by as a gamer, was how this, a major, big budget studio film made by a respected director, bore so much of the language of games. These aren't grabbing-at-straws analogies, I'm talking about either, I'm talking about a film that looks, feels,  plays... like a videogame. In an age where big budget, effects-heavy  films are often derieded for emulating games, here is one which manages, whether it be accident or design, to replicate our own experiences far more than the recent Prince of Persia or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

[note: article contains some film spoilers]
 

Call of Duty MW2's 'Cliffhanger'

A gravity shift in Inception....

Nate Drake takes a tumble in Uncharted 2's tilting sets...

God of War III's rotating Spike Room

If you're dubious, take the film's central 'mind heist' as a beautiful example; the characters jack into a shared reality or dreamscape, the same as when we log onto  the lobbies of PSN. As we fight and co-operate with each other through digital connections, so do the characters, each with their own speciality no less, have to fight their way through levels within levels, all the while fending off aggressive "militarised projections", the behaviour of which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played a third or first person shooter with good dynamic AI. At times the action feels-nay, PLAYS- like a game. The opening scene features DiCaprio stalking through a Chinese house, gun in hand, moving form cover to cover, the "NPC's" dropping like flies under his stealthy movements and twitchy silenced pistol. Throughout the film as the characters navigate the films mindscapes, they have to fight their way through a twisting, changing, unpredictable world, the rules of which are at the behest both of it's "author" and the people playing in the author's world... much in the same way we inhabit and interact with the worlds that developer create for us. The most blatant overture to gaming comes in the shape  of Ellen page's character who is employed as an architect of the dream "levels" (that's actually what the film calls them), and who has to create mechanics to trick the mind into engaging with the fiction it is trying to create within the victim's mind.

A mindscape folds over itself to create a new world

But there's more than superficial comparisons to be made here. Any gamer who has lost hours of their life to Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto or Demons' Souls will find much to relate to in the film's ideas of the potential consequences of spending too much time in alternate realities and how this affects our perception of reality proper. As both Inception and the Matrix films propose that there may be those who don't want to leave the lure of these virtual and dream worlds, or cannot escape their grasp, so are we as gamers haunted by trophies, end-level bosses, puzzles, items and upgrade paths in our dreams, even as we feel the hours with our friends and family being taken away from us. We are consumed by quests and hoarding, fighting monsters and levelling up, that "just one more go" for that last rock shard in inFamous at 5am... When Kevin Butler received that rowdy applause at E3 this year for the line "Staying up all night to earn a trophy that isn't real... but is.", he really did speak a home truth about the compulsive and deeply immersive nature of digital entertainment. Inception ties this idea to the core of Leonardo DiCaprio's character and the devastation the immersion within another world, another reality, wreaked on his personal life. Nolan obviously has something to say about the amount of time people spend engaged with the internet with the growth of social networking, too, but the truths of it lie closer to home for some of us, I think.


Still, this extraordinary film, so unusual and yet so typical of big budget fare, also speaks to the wider acceptance gaming has achieved, but also in the way it is expanding.Whilst Uncharted 2 cribbed from Indiana Jones with great skill and verve, and places the player in the narrative as the protagonist better than any other game in recent memory, here we have a film that cribs from videogames with great skill and verve. Not only that, they're drawing from the similar wells of inspiration. As the mind and eye can be manipulated in echochrome to create new paths, so too does Inception borrow these Escherian quialities to create it's own tricks and traps. The way Ellen Page's character, the architect, creates new extensions of existing dreamworlds, will be familiar to anyone who has used LittelBigPlanet's pull-out stairs or reworked Media Molecule's levels to create new iterations. Let us hope that the raised profile games won't just be about being an easier target for the tabloids or Fox News, but that we can cross-pollinate more and produce results as fruitful as this film that remind us why videogames are such a unique experience.