This video is sponsored by Skillshare. The first 1000 people who use the link
in my description will receive a one month free trial to Skillshare Premium.
I’ve been playing a couple of recently released games that I can only describe as
strange. Both seem to come from very different sides of what we might call the “indie spectrum,”
both with wildly different levels of budget, clearly pursuing different things, and yet
both coming up against the exact same hurdles in terms of the medium they’re working with;
in a way that’s gotten me thinking about how games build their atmosphere compared to other artforms.
To begin, when I first heard about Road 96, there was some talk that its story was “procedurally
generated” in order that the narrative could respond with more flexibility to players’ whims
rather than the more rigid, sometimes binary choices of other such narratively
driven games. And as I started playing, I was under the impression that the game,
similar to the way it stitched together story scenarios, was using some kind of AI to generate
its vocal performances for the numerous characters you encounter along your journey,
in a fashion similar to last year’s Watch Dogs Legion—sure, it may be odd, it may be stilted
as all hell, but what do you expect when you’re generating voices with AI? It’s gonna be robotic,
because in a way, a machine generated it… right? Oh wait, it’s not AI generated at all. It’s
all fully written and acted by human beings. Oh nooooo. Not only is its story of several convening
road trips under the oppressive tarpaulin of a tyrannical… American (?) government a little
tonally all over the place, but now its delivery seems all the more alien to boot. One of the first
things I saw was a down-on-his-luck NPC drinking alone in a rundown trailer park, eating rotting
food, next to the deafening noise of partygoers and, uh… trombone players… who proceeded gleefully
welcome me to paradise. Now, a computer, AI voice generation not recognising the sarcasm that
“welcome to paradise” line is clearly meant to be marinating in is understandable—but a human? It
doesn’t feel right; none of this feels right—it all feels like it’s held together by tape,
and that it’s going to fall apart at any second. The long lead up to the release of Twelve Minutes,
on the other hand, reeked of a kind of prestige. This wasn’t your run of the mill indie title
appearing out of nowhere, made by some student in a garage—in the months and years leading up
to its release, this “Interactive Time Loop Thriller” gave off the vibe of
indie darling in the making. Published by the interactive arm of Annapurna, its gameplay was
shrouded in mystique—a stark, minimalist visual palette showcasing a slice-of-life gone wrong,
with an immovable birds eye view. Crucially though, this was all building to
that cherry on top of any title like this with a budget—the dreaded presence of the Film Industry.
Indeed, rather than searching the extremely large pool of video game voice actors,
the makers of Twelve Minutes turned to the obviously more legitimate medium and snagged
none other than Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Defoe. As pointed out by Yahtzee,
they even hired voice coaches in order to make the accents more believable.
This is about as pricey as you can possibly go with this kind of thing—no expense was spared in
making this seem like the most prestigious project to come out of the indie scene in quite some time;
one where vocal performance was key to creating that believable, lifelike atmosphere.
And yet it’s a prestige, an atmosphere that crumbles the second something in the process
of the game’s narrative loop starts to bug out; the game doing its best to hold together
these big performances by big name actors in the face of glitches; of you desperately trying to
interrupt proceedings, just so you don’t have to endure yet more minutes doing the same things over
and over again—you have the answer in your pocket; it’s just the game doesn’t give you a chance to
present it, because that kind of convenience doesn’t line up with Twelve Minutes’ notion
of how it should be paced. All that money going towards voice acting, and you still end up with
James McAvoy hilariously throwing his hands in the air and monotonously chanting “Babe. Babe. Babe”
ad infinitum. And that’s after I decide to flush all of our material possessions down the toilet
and stab myself in the living room before the character even realises they’re in a time loop.
Even beyond the game’s highly contentious (and in my eyes extremely daft) ending, essentially
this prestige I talked about ends up butting up against the almost inherent absurdity of putting
control of a scene’s action in a player’s hands; with whatever transpires distinctly
lacking the pinpoint precision of timing found in the medium its actors are proficient in. The
delivery of a line in a vocal booth might sound, to the ears of those performing and recording it,
like the most natural thing in the world—but in the context of a video game encounter (especially
in a game revolving around time loops) it may necessarily repeat itself or blurt out in the
wrong context with the character facing a wall or randomly standing in a closet or something.
