I've recently finished playing the new Tomb Raider. It's certainly a good game, but I can't help but feel that my enjoyment of the game is being tarnished by The Walking Dead and, more importantly, Spec Ops: The Line. I recently wrote about how much The Walking Dead affected me, but I played Spec Ops before I started my blog, so I have no previous words of my own to share on the topic. Sufficed to say, the narrative in Tomb Raider comes of as amateurish compared to The Walking Dead, and the cognitive dissonance between the narrative of Lara the victim and the game play of Lara the superhuman serial killer is made all that more obvious by Spec Ops: The Line.
I was really looking forward to this game because the trailers and press coverage leading up to the release seemed to indicate that there was going to be a serious look at what happens when someone inexperienced like Lara is thrown into an extreme situation. In practice there is a passing mention of the idea in a few cutscenes early on in the game, but that's about it. In the past though, I would have thought that this basic treatment of the material was a brave step for gaming, but The Walking Dead and Spec Ops have really shifted my perspective on how good narrative can be in a game.
Ultimately this is a good problem to have. It's a sign that the industry is maturing. There has long been a stereotype that gaming is only for kids and teenagers hunkering down in their parent's basements. Obviously this isn't true, but stereotypes usually don't appear out of nowhere. I think there are historical reasons that this stereotype exists, but I also think there may be another reason: gaming hasn't done a good job at targeting adults specifically. Whenever a game tries to be "adult" or "mature", it usually just ends up being juvenile in the same vein as Duke Nukem (not that I didn't love DN3D when I was in high school).
If we look at film, there is a huge variety of genres. Sure, action movies and romantic comedies make up the bulk of films made, but there are a lot of other genres, with plenty of intellectually challenging films to choose from. Unfortunately the diversity of games doesn't match the diversity of films (as an aside: game "genres" aren't really genres...they are gameplay mechanic classification systems. We don't call film genres "3D", "70mm", "digital", "IMAX", etc, so why do we call game genres "FPS", "RPG", "Driving", etc?).
That's not to say no one has ever tried to make gaming's equivalent of "Citizen Kane," but for one reason or another, no one had really succeeded before The Walking Dead (just my opinion, of course). I think that 2011/2012 was something of a tipping point though. I think that everything traces back primarily to Braid. Braid was an indie game with a thematically complicated plot/message aimed squarely at adults that also managed to garner a sizable audience. The game was released in 2008, roughly four and a half years ago.
Of course one popular indie game isn't going to sway the direction of AAA game development. But a sea storm of amazing indie games can. After Braid, we have seen a multitude of truly amazing indie games come out. Off the top of my head, we saw Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Bastion, and The Binding of Isaac in 2011, and 2012 was a veritable gold mine of amazing indie games. In fact, I would say 2012 is quite possibly the best year in gaming I can remember. We saw Journey on the PS3 (I really want to play this, but seeing as I don't have a PS3...), Dear Esther, Thomas Was Alone, Kentucky Route Zero, and the list goes on. Most importantly though, was Spec Ops: The Line and The Walking Dead. The timing of these releases is important. Braid paved the way, and several follow-ups established the indie scene, and now we are reaping the benefits. I am truly excited to see where gaming goes from here.
Which brings me back to Tomb Raider. I fully believe that the developers wanted to craft an amazing story, but the AAA world takes longer to respond to changing market dynamics. If nothing else, the development time for a game ensures that any given game won't show it's influences for a few years. In fact, according to the Tomb Raider Wikipedia page, development began in 2008, the same year Braid was first released. I think that this quote by lead writer Rhianna Pratchett shows the limitations of the mindset prior to the indie revolution:
There's always a balancing act. I think the narrative team would have liked to see that as a slower ramp up. That time between the first kill and lots of kills, I think we would have liked to see that slower paced. But, this isn't always about narrative.
This simply is no longer the case, and Spec Ops: The Line and The Walking Dead proved that. Both games take place in very violent worlds, but the former used lots of kills specifically to advance the narrative, and the latter simply didn't have lots of kills. It leads me to wonder what Tomb Raider would have been like if it had been released two years later, and it makes me really excited to see what the next Tomb Raider will be like. The times they are a-changin.