Short Controlled Bursts: Affect and Aliens

“This is an emotional moment for all of us?”

Carter Blake, Aliens ( James Cameron, 1986)

The 2005 announcement that filmmaker Steven Spielberg had signed a contract with Electronic Arts to develop three games sparked yet another round in an ongoing debate about games and affect. As Spielberg had earlier explained, “I think the real indicator [of the game medium’s artistic success] will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17.”¹ Many film critics saw Spielberg’s recruitment as Hollywood coming to rescue its fledgling digital counterpart: the director of screen melodramas was being hired to teach the games industry how enriching character and storytelling could achieve greater emotional impact than games currently on the market. Industry insiders, by contrast, argued that games had already achieved plenty of emotional impact by deploying their own techniques and exploiting their own distinctive properties as a medium.

In this essay, we hope to develop a more sophisticated account for the affective dynamics at work in cinema and games through a systematic comparison of James Cameron’s Aliens and the 2001 game Aliens Versus Predator 2 (Monolith, 2001). Alongside Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Aliens is probably the film which has most directly influenced the visual and genre conventions of mainstream American games—both explicitly through games adapted from the film franchise and implicitly through games which mimic it. Aliens Versus Predator 2 for PC was a sequel to an earlier Aliens Versus Predator PC game by Rebellion (1999), which itself was a reworking of the original first-person Aliens Versus Predator videogame (also by Rebellion) made for the ill-fated Atari Jaguar home console in 1994. During the same span of time, there were many other videogame incarnations of the Aliens Versus Predator IP, ranging from beat ’em up arcade games to real-time strategy games. The first-person games, however, most directly re-create the atmosphere and situations of Cameron’s film, “putting you in the film” in an immediate, immersive sense. While the game is not pure, mixing together the Aliens and Predator franchises several years before they would cross over on the screen, Aliens Versus Predator 2 remains the most compelling and faithful of many attempts to create a game based on Aliens.

Cameron’s Aliens

Cameron’s original film set a high standard for affective intensity: an action film that certainly makes us cry and otherwise has its way with our emotions. Cameron’s particular gift as an action film director has been to create a complex set of interrelationships between his characters, firmly establishing the emotional stakes in every sequence, and thus combing character actions and reactions in such a way that we never lose track of what the events mean for the people involved. Long before Titanic (1997), Cameron wove the melodramatic imagination into the DNA of the action genre.

Consider, for example, the spectacular sequence of events which unfold as the Colonial space marines attempt to rescue what they believe to be a group of colonists being trapped by the aliens, and in the process have their first sustained confrontation with the creatures. On the surface, it is easy to imagine how this sequence could inspire a game level: there’s a clearly defined mission that hinges on the importance of using the right tools, thinking through problems, and maintaining firm discipline. Much of the drama centers on the failure of the high-tech gadgets to protect the marines from danger. The static, flickering images on their viewscreen constantly remind us of the vulnerability of the technology linking the men in the field with those in command, making it impossible for either group to fully understand what’s occurring. The characters must be stripped of their most effective weapons because of the risk that they may rupture the cooling system and set off an explosion within the nuclear reactor. The alien’s acid-like blood proves to be as destructive as their flamethrowers, allowing the monsters to do harm even after they are killed. Some of the...