The atmosphere of Twelve Minutes—that dark, understated, solemn, tense vibe—needs events
to play out in exactly the right way to have the biggest impact, but no matter how much money and
attention to visual detail you throw at it, it’s always going to have to reckon with the
fact that the concept of atmosphere in video games is not experienced unilaterally—instead,
it’s prodded and stretched and potentially ripped apart whenever a player does so much as press a
button; which raises the issue of how we even judge atmosphere in a video game to begin with.
See, if there’s one way I can describe Road 96—not just its voice acting but everything about
it—I would call it all “aggressively odd.” Despite how… off the voice acting feels, there’s something
about it that fits with the larger vibe of it all. You’re controlling all these teenagers hitchhiking
across a fictionalised version of the United States in a specific time period in the past,
but one that’s filled with anachronisms and experienced in a very limited capacity as dusty,
barren Americana. There’s a sense that this is based on a real place, it’s just distant
from how you actually envision it—you’re not meant to feel safe here, it’s meant to be
otherworldly, like you’re a kid out in the middle of nowhere scrambling to get to your destination.
Plus, I’ve never been a runaway but I have been On The Road in some capacity before and,
lemme tell ya—people out there can be pretty damn weird. That someone’s speech might be distorted
and chopped up to this degree might not line up with our preconceptions of perfect delivery of
a line in a controlled piece of fiction… but there’s definitely something about it that,
in an abstract sense, feels oddly true to life. Traversing a world like this would be frenzied,
exhausting—never knowing what’s coming next, whether it’ll be a police officer drawing their
gun on you or pair of dumbass robbers forcing you to partake in a weird quiz show or a Burning
Man-esque party or a lorry driver in danger of falling asleep at the wheel; the bug-eyed denizens
of this world chirpily spouting their lines at you as if they were automatons leaving you in the
position where you can’t fully trust anything they say; like at any point the mask could slip and you
could find yourself in a dangerous situation. And so surviving the larger political turmoil
turns to getting through the day turns to simply surviving the next moment—something which
isn’t so certain in Road 96’s albeit clunky approach to storytelling. And so over time,
I guess I grew to view the stilted voice acting as a pretty crucial component of that frenzied,
otherworldly atmosphere. Sure, it wouldn’t work as a film, but as a dense, complex piece of software,
a crafted world that you navigate and experience yourself, I find myself
more willing to fill in those technological blanks for the sake of the larger picture.
With Twelve Minutes on the other hand, as I’d be forced to do the whole loop over
again because the game didn’t recognise the precise thing I wanted to say to this person;
no matter how natural or assured the delivery of its lines sounded… all I could think was “you
paid these actors that much for… this?!” There was already a kind of hokeyness,
a pursuit of some false idea of legitimacy associated with Hollywood’s encroachment on
the video game industry or vice versa. But playing these two games so closely
together gave me a real sense of why it so often doesn’t work on fundamental, experiential level.
Look, I’m not saying that you’re wrong if you liked Twelve Minutes. Despite what you might
think I’m not trying to establish which game is better, or which you should play out of the
two here—for sure, Road 96 runs up against a similar hokeyness in its tone of writing,
a similar rigidity of choice in some of its sequences and ultimately the same absurdity
that comes from placing a player in control of its larger narrative arc. I’m just using these two
games I played recently as case studies in what we look for and how we judge atmosphere in games.
It just so happens that Road 96 feels far more equipped to deal with that absurdity,
like it comes with the territory of a procedurally generated narrative;
a strange amalgamation of people reading lines without knowing the full context and having
those lines stitched together in response to whatever nonsense the player enacts.
It attempts to figure out a reaction to the way players act in its story,
without the major budget of Twelve Minutes, in a way that renders its foibles far easier
to look past—rather than a game trying to emulate Hollywood movie production and making little room
for the weirdness inherent to the medium—of placing a controller in a player’s hands.
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and you’ll really be helping out the channel in the process. Thank you to Skillshare for
sponsoring the video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece on Twelve Minutes and Road 96!
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Max Cohen and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you all so much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.