In the western world, a lot of new. The fifth episode of the series’ fourth season Westworld (HBO, Crave), broadcast this summer, is called “Zhuangzi” in reference to the founding text of Taoism which calls on the population to free themselves from human norms and technologies. Everything is always complicated in this fiction.
Everything there is coded and also coded. The credits resume Video Games , by Lana Del Rey. Zhuangzi also makes hear The Day the World Went Away, by Nine Inch Nails, remixed by Ramin Djawadi. In this episode, therefore, the central character of Christina (Evan Rachel Wood), screenwriter for the video game production company Olympiad, becomes aware of her ability to control the lives of all the people around her like so many avatars of a virtual world. Teddy, Christina’s accomplice, tells her that she embodies God at the helm in this broken universe.
“Well, that’s the thing with this world,” he told her. Some of the most incredible things turn out to be real. And the things that seem most real are nothing but stories we tell ourselves. »
That TV borrows from video games and vice versa is no surprise. The Pokémon game launched for Game Boy in 1996 gave the following year a cartoon for TV. Dozens of similar derivatives followed, including in immersive gaming (Arcane, The Witcher, Black Mirror: Bandersnatchand soon Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed). There are now at least 70 TV productions set in the world of video games, in English alone, and still hundreds of episodes of other series related to this world.
The big screen adds more and more. We will be entitled to mario in 2023 (with Chris Pratt as a famous firefighter) and an adaptation of The Last of Us, famous post-apocalyptic game. Transposition projects exist for BioShock and Minecraft.
Russian Dolls (the second season has also just ended) has been described as “a love letter to video games”. The production features a game developer forced to make and redo choices. When she chooses the wrong branch, she dies and everything starts again.
The film The Matrix: Resurrections (2021) revived Neo, hero of the previous trilogy, by imagining him too as the developer of an immensely popular video game. The universes pile up just as much to lead to a new radical critique of the relationship between reality and screen fiction.
A game gone wrong
Megaproduction Westworld continues to add season after season, in audacity and complexity, from the rich video game material. This television and serial story, often told with narrative loops borrowed from video games, serves to develop a vast and deep commentary on avatars, gamers and ultimately what could be prepared with the great shift in the metaverses, these “virtual worlds going beyond the real world”.
In the end, the narrative that Christina’s character is working on for the Olympiad company turns out to be the material for the series itself. The first two seasons feel all the more like video games as they take place in a western theme park where human characters interact with robotic avatars. Connoisseurs immediately drew a parallel with the game Red Dead Redemption.
” Westworld offers a very metaphorical reading of the video game, but its main interest, in my opinion, is to give the point of view not of the player, but of the avatars. And even more, that of non playable characters, the secondary characters that we come across in a game and with whom we can interact. These avatars are mistreated, and this mistreatment becomes a commentary on human cruelty,” says Simon Laperrière, doctoral student in film studies at the University of Montreal. His thesis is interested in the interpretations generated by the communities of adepts of puzzle works and therefore relates in part to Westworld.
The exegete pushes this reading even further by proposing that the revolt of the humanoids evokes a game that has gone wrong. “The roles are reversed, and the player loses control over the game”, sums up the connoisseur. The virtual world even ends up contaminating real space so that play and life merge.
Narrative “literacy”
This series multiplies the signs, interpreted by an army of followers on the lookout with the enthusiasm of semiologists on acid. The fact that the hosts are naked when they find themselves in the laboratory evokes for one the creation of the original couple in Genesis. Another thinks that several scenes in season two are actually leaps forward (flashforwards) in season four.
Obviously, narrative “literacy” must be well generalized and mastered to dare to play its codes everywhere on the screens. “The video game has taken hold, we know this form which has a profound influence on our imagination”, says Professor Dominic Arsenault, from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Montreal. He recalls that when photography took hold, it had a real effect on all of the perceptions experienced by humans and on our way of seeing the world.
“It also happened with the cinema. This is happening with video games. Our perception of the world expands to touch other domains, for example the notion that everything is governed by rules, that our actions have impacts and that our lives are like stories conceived as systems of possibilities. »
The first video games quickly borrowed structures from cinema or literature before developing their own narrative explorations around interactivity, looping narrative or personalization of action. The British writer Douglas Adams (1952-2001) helped create the role-playing game in 1987 Bureaucracyin which the character, caught in the bureaucratic system, can never win anyway.
“The video game is interactivity, a form experienced by Dungeons and Dragons or the books of which you are the hero, says Professor Arsenault again. What’s the matter with constantly dying and starting over? »
On TV, Plan B shows the use of the looping narrative technique that exposes a choice, but in situations overloaded with grief: a mother trying to prevent her teenage daughter from committing suicide, a policewoman trying to prevent a father’s murder of his wife and children . We are far from groundhog day and its candy rose water iteration.
“We will look in the video game for what allows us to reflect on our relationship to the world, on the impact of choices, for example, or on how things could be differently, continues Professor Arsenault. In the early 2000s, many games offered moral choices. Now that we are connected to the Internet, stories can become even more complex and require communities to discuss, analyze and explain complex content. »
The teacher goes even further. For him, the transfer from one art to another, the current narrative borrowings of film or TV series, is explained by the social force of this virtuality. He talks about “our daily lot” and reminds us that many of our contemporaries give the impression of living in parallel worlds. He cites conspirators…