{"id":201,"date":"2026-02-16T12:01:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T17:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/?p=201"},"modified":"2026-02-16T12:02:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T17:02:14","slug":"montage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/montage\/","title":{"rendered":"Montage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I found this markdown document in a drafts folder, dated June 2022<\/em>. I didn’t look at it at all, just copied and pasted into the CMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soviet montage theory. It\u2019s pretty simple – the idea is that the images in cinema don\u2019t produce meaning on their own. It\u2019s the juxtaposition of images through editing, through montage, that produces meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, rather, the viewer who sees those juxtaposed images creates the meaning. In their mind. It makes sense that that\u2019s how our brains work – before film, any two things we saw at the same time would like be related. And it is definitely internal to our brain, it\u2019s not something that is necessarily a part of film. If you\u2019ve seen Silence of the Lambs, you\u2019ve seen this idea played with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also fits nicely with how film (like, actual film – with the strips of images on ground up bones and hooves) works. A bunch of still images that only have motion when viewed rapidly pone after another. Kind of like editing on a micro level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So games don\u2019t really have a lot cinematic editing (whether that\u2019s a benefit or a detriment I can\u2019t (won\u2019t) say), at least not during gameplay sections. A dramatic change of camera angle doesn\u2019t really count. And you can\u2019t really do a lot of cutting between different images when the player needs to, you know, be able to control what is going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Importance of contrast isn\u2019t limited to cinema. It\u2019s obviously important in music. And the entire point of museum exhibitions is the play of multiple works in the context of other works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Games. Consequence and choice and agency and blah blah blah-ity blah. The usual line of thinking (which I attribute to Peter Molyneux, totally unfairly ignoring everyone else whose ever espoused an idea ever) is that choices and consequences only matter if you can\u2019t unmake them. Like real life. Which is the embodiment of a philosophy about free will and choice and individual agency that I\u2019m not going into here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the Fable series limits you to one save and shouts, \u201cYour choices matter because you cannot unmake them!\u201d and you shout back in frustration and try to game the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are hundreds of tiny little choices and interactions in games – every button you press, every thumbstick twirl, every mouse movement. There\u2019s no filmstrip, there\u2019s just a sequence of interactions and the image responds. Cause and effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thought experiment: a short game with a story that has a single decision point. You choose between two options and the rest of the game plays out along one of those two story paths. Your choice caused those effects. Then you go back again and make the other choice, because that\u2019s how you play games. They\u2019re about trying different things and experimenting, right? So now it\u2019s not just about cause and effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your input into the game is based on the choice of which button to press and you can push every button and different things happen. So why, when you come upon a story choice, a narrative analogue to the kinetic button push, shouldn\u2019t you be able to choose as many times as you want? Because, as per above, that\u2019s not how life works or how stories work (because all stories obviously seek to recreate life (fallacy)). It\u2019s all about cause and effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When John Peter Grant writes about ambiguity versus lore<\/a> he\u2019s pointing out a pretty useful distinction. Discussing the meaning of symbolism is different than discussing fighter formations in the Mass Effect universe. Games are great at providing fodder for the latter type of discussion (actually, it\u2019s not games, it\u2019s stuff that\u2019s ancillary to the \u2018game\u2019 part of the game. The Mass Effect codex is not necessarily good storytelling just because you can (thankfully) ignore it.) but, maybe because of their nature (or nurture) as \u201csimulations\u201d, they have to eliminate as much of the ambiguity as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Problem: Interpretation requires ambiguity, and games don\u2019t really get negative space. They\u2019re creating worlds, after all, and there aren\u2019t gaps in the real world (there are), so why should there be gaps in the virtual?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, negative space in the sense of interpretable space between, say, two images cut together
(or two comic panels, if you\u2019re familiar with Scott McCloud) – that\u2019s where the viewer or the reader makes meaning in these visual media. But in games we don\u2019t have that linear structure filled with gaps. Hell, the Half-Life series has absolutely no gaps from Gordon Freeman\u2019s point of view (which, I guess is realistic, because you\u2019re inhabiting him? Until you start looking at issues of distances and sleep and bathroom breaks and eating and\u2026) We have branches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So anyway, maybe games aren\u2019t about cause and effect, not exactly. Maybe they\u2019re about comparing multiple effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And not just in a \u201cWow, look at the technical artistry on display here to basically create two different games!\u201d way. And not in an \u201cOh man, look how different the game turned out because I made this other choice!\u201d way. It doesn\u2019t matter that you, the player made the choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Refocusing on the differences between outcomes moves away from the power-fantasy inherent in a single player game (where the player, by virtue of being an actual human being, is the only active agent to which everything in the game responds) and lets a story be about something more, even without sacrificing the thorough world-building that games are arguably great at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But basically, if replaying a game, making different choices, seeing different outcomes, doesn\u2019t add to the understanding and appreciation of the other series of outcomes, doesn\u2019t increase the weight of the choice no matter the decision, maybe the choices aren\u2019t all that interesting in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s plenty of room for meaning in the montage of branches – the \u201cWhat Could Have Been\u2026\u201d story is all over the place in other media, and yet this might be the medium most suited to telling it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or maybe I\u2019m just reading it wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found this markdown document in a drafts folder, dated June 2022. I didn’t look at it at all, just copied and pasted into the CMS. Soviet montage theory. It\u2019s pretty simple – the idea is that the images in cinema don\u2019t produce meaning on their own. It\u2019s the juxtaposition of images through editing, through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}