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Developer 3D Realms have just released their ground-breaking action game Max Payne, which is being described almost everywhere as "the most cinematic game ever made". I have been playing it a bit myself and have to agree with this, even if I find the term slightly irritating. What this means is that Max Payne utilises many visual tricks which have previously only been seen on celluloid, such as the famed Matrix-style "bullet time" (a feature which essentially slow the game speed to allow the player to react to certain events in ways that would normally not be possible: i.e. dodging a bullet). Indeed, to an onlooker watching someone play it can be a very cinematic experience: you watch a scene unfold, observe the consequenes and then have to consider the aftermath - but that is only one part of the gaming experience. Instead I would term Max Payne post-cinematic: it is in some ways representative of the future. The visionary author Neil Stephenson posits in his tour de force "The Diamond Age" that ultimately the movie will develop into what he calls a "ractive" - a reactive experience in which the viewer/user will actually play a role and in which events change according to his actions. In my opinion Max Payne is much closer to this experience than to a contemporary movie: events change in a dynamic way as a result of your keystrokes and the outcome of the game/experience is indeed moulded by your actions.

Make no mistake: Max Payne is an important game. It will affect the way games will be made (or at least I hope it will) because it shows that games are not by their nature inherently inferior to movies. It allies a plot which while not Shakespeare is better than that of most John Travolta movies (Michael, anyone), it does manage to create some kind of emotional involvement on behalf of the user in a way that few movies do, it is highly stylish and most of all it is great fun. However, the game has had some not insignificant criticism (mostly in the mainstream press as opposed to gaming publications) which I will attempt to answer now. First of all many have argued that it is by nature inferior to films simply because many of the visual techniques and stylistic elements have been cribbed from movies: yes, this is true. But that is simply because films are now part of the collective psyche and a game of this type is necessarily going to be reverential of them. It is also worth noting that film is merely an earlier medium: movies were being made long before games and therefore inevtiably generated some great ideas before games designers could or did. This does not make Max Payne inferior to a movie, however: it many ways the movie comes off worse because in Max Payne you are it. You have the power to decide the outcome in a way that a movie or play can never offer you (although Jeffrey Archer tried with his The Accused in which the audience voted at the end to decide if the protagonist was guilty or not). The second argument that has been raised is that golden oldie: Max Payne is violent. The phrase "Bullet time" conveys this. What I don't understand is this: given that Max Payne is given a rating in the same way as a film is - and also given that the violence in Max Payne is heavily stylised as opposed to that in say Shaft - why is it being described as pernicious and shocking when similar movies are not? At least Max Payne offers something of a moral choice: in the game while you are obviously encouraged to shoot the "enemy" you are specifically warned against shooting innocents, and can lose the game because of just that. Is it so much worse than a film simply because you are in control, rather than watching an action hero doing the slaughtering?

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