Previously I have talked about the sad need by current entertainment industries to repackage films or stories previously experienced into an unnecessary additional story. I would like to depart from written literature and touch on video games. They are far worse than movies with their inability to break away form repetitious ideas and rehashing of previously executed (and often better) plots, themes and in the case of games also overall gameplay mechanics. What he have now are an overabundance of games ending in "2" or "3" or a colon with a meaningless subtitle such as Angry Birds: Seasons or Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Game publishers are uneasy about pushing their money towards any projects that can't assure stockholders of overall rise in revenue, so most game developers are forced to remake the same game over years and years, some even expected to have yearly releases that make older versions entirely obsolete such as the Call of Duty franchise. The problem, then, is that we aren't seeing many new or innovative ideas out of mainstream higher-grossing companies as they play it safe with investments, taking a safe reiteration of an already popular franchise and just expanding on it.
What I wish we could see in games today is a stricter following to the idea of spiritual sequels. A perfect example of this done right as well as done wrong would be the Bioshock series from 2K Games. The game itself was a spiritual sequel to a PC game called System Shock (which itself also had a sequel, System Shock 2). Though Bioshock shared many similarities with System Shock, it was it's own beast that gained popularity due to the high-quality execution of it's environment as well as providing the player with a story-driven incentive to explore and complete the game. The game starts with your character surviving a plane crash only to was ashore a small lighthouse. As you enter you realise this is no mere building, but the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, a town without government where men of science and prosperity can exist without the burdon of morality imposing itself on the expansion of new technologies. It was itself a well-focused narrative that slowly reveals the origins of the character you play (in first-person) while you also begin to understand the seedy Atlas Shrugged quality of the city's views on property rights, individualism and how the city fell apart to drug addiction and riots, unable to support it's own ideal society.
Almost three years later Bioshock had itself a sequel. This was the typical drivel produced by the average studio, releasing a product in a hurried and unsuccessful attempt at recreating the booming and unmitigated success of the original. Like so many intellectual products whose appeal is not only the original product itself but the prospects of establishing a series, a pool of preexisting concepts and ideas, all already fully realized, it is easy to make a sequel because it is so much harder to create an original conceptualization of a game that doesn't already have all the groundwork in place. The general appeal of an updated version of an already-known universe is easy to produce and far too easy for audiences to indulge and ask for more of the same, so long as they disguise it as new.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Why do sequels exist? Sure in this modern day our generation needs to be bombarded with constant stimuli to even be bothered to pay attention. We've become saturated in an age where so many parcels of our daily lives are conveyed to us through so easy a means that it takes little effort for us to become upset at anything we encounter that doesn't offer complete and instant gratification. The idea of sequels I'm touching on here isn't exclusive to le cinéma, either, as our entertainment dollars constantly pick and chose through funded popularity what intellectual properties continue to exist. Hollywood and even the video game industry have become obsessed and with and work tirelessly towards rehashing an already existing concept.
With written stories or oral traditions, we see similar motifs and themes persisting throughout each medium: the fall of man, the story of creation, the great flood, the resurrection, they've existed in multitudes of cultures, the stories get updated to reflect modern ideas and cultural habits that persist in the time of each tale's reformation. From the journey of the hero to the constantly repeated morals from fables and nursery-rhymes, the same story may be told, but the matter itself, the subjects, the locations, they all change to cater to a specific culture or time. In the more modern sense of sequels of which I'm trying to lampoon, sequels serve no purpose outside entertainment value. The powerful story involving the rise of a chosen one to triumph over the forces of evil with the help of a wise and sagely old wizard has been once told through King Arthur and his court, aided by Merlin, and again through Harry Potter and his needing to be brought up and taught how to grow into his heroic role, similar to Arthur's training. In modern entertainment we produce sequels not as a spiritual reinterpretation of the previously existing story, but so we can spend more time with the specific characters we've grown to enjoy. We don't create similar stories to recapture the compassion and wonder of the original, we carbon copy the first movie, changing little in terms of characters and overall plot. The audience has grown to expect to see the same people from the first film in strikingly similar situations. We, expecting entertainment, hold film studios to high expectations, and when they let a Bond Girl die, or when Indiana Jones gets married, it destroys our image of the characters, which as Northop Frye might agree, is what we need to get that true romantic experience of the movies: we need stock characters whose future actions are easy to discern through their simple dimensionality.
