Cross-Medium Drift
The tradeoffs when games adapt other media's conventions! Final Fantasy X, Metroidvanias, Super Mario Wonder, Death Stranding, Gacha Games...
“Cross-Medium Drift” is a phenomenon that happens in every game, and it’s when the game takes upon qualities of a different medium: creative media, like movies, anime, manga, comics, books, TV, music.
This is unavoidable when making a game. It’s also part of why games are so interesting - because games are so hard to pin down as to what they actually are. A game could feel heavily film-inspired at one point - and the next it could feel like some strange kind of action-game experience. A game can drift into other mediums to different degrees, and this drifting can overlap.
This isn’t ‘bad’ or ‘good’, it’s complex, but I want to talk about a few cases of cross-medium drift in which I feel like the horizons of a game’s design are overly defined by the game’s drift into another medium.
I’ll start with an example of a game I really like, Final Fantasy X.
In this scene from FFX we have a few NPCs standing around. Probably nothing except the NPCs are interactable, although the environment art is beautiful and vivid like a painting. In this case I think the game is drifting towards the medium of a painting.
However, the medium of painting is usually encountered in an art gallery: a space that invites you to reflect, pause, and focus on the act of looking. In contrast, the average player probably spends a minute or two at tops in this room, without much time spent on the act of looking at the background. At most it’s a bit of flavor for where you are in the story, although the game doesn’t dwell much upon it. This “paintingness” of some of FFX’s levels draws contrast with the other aspects of the game: fighting battles, exploring, watching cutscenes. In a weird twist, this overly realistic background painting mostly served to pull me out of the story.
Compare this to the (mostly) full-3D environments of another place in FFX - Besaid Island, which, combined with camera movement, feel like they play a bit more towards the game’s cinematic storytelling and linear RPG adventure, by presenting an environment that the player actually feels embodied in.
To come at FFX from another angle, it features these levels where you solve puzzles by moving orbs. These always felt like the game drifting from “story rpg” to “tedious puzzle game”. That is to say, cross-media drift can also happen by the game feeling like different kinds of games!
Metroidvanias
It’s common for recent Metroidvanias to have a detailed art style where the environment feels very realistically rendered (whether this be through a painterly style or a 3D render style). But, despite looking different or having different stories, many metroidvanias feel similar. (melee upgrade, jump upgrade, HP upgrade at the end of a hall…) Playing some metroidvanias yesterday, I felt I was merely walking between the pages of a picture book - boxy environments with some differing slopes here and there...
Not an unpleasant experience, but not one that felt particularly resonant for me at that moment. It made me wish that instead of these games drifting so much towards 2D/3D illustrations or concept art, there had been more going on with the other aspects of the game, rather than leaving it more up to convention.
Here’s a few examples. These games aren’t bad, but the way they approach being a game does feel well-treaded, even if their execution is great.
So… is Nice Art and Convention Bad?
No, I like both at times! But I bring these examples up more to show that games can drift into being other media in ways that seem to cover up the conventional approaches they otherwise take. And to me, the game design aspects of a game strongly guide the kinds of stories that can be told. Even if you shake up the art style or music, if a metroidvania game follows a conventional “very large grid of 2D boxy spaces where you slowly increase your HP and gain melee and movement skills”, to some extent those layers - the art, writing, exploration… will all start to feel a bit separate, like the meat disappointedly slipping out of your Subway sandwich, ruining the illusion of sandwich unity.
Even if I am getting a nice, animated film or picture-book-story-esque experience, it doesn’t feel it’s working as hand-in-hand with the rest of the game as it could.
Other Examples
Take Super Mario Wonder: it’s an entertaining game with different level gimmicks and twists, but with the effortlessness of its platforming and relative uniform boxiness of its levels, it takes upon the feeling of scrolling through a TikTok feed. There’s little that’s inspiring about the world map or the structure of the game - it’s just one level after another, which you open, like an advent calendar, or a Instagram Reel, waiting for what surprise will come.
