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Posts authored by john.cutting

Visual Shorthands in Movies

Visual Shorthands in Movies published on No Comments on Visual Shorthands in Movies

Movies use a lot of visual shorthands to quickly communicate a point, but these shorthands don’t exist in the real world. This causes a lot of subtle problems in the real world because movies- for better or for worse- are how most of us inform our lives outside of our actual experiences. For example, if I ask you to imagine Moscow right now, you are probably going to think about an onion-domed cathedral covered in snow. Moscow is snowy, but it isn’t THAT snowy. In fact, it can get quite hot. The average annual temperature in Moscow in 2015 was 47 degrees which was slightly higher than the average annual temperature of Paris.

The point is, movies fill in the gaps a lot of us have about the world, and this can lead to a lot of misunderstandings that it is hard for people to put out of our minds because we aren’t aware that these cognitive shortcuts exist in the first place. Some of these shorthands can lead to real problems while others are simply funny to think about. Here are a few examples:

  1. “Go to Aisle 28 in Michaels for Conspiracy Crafts”

Scene: The main character is trying to unravel a web of lies, corruption and conspiracy that involves petty criminals, politicians, and mafia dons. To figure out all of the connections, pictures are placed on the wall with red strings showing the connections between the various parties. People that are killed have giant red X’s marked over their faces. Reality: This may be the most inefficient way to track these web of relationships possible. The cork board with photos only serves to inform the audience and provides no practical detail for the character. It does raise some questions that I would like to see…

I want to see Frank Castle in the middle of his investigation montage actually doing the physical arts and crafts- show him standing in an aisle at Joann’s Fabrics deciding which string is most appropriate for his revenge map, comparing prices, printing and carefully cutting out photos, and getting frustrated when he makes a mistake and has to unspool a bunch of thread so that the map makes sense again.

I did some consulting work for a California agency that was doing a deep dive into white collar crime involving fake pensions, tax evasion, worker intimidation (perhaps worse), etc. We had a team of forensic accountants and investigators unraveling the net, and everything was tracked on an Excel spreadsheet. This makes sense because you can easily do regression analysis to find connections and correlations from gigabytes of data. The investigation leads actually went out of their way to restrict access to photos, names, and identifying features of the people being investigated because they didn’t want any subconscious biases to affect the decisions being made.

Regression analysis isn’t sexy to show on the screen, but the corkboard is also silly. I suggest we replace this shorthand by cutting to the executive summary that the team of investigators presents to summarize the results of a difficult data analysis.

  1. “Help, my child has been abducted… yes, I can hold.”

Scene: The main character’s loved one has gone missing. Despondent, they call the police, and the 911 operator says that they can’t file a missing person’s report unless the person has been missing for 24 hours. The protagonist can’t wait that long and is forced to strike out on their own to find justice.

Reality: This is pure fabrication by movie writers in order to create a sense of drama. It’s not true. In fact, police will release PSA’s begging the public to report a missing person right away because it’s HARDER for them to find the person after 24 hours. It makes sense in an odd kind of way for this to be ‘true’ in movie logic because it creates drama and crisis that the protagonist has to resolve instead of handing over the search to a (supposedly) trained, fully staffed police force. Movies would be boring if the police believed John McCain and surrounded Nakatomi Plaza right away or if the Chicago PD actually searched for Kevin McCallister instead of just ringing the doorbell and then giving up.

  1. “Bombs should audibly tick (and also have a glowing light). It’s unfair otherwise.”

Scene: Our hero kills all the bad guys and dashes to an easily accessible time bomb. He agonizes over whether or not to cut one of the conveniently color coded wires (or, for a Shyamalanian twist, they all might be the same color). The timer approaches zero and he is forced to choose. A quick snip, a pause, and the timer stops at 1 second. The bomb lays inert.

Reality: This is a common trope complaint, so I’m not going to talk about the logistics of bomb defusing (the correct answer is to destroy it with a smaller bomb or a shotgun), but I want to talk about the fact that time bombs (or, more specifically, “timer activated explosives”) are really impractical and are rarely used. 

Most bombers want some sort of control of the bomb because (1) making a bomb is difficult and dangerous and (2) a timer almost guarantees that you’ll end up exploding nothing of value. That’s why most bomb makers use some sort of active trigger- a cell phone call, a pressure plate, and button- because it offers control, reduces the risk that the bomb will be discovered, ensures that the target is actually struck, and reduces the risk that the bomber will blow himself up (time bombs are prone to early detonation). I understand this movie shorthand- a timer adds a sense of dramatic tension to any scene- but I also find this shorthand particularly insidious because politicians will cite a proverbial time bomb to justify torture and all sorts of misdeeds. Any credible threat outside of unsophisticated lone-man lunatics will forgo a simple time bomb for something that they can control.