We have been retelling the same few stories from era to era, but with the advent of modern movies and video games, all we expect from a well-told story is that it would be somehow insulting to the original work if we didn't somehow expand it. No one is clamoring for a Lord of the Flies 2 or a prequel to The Importance of Being Earnest because we can respect the original for itself, without having this knee-jerk reaction to needing to spend more time in that fictional world.
With written stories or oral traditions, we see similar motifs and themes persisting throughout each medium: the fall of man, the story of creation, the great flood, the resurrection, they've existed in multitudes of cultures, the stories get updated to reflect modern ideas and cultural habits that persist in the time of each tale's reformation. From the journey of the hero to the constantly repeated morals from fables and nursery-rhymes, the same story may be told, but the matter itself, the subjects, the locations, they all change to cater to a specific culture or time. In the more modern sense of sequels of which I'm trying to lampoon, sequels serve no purpose outside entertainment value. The powerful story involving the rise of a chosen one to triumph over the forces of evil with the help of a wise and sagely old wizard has been once told through King Arthur and his court, aided by Merlin, and again through Harry Potter and his needing to be brought up and taught how to grow into his heroic role, similar to Arthur's training. In modern entertainment we produce sequels not as a spiritual reinterpretation of the previously existing story, but so we can spend more time with the specific characters we've grown to enjoy. We don't create similar stories to recapture the compassion and wonder of the original, we carbon copy the first movie, changing little in terms of characters and overall plot. The audience has grown to expect to see the same people from the first film in strikingly similar situations. We, expecting entertainment, hold film studios to high expectations, and when they let a Bond Girl die, or when Indiana Jones gets married, it destroys our image of the characters, which as Northop Frye might agree, is what we need to get that true romantic experience of the movies: we need stock characters whose future actions are easy to discern through their simple dimensionality.
We have been retelling the same few stories from era to era, but with the advent of modern movies and video games, all we expect from a well-told story is that it would be somehow insulting to the original work if we didn't somehow expand it. No one is clamoring for a Lord of the Flies 2 or a prequel to The Importance of Being Earnest because we can respect the original for itself, without having this knee-jerk reaction to needing to spend more time in that fictional world.
The King and the Corpse is a wondrous tale that is meant to represent the journey of the soul through life, or more specifically, as the full title reveals, the soul's struggle with good and evil, and it's attempts to understand either. The purpose of king's story in the book is meant to reveal the true nature of life's journey, the corpse flying miraculously back to the tree every time the king attempted to answer a question. Whether or not the king was correct in his answers to the riddles was inconsequential, the spirit within the corpse was imparting a life lesson to the king, the long walk back to the necromancer paralleling the life-long journey that is searching for answers to questions, the king's responses mattered little to the spirit in the corpse because he was testing the king's ability to understand life is meant to be experienced, not to have definitive answers. Yet even in the ambiguity of the corpse's message, I see the moral guidance the story attempts to impart. The king's tale may be a gentle guide to understanding the nature of one's soul and in doing so conjures up several other similarities between itself and other religious theologies at large.
The opening reminds me of the fall of man, the monkey acting outside the expected decorum, not disobeying God but disregarding any royal rules of conduct in sitting on and disrupting the king. The monkey came from the women's apartments, which lends the monkey the ability to become a manifestation of women. The moment of great revealing (although the revelation of the necromancer's intention is, as well) comes when the monkey bites into the fruit, which similar to the Christian creation story, is a nondescript species of fruit. There are also elements of the resurrection, the king freeing the spirits of the grounds, and the necromancer's intention to enslave a newly-risen corpse. All religious allegories deal with man's struggle within and without himself against the state of his soul, each attempting to ingrain morality and life lessons, which is why I think the King and the Corpse is just as much a religious narrative, as it is an allegory for improving one's journey through life itself.
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