DVD technology has been a colossal success in delivering feature films and other long-format video, with figures for consumer purchasing showing that by the end of 2005 more than 80 percent of U.S. households will have at least one DVD player (DEG Press Release). The phenomenal market penetration of the DVD into the everyday world of millions of people has brought in its wake an unforeseen new locale for electronic games. A growing number of DVD releases include games playable on standard set-top players as special features. Although the majority of these games are found on releases aimed at children (e.g., family-oriented animation), others clearly have an adult audience in mind.

Parsing these games into a taxonomy could be done in a number of ways, for example according to genre/sub-genre of the accompanying film, gaming conventions (e.g., word games, spatial games, perceptual-motor coordination), or marketing age group. The last of these taxonomies highlights the evolution of the DVD game from simple visual concepts to more sophisticated ones, so this is the one I will be primarily using in this article. Of course, even some of the simplest early DVD games were quite sophisticated, deriving as they did from animated films with tremendously high levels of art direction. What they lacked was design that involved setting more challenging interactive goals for the gaming audience (Falstein “Paradigm” 47).

After examining the development of DVD games, three things stand out:

• Pattern matching, whether visual or semantic/syntactic (i.e., answering questions; Jurafsky and Martin 84), is the most common play strategy of all DVD games;
• Over the past five years, these games have developed an appearance of interactive complexity reminiscent of games rendered in real-time;
• The appearance of complexity relies primarily on the careful preparation of many small video segments that can be concatenated together rapidly by the DVD-apparatus.

These three linked observations imply that the current design trend placing interactivity at the center of game design has yielded better, more entertaining games with good replay value. The growing practice of providing two or more discs for major film DVD releases means that gaming content to fill them will increase. Will the new generation of DVD games continue to improve as they have over the last five years?

An early form of DVD game involved asking a series of questions that eventuated in a positive or negative outcome. The 2000 release of The Cell, for example, contained as a special feature an “Empathy Test” that first determined the viewerʼs “emotional IQ,” and then ascertained how “empathic” the viewer was. The gameʼs relation to the film was clear, but not belabored, “measuring” the viewer on an implied scale between the filmʼs empathic protagonist and its un-empathic villain. Interestingly, whether the viewer was allowed to take the second part of the test depended on the “emotional IQ” obtained in the first part of the test. If the viewer fell too close to the villain in “emotional IQ,” the game advised her to seek professional counseling and refused to proceed to the second part. Importantly, the “Empathy Test” is a good example of two of Falteinʼs 400 rules for game design: “Provide an Enticing Long Term Goal” and “Provide Clear Short-Term Goals” (“The 400 Project” 26). The individual questions of the test made up the short-term goals, while the long-term goal became the quest to finish the test and receive the final “diagnosis” revealing how empathic the test-taking viewer was.

Figure 1. The Cellʼs “Empathy Test” orients the viewer to the ultra-long-term goal of being an empathic person in its opening screen.

The Cell DVD is noteworthy for another reason: it was one of the first DVDs to contain a demo version of a PC-game based on the film. It also has product placement for the PC-games Homeworld (1999), and Homeworld: Catacylsm (2000), which are not directly related to the film but are included purely as advertisements. This sort of product placement has been common in film since the 1970s, but never directly positioned on an interactive vehicle like that made possible by the DVD-apparatus (Babin and Carder 33). The Cell DVD release was ahead of its time in both of these commercial strategies, strategies that are now quite common in new DVD releases. The Van Helsing DVD, for example, includes a one-level demo of the XBox game, while Spider-Man 2 has links to online games via MSN-Microsoft Online Gaming Network.

