With the Oscars poised to air tonight, it seems an appropriate time to meditate on the fate of film license games. I've written before on Hollywood's propensity to use games as a film marketing tool, as have I mused on the dangers of games mixing themselves up with