Game of Souls? Dark Thrones? Daenerys narrative dissonance? Game of Thrones feels more like a video game in its final season.
From BioWare and Dark Souls to grinding XP and ludonarrative dissonance, Game of Thrones feels a lot like a video game in its final season.
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From Dark Souls to ludonarrative dissonance, Game of Thrones feels a lot like a video game in its final season.
For years, video games have been apeing film and television. We ran an entire column dedicated to the intersection of video game and film for six months.
As video games sought greater respect for the art form, like a try-hard kid trying to get in with an older, cooler crowd, the osmosis from TV and film was inevitable.
The funny thing about osmosis, though, is that sometimes things flow both ways. And while television and film have been visibly shaping storytelling and cinematography in video games, we’re also starting to see the inverse. We find it in the blurred reality scene-setting and GTA-alike roleplaying in HBO’s Westworld. It’s in the respawn conceit in everything from Hollywood’s Source Code and Edge of Tomorrow to Netflix’s Altered Carbon and Russian Doll.
And now, in its eighth and final season, video game influences have taken over in Game of Thrones.
Warning: There are spoilers for Game of Thrones – in particular, the final season – below.
Nobody just buys anything in video games any more. In an effort to eke out more play time through repetitive tasks, shopping has been replaced with crafting.
“Get money, go shopping, buy thing” becomes “complete quest, get blueprint or recipe, hunt for components, travel to safe location, craft thing” instead. It feels counter-capitalist at first, like a video game version of The Good Life (with less Felicity Kendal). But in reality? It means wasting huge gobs of your free time to pillage the virtual environment to make a new pair of boots out of the carcases of 100 dead otters.
In Game of Thrones, they’re mostly crafting Dragonglass weapons to take on the army of the dead. It gives Gendry a chance to show off his blacksmithing skills, at least. Oh, and Cersei has been busy living her best Age of Empires fantasies, crafting some very big catapults.
There’s a moment, in video games, that happens just before the end. It’s particularly prevalent in large scale RPGs with lots of party members, like Dragon Age or Final Fantasy: All of the heroes will gather together for a chat.
It’s basically the point of no return. It’s where the game gives you a chance to make sure you’ve levelled up your characters, kitted them out properly, and completed all the optional side quests. Because once you cross that threshold, you’re not coming back.
In the final season of Game of Thrones, the whole of the second episode was one big BioWare moment. Heroes from all over were reuniting, planning, laughing, drinking, dancing, and fornicating, like it was their last night alive. Like Mass Effect 2’s infamous suicide mission, it felt like nobody was coming back from this one.
Some of them sadly didn’t.
(HIS NAME WAS BERIC DONDARRION, GODDAMIT. HE WAS A HERO AND YOU ALL DON’T EVEN REMEMBER HIS NAME. BERIC DONDARRION. NOT “EYE PATCH MAN,” OR “SHERIFF DAN ANDERSEN FROM FORTITUDE” – SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT.)
The final season’s third episode, The Long Night – colloquially known as the Battle of Winterfell – is equal parts tower defence and Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings. Not one of those nice tower defence games like Plants vs. Zombies, either. One of those horrible tower defence sequences, from Gears of War, or Resident Evil, or World War Z.
After time to set your defences, first, there comes silence. Agonising, interminable silence, deep and dark enough to drown in. Then the first wave crashes against your fortifications. You repel it, perhaps fall back to a deeper defensive position, then steel yourself for another attack.
This repeats for the duration of the battle. But on the defending team, you don’t know how many phases you need to repel. Just when you think you’re surviving, the enemy summons up new forces out of nowhere. (Literally. Whoever thought hiding from a necromancer god in a crypt was a good idea?)
All you can do is keep fighting, and hope this is a sequence you’re able to win.
It’s a bit of a cheap trick, but the Night King creates a swirl of storm clouds in the skies around Winterfell. This serves several purposes. It blots out any moonlight, so Winterfell’s defenders can’t see. It presumably also scares the crap out of people.
But it also masks his position, as he soars above the castle on the zombified dragon, Viserion. While Danaerys and Jon try and engage him, it gives the Night King the element of surprise.
Classic Fog of War usage. (And it’s a bonus if distance fog means Game of Thrones can save on CGI budget by not rendering things more than 50 yards away. Pop-in for the win.)
While the Battle of Winterfell rages outside, Arya finds herself trapped in the castle’s library. Here the undead horde of the Night King – so often raging and racing, firmly from the fast zombie trope – shamble around, sentry-like, among the bookcases.
Arya can take out one or two, but any amount of noise will bring more wights down on her. So she sneaks, Solid Snake style, through the library. She skulks in the shadows. She avoids their cone of vision. She waits for them to pass. She doesn’t make a sound. Arya even borrows a page out of Joel and Ellie’s playbook, throwing objects into other parts of the room to distract them.
Then, as it always does with stealth sections, something goes wrong. Wights begin to pour into the library and Arya is left with no choice but to fight her way out. If that doesn’t perfectly encapsulate everything that’s frustrating about lengthy insta-fail stealth sections, then nothing does.