One of the earliest DVD releases to include video-based games was the Disney release of the Pixar film, Monsters, Inc. (2001). Two of these games were created for the Japanese animated series “Ponkickies 21” and are merely short video clips depicting the host, “Go-Go” Connie-chan, introducing a simple “guessing game.” One of these games is the Japanese version of Paper-Rock-Scissors called Janken, while the other is the Lucky Door Game where the object is to guess which one of the animated characters will come out of the door. Neither of these games is genuinely interactive, because the player simply makes a personal guess or gesture while the clip runs to the end, eventually revealing the outcome (with no input from the player). The game Peek-a-Boo: Booʼs Door Game, required true interactivity from the viewer and therefore had real gameplay through the DVD apparatus (i.e., the formal specification of the DVD format plus the physical hardware reifying the specification) (Baudry 346-347). It required the player to explore the six rooms behind closet doors looking for pieces of Booʼs door in each room. This was essentially a guessing game as well, but with the difference that the DVD apparatus waited for the viewer to choose one location in each room that might hide the door piece. The video segments between the choices were primarily designed to segue from one choice-making opportunity to another.

Figure 2. A view of Monsters, Inc.ʼs interactive Peek-a-Boo: Booʼs Door Game as the first set of doors arrives. The 2-D art of the game is reminiscent of the movieʼs storyboards, of which a selection is included on the DVD.

The subsequent release of Lilo and Stitch in 2002 brought a greater complexity to DVD gameplay by breaking the included game into two interactively distinctive styles of play that combine the ideas of The Cell with Monsters, Inc. Dr. Jumba Jookiba, the evil mad scientist who created Stitch, first poses a series of questions which, when answered correctly, activate an “injector.” After activating all three injectors, the viewer must correctly choose the order of the chemical ingredients to create a new life form. The creature creation game requires both memory skill and pattern-matching to succeed. Critically, the video elements take on a new role in the gameplay, working as particular responses to the viewerʼs actions and not simply as transitional elements between choices. They provide a sense of real-time interactivity missing in The Cell and only partly employed in Monsters, Inc. The creature creation game marks a definite evolution from these earlier examples.

Figure 3. The question-and-answer segment and the create-a-new-creature segment in the Lilo and Stitch DVD game.

One of the most sophisticated DVD games is Mega-Race, included on the 2003 release of Spykids 3D: Game Over. The DVD race matches the race in the film very closely, even reusing some of the filmʼs race-game segments and the racetrack layouts found there. As the player takes the place of Juni Cortez in the driverʼs seat of the mega-bike, she experiences to a great extent what the film portrays as Juniʼs ride. This close reproduction makes the game appealing to those who enjoyed the film because they get the chance to become the hero and pursue the goal of defeating the Toymaker themselves, albeit within a smaller compass.

The advance between the relatively simple games discussed earlier and MegaRace is the result of a much more fluid use of pre-rendered video clips. In MegaRace, the clips have been designed to fit together around segments actually taken from the film in such a way that the movement on the racetrack approaches the visual look of real-time rendering. However, the racetrack never varies; the obstacles and accidents remain the same each time the game is played. After a few tries, it becomes relatively easy to win the race repeatedly.

Figure 4. The starting line of MegaRace

Figure 5. A crash sequence taken directly from the film.

Figure 6. Somewhere near the middle of the race.

In 2004, New Line Entertainment released the DVD for Elf which contained four different games: Fix Santaʼs Sleigh (a question-and-answer game), Elf in the City (a maze game), Snowball Fight (a first-person shooter game), and The Race Down Mt. Icing (a driving game of sorts). The last three of these games take the use of interactive video elements to new levels. The maze game uses video segments of moving streams of traffic to block off sections of the maze, while the snowball fight shows video of snowballs both incoming to and thrown by the viewer. The Race Down Mt. Icing most fully exploits the use of video segments to present a simulation of a luge-style run down a candy-cane strewn course. Each portion of the course appears as if it were displayed by a real-time render engine, but is actually pre-rendered video. As the viewer passes from one area to another, an obstacle (giant candy canes or a rolling snow boulder) intervenes giving a choice to move right or left, duck down, or jump over by pressing the appropriate keys on the DVD remote. If the viewer chooses the correct direction, the video element for the next portion of the course is played and the game progresses. If the viewer makes an error, a video element of a wipeout plays and the viewer begins descending again at the portion of the course prior to her wipeout.