Even in movie universes, time bombs don’t make a lot of sense. A terrorist in the story usually uses a bomb as a form of leverage to make demands. What if their demands are actually met? It’s going to be an awkward moment when the terrorist will have to explain that they couldn’t defuse the bomb because there was traffic and they couldn’t make it back in time to stop the timer.

Abstraction >> Faux Realistic

Abstraction >> Faux Realistic published on No Comments on Abstraction >> Faux Realistic

I have been thinking a lot about video games that remain compelling to me over a long period of time, and a common theme is the amount of abstraction that the game itself embraces. Many game studios (or at least their marketing departments) love to talk up how photo-realistic, immersive, or lifelike their games will be, but I really think this material misses the point about why people play games more than once. 

All games are abstractions, and I posit that the industry trend of throwing millions of dollars in an attempt to obscure this abstraction creates a total that is less than the sum of its parts.

A lot of very smart people have written dissertations about the Uncanny Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) and how humans tend to have a negative emotional reaction to object that approaches a human’s appearance. There is something off, and our brain notices it whether we want it to or not.

I suspect that this reaction holds true for other representations of reality even though the Uncanny Valley reaction is most strongly felt for human faces because a major portion of our brain is dedicated to processing faces and emotions. This might be best explained by example.

I was playing a first person shooter not too long ago that boasted a destructible environment and a few other realistic features. I came to a point where I couldn’t figure out how to get around a chain-link fence. I couldn’t climb over it. I couldn’t knock it down with a rocket launcher. It held impossibly firm when I drove a vehicle into it. Despite the graphical fidelity, this felt ridiculous in the moment. It took me out of the moment, broke flow, and was a strong reminder that I was sitting in front of a monitor playing a game.

Let’s take the same scenario and lower the promise of graphical fidelity. I’ve played dozens of top-down shooters where you can blow apart some buildings but other walls are impervious. I can’t recall a single time this has disrupted the flow of play because my brain is readily able to process the abstraction of reality and frame it in a universe where rules seem consistent or at least understandable. Instead of wondering why a simple fence is impervious to tons of steel barreling into it, my attention snaps to finding the proper path to my next objective instead. Even though the situation might be exactly the same, it is more frustrating and off-putting to be placed in a less abstracted representation.

To test this hypothesis, let’s dial down the graphical fidelity and increase the abstraction as much as possible. The first game that comes to mind is Dwarf Fortress. I play Dwarf Fortress using ASCII characters to represent everything from tree leaves, water, giant pandas, lava, etc. The level of simulation is absurdly detailed and oftentimes beautiful once your eye is trained to understand what is being represented by a few tildes and hashes.

I recently did a Let’s Play thread on twitter (using my Blaseball handle) where I built a wooden fortress completely suspended in the trees of a forest (https://twitter.com/BlobCostas/status/1585040951768416256). This was a hilarious play through because the trees would often drop branches down through the multiple layers of roofs and floors of the fortress… often with funny or tragic results. The game we played had a lot of emotional moments of sacrifice, loss, and fortitude in the face of impending disaster. Also, there were tales of romance, betrayal, and grief from the poor dwarfs of the fortress… and all of it was rendered using characters that one could type into a text editor.

If we were somehow able to render this exact same scenario Unreal Engine 5, it would not have been a fun play through. The thought of a giant, two-headed Ettin climbing a wooden ramp into a massive treehouse would have looked odd. We would wonder why the monster didn’t simply pull itself up by tree branches to get to the fort. Likewise, the falling branches that pile drive their way through the fortress would look ridiculous instead of being a fun sort of environmental hazard to the fort. Even the fort itself would look uncannily stable and resilient because it wouldn’t sway with the breeze or droop under its own massive weight.

The same can be said about the online game Blaseball which uses an even higher level of graphical abstraction. The entire game is represented by text prompts and a few common representations of whether or not a player is on a particular base. That being said, the game has a rich lore of murder, theft, betrayal, redemption, and literally attacking and dethroning gods. None of this would be remotely enjoyable if it were rendered in the latest MLB the Show 22 engine. Dominic Marijuana hitting a home run to cripple the Shelled One’s pods was an epic moment in Blaseball history (https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Day_X). If we tried to recreate this in The Show 22, it would never pack the same punch because the joy of imagining and losing ourselves in the moment would be replaced by a passive, less-satisfying representation of reality.

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