Video games often do away with dialogue is this reminiscent of early cinema or a peek at things to come?
Upon observing the first fifteen minutes of this walkthrough, it quickly becomes evident that the designers intentionally draw on the medium of film and television to enthral the player in an experience which, by mean of association, puts them centre stage. From the soundtrack which, though transposed by two notes, shares the first unmistakable six notes of the X-files theme, to the camera angles and movements, all is designed to evoke the magical world of the cinema, and why not? Anyone who has seen a thrilling story bouncing off a cinema screen will have, at some time, felt at one with the protagonist and their exploits. A game like Virginia, however, can take it one step further by adding a layer of interactivity allowing the player to enter further into the experience and even make personal choices on how the story will eventually unfold. Like 'Choose your own adventure' books and later 'Minecraft Story Mode' and Black Mirror's- 'Balderdash', an adventure game like Virginia fuses the suspended belief that comes with cinema with the interactivity of video games to great effect.
The absence of dialogue seems almost reminiscent of early cinema and the recent works of Malick, relying heavily on action and symbolism to push the narrative forward. The effect is twofold, we as a viewer and protagonist are drawn to hearing our own inner voice. There is, therefore, no foreign accent or unfamiliar voice to remove from the fantasy that we are the figure on screen. Additionally, the unnerving silence and mystery is disorienting and urges us to seek meaning and resolution where none is readily offered. Early figures of cinema may have enjoyed this technique.
In 1900, the year that Freud published his ‘Interpretation of dreams’, Lumiere had created a series of short one minute films which appeared on screen like the memorable dreams that featured so prominently in this revolutionary book. Lumiere’s short reveries were loaded with symbology and implicit meaning but were far from presenting the book narrative that an audience in 1900 was accustomed to.
The language of psychoanalysis would also seem to borrow from that of cinema with terms such as ‘projection’, ‘screen memories’ suddenly appearing as terms to describe the inner workings of our psyche. The visual language of film, too, soon incorporated techniques like dissolves, cuts and flashbacks which indeed, resembled the language of dreams.
For Freud ‘images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory’. (Royle 2003) However, he was not entirely a fan of cinema, refusing, bar one occasion, to be caught on film and turning down a hefty sum of money from Hollywood to write a screenplay. (Guardian 2001). Yet his case histories play out and develop not unlike a murder mystery plot and his discoveries undoubtedly went on to influence a series of filmmakers who would use a palette of images to weave dream like sequences to deep psychological effect.
Alexanrde Astuc’s article 1948 ‘the birth of a new Avant- Garde: the Camera Stylo’, had articulated the theory that cinema would break free of the tyranny of the visual, from the image for its own sake and from the immediate and concrete demands of narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. There was the illusion that film could become an Esperanto , “able to travel across linguistic borders and to be understood by everyone in the world thanks to the ‘unequivocal’ universality of the image”. (J.D. Cintas 2008)
The combination of interactivity and deeply charged significance of the visual images work incredibly well together in this cleverly designed video game.
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