Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

So my game stuff this weekend was packed. I got tons of Mario Kart screenshots, even ones I’m not planning to use for articles. I finally got that Hades epilogue, which I missed years ago but gave me a relatively artificial reason to give my favorite game of 2020 a second playthrough. Deltarune is also now done, at least until Chapter 5. Unless I, say, re-commit to Wind Waker or try one of those ultra-hard Picross puzzles, my time is open between now and Donkey Kong. Except that I still have one thing I wanted to try this month. Packing over seven gigabytes, Telling Lies is the largest game on my rather overfull Switch 2, and by far the largest that I’ve not played. You know World of Goo‘s half-off on there for the next couple days, right? And that’s like one seventieth the size! As someone who likes to posture his games journalism bona fides, how can I not play Sam Barlow’s ode to webcam voyeurism and subsequently eject it from my hard drive?

Now, I didn’t exactly get far. The game is incredibly obtuse, seemingly far more so than its spiritual predecessor Her Story (which I feel I probably should’ve done first, but alas). There was also some unrelated stress that put me in a mindset that wasn’t amenable to much of anything, let alone a video game about trawling for data. I’ll be asking for some help about it in the comments. But what I’m interested in today is how Telling Lies is one of the champions of modern Full Motion Video in gaming. Instead of using pixels, polygons, wire frames, bit maps, volumetrics… I dunno, ASCII art, why not just use real life footage of actors? Something that is, almost assuredly, why Telling Lies is that big.

Historically, FMV was a joke. To gamers and fans, I mean; it cost a relatively significant amount of time, labor, and money to put into Windows games or on the Sega CD. These clips were supposed to be futuristic and prestige, they were supposed to be an example of how the entire games industry seemed on the cutting edge, but they weren’t to the people who watched them. Sometimes they were ambitious like Phantasmagoria, sometimes they got notable stars—my personal favorite is Adam West in the casino thriller Golden Nugget, but some of the Star Trek ones did get actors from the shows—but most were, to put it mildly, schlocky. Like, one of the more prominent was Sewer Sharks. At a time where classics like Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Street Fighter II, and Super Metroid were carving a new path or perfecting an old one, this felt wholly artificial. A game using cheap real life movies kinda… seemed to ruin the point of games’ uniqueness. There have always been FMV fans and defenders, but it was a hard sell, and for the most part, game makers decided to hide the silliness through pre-rendered FMV animations. Sure, it was pretty obvious that these 3D movies weren’t real (some literally used cartoon animation, like Dragon’s Lair, which is probably the quintessential example of the trope as a whole), but it wasn’t real people. That was a step beyond, right? Right??

However, live action footage didn’t go away forever. Technically, it didn’t go away entirely; the Command & Conquer series famously uses it for camp of the most delectable and Tim Curriest order. Remedy employs these constantly in titles like Control and Alan Wake; hell, Quantum Break made a fake live action TV series to go along with it. Contradiction: Spot the Liar! is a more deliberate take on the silliness, and to this day I hope for it to get a Switch port. But Her Story and its pseudo sequels Telling Lies and Immortality did codify a new idea for the concept: not kitsch, not camp, but dour, well-acted, and intimate to a degree that can be staggeringly uncomfortable. We now have Not For Broadcast and Late Shift, as well as those “interactive fiction” TV shows Netflix recently turbofucked out of existence.

This is a niche subject, I get. I’m fully aware that most people don’t really engage with my more conceptual prompts—I’m not being dismissive or resentful; I just, you know, know. I read the comments—but even this is pretty specific of a topic. And my own interest is half due to camp fascination and half due to it being concentrated on PC games I never got to play. Still, if we think about games as art, we also have to think about each individual part of a game as something akin to material. Paints and instruments and script pages, all translated into a canvas of code. Some materials are more niche, obscure, strange, provocative, or difficult than others, and live action FMV is certainly all of those things. So, as the art critics that we are, and we are, what is your experience with interspersed live action footage in video games? Which games have you played that had it? What are your favorites? What are your least favorite? What would you like to see from the trope?

But, most important of all, what did you play this weekend? And remember to check out Lily-Bones’ latest “Game News Roundup!”