I’ve played recent indie adventure games that prioritize feeling more like a manga or an anime during cutscenes, while the other aspects of the game sometimes can feel like straightforward puzzling that are mostly there to fill space in between story beats. It’s not that the story or game has no merits, but rather that it feels like the game’s ‘anime-ness’ is overpowering everything.
Other games drift into movies: take Death Stranding, which combines a uniquely quiet, 3D open-world exploration-delivery system with movie-like cutscenes that, while not entirely unrelated to the delivery gameplay, can sometimes feel jarringly different, confusing. The cutscenes don’t necessarily harm Death Stranding as a work, but it also feels like they aren’t adding too much other than something to break up the pace. They can just feel… there.
I feel like a much stronger example of drifting into movies, or anime, or textual media, is something like The Silver Case,. The ways text and image are presented, even the at-times obtuse exploration segments, feel like windows into the world of “The Silver Case”, windows which are curated and designed to frame the world in ways that suit the narrative.
Extreme examples of cross-media drift are found in stuff like gacha games or F2P games. If you’re unfamiliar with gacha games, they’re games which almost, without fail, present two end goals: clearing extremely difficult number-based challenges, and watching anime-style cutscenes to learn about characters. To do either of these requires you to do something repetitive for hours on end over weeks or months, day in and day out. While gacha games aren’t lacking anything to offer, these layers - number challenges and anime-style scenes - feel almost completely untethered from whatever grinding system the game employs.
In the western F2P sphere, there are games like Project Makeover, where you must play match 3 puzzles in order to advance a reality TV-like story.
In these kinds of games, the layers are SO separate that the ‘game’ layer is literally there to act as a financial engine with some other coat of paint applied.
Case in point, here’s a chart that show the different game equivalents of the various currencies in Mihoyo’s gacha games. In some ways this almost distills my entire post: each set of three items (e.g. Primogem, Stellar Jade, Polychrome) is presumably entirely the same in terms of function, just reskinned and renamed for a different game-world. While the art carries different meaning, the function of these items generally produces similar feelings for players.
Conclusion
Cross-media drift is in every game, and it’s not a bad or good quality! But, in certain contexts, it can allow for high amounts of conventional game design to slip by. Put another way, too much cross-media drift makes the layers of a game feel they separate, whereas games feel most interesting as a storytelling or artistic form when all the layers are working together with intention.
I personally would like to see games trying to explore more ‘gameness’, rather than emulating other media too much. This exploration of ‘gameness’ can happen in all sorts of genres, whether it be visual novels, action games, shmups, multiplayer games… (That is to say, ‘gameness’ is not that traditional divide of ‘story vs. gameplay’ or whatever, rather it’s a holistic quality. Gameness could be increased by having game writers play more action games, or having arcade game designers play more visual novels!)
I remember, as a teenager who played computer games in the 90s, noticing that CD rom games could be from any medium. Like, an adventure game where you guide a claymation character through a diorama would seem different than a cartoon going through a drawing or a mix of photography and 3D computer animation. The first 2 weren't new for interaction, I had doll houses and playmats and dolls 3d and 2d. But it was new to do it in a structured way, even if adventure games are barely structured.
FF7 on the playstation was for me the first time a game combined thoughtful gameplay with something like that. I didn't even realize it wasn't as easy to loose as random encounters on Final Fantasy games on NES, or boss fights on the SNES, but there was enough new stuff that I didn't notice until I tried the older games. And scanning the screen for clues was more exciting than ever, since they weren't limited to square tiles.
Your conclusion is a little different than mine. I see the drift as a blast furnace which we put all of our ideas into and out we got pure gold already. From that point the problem is will we ever think of or have a new idea ever again after the blast furnace thing. Causing things to seem uncomfortable at most and predictable at best. I like the idea, though, that you are maintaining.