To increase the sense of real-time rendering, the DVD-apparatus randomly changes the course in small ways by using different video elements for the same stretch of the course. The wipeout elements are also varied among three different crashes so that each spill looks somewhat unique when occurring over different portions of the course. The various combinations of the video elements produce a deeper sense of real-time interactivity which is at the heart of all electronic gaming (Crawford 78-79).

Figure 7. A wipeout in progress from The Race Down Mt. Icing

Figure 8. A giant candy cane obstacle from The Race Down Mt. Icing

Figure 9. Inside Mt. Icing from The Race Down Mt. Icing

Given the limited capabilities of the present DVD- apparatus (i.e., the rudimentary scripting language plus the underpowered processors of most players), other play strategies (e.g., simulation, first or third-person shooter, tactical, difficult tests of perceptual and motor skills, etc.) are much more difficult to implement. Because the complexity of DVD games relies on the preparation of many small video segments that are played rapidly in succession depending on the viewerʼs interaction with the game scripts, the speed of the script-processing engine, the video decoders, and the reading speed from the disc all directly impact the performance of the game. As in console gaming, fixed capability hardware provides both a stable delivery platform and a troublesome bottleneck for newer game designs (“Brave New Worlds” 30-31). Moreover, moving toward game styles such as 3D simulation, which requires indeterminate interactivity that would be very difficult to pre-render, may well be beyond present DVD game design.

On the other hand, the inclusion of games playable on consoles could be seen as an alternative to this hardware bottleneck. An example would be the one-level version of the XBox game on the Van Helsing DVD mentioned above. Since both the Microsoft XBox and the Sony PS2 also act as DVD players, this supplementation of one technology with another would enable designers to position games in tandem with films on the same interactive device. However, because only demo versions of console games have appeared this way, it seems as if designers have yet to take full advantage of this approach. Including game demos on DVDs is more like product placement (advertising the full version of the game to a special “gamerʼs” segment of the film audience) rather than an attempt to truly synergize the two media on a single device.

More promising is the advent of high-definition video on DVD, which will provide a more fully featured scripting language and more powerful processors for the next generation of DVD-players (Heiland 17-19). Currently, the contenders for the delivery technology (BD-ROM discs from the Sony-led Blu-Ray Disc Association and the DVD-Forumʼs HD-DVD discs) are incompatible. However, just as the rival pre-DVD camps came together to develop the present DVD specification, it is likely that through negotiation a common delivery technology will be created. No matter what the delivery technology, it will certainly surpass the present DVD-apparatus by providing more internal bandwidth for the video segments, higher-level programming strategies (using Java if the Blu-Ray specification succeeds), and network communications capability (Dixon 60-61). An HD DVD-apparatus might well give the current generation of gaming consoles a run for their money, allowing some real-time rendering of graphics and more sophisticated interactivity. Perhaps the development of games on DVD is poised to hurdle to the next level via the “Blue Highway” of the emerging generation of DVD-players. It would undeniably yield better quality game play for everyone.

Works Cited:

Babin, Laurie A., and Sheri Thompson Carder. “Advertising via the Box Office: Is Product Placement Effective?” Journal of Promotion Management 3.1-2 (1996): 31-51.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-75). Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism (5th edition). Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
“Brave New Worlds.” GameState (Summer 2003): 28-33. Crawford, Chris.
Chris Crawford on Game Design. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2003.
Digital Entertainment Group Press Release 1/06/05. “Industry Boosted By $21.2 Billion In Annual DVD Sales And Rentals.” 20 Feb. 2005 <http://www.digitalentertainmentinfo.com/News/press/CES010605.htm>.
Dixon, Douglas. “Next Generation DVD Authoring.” DV (February 2005): 58-64.
Falstein, Noah. “The 400 Project.” Game Developer (March 2002): 26. –––. “Paradigm Shifts.” Game Developer (November 2004): 47.
Heiland, Victoria. “Blue Highways.” eMedia (December 2004): 16-22.
Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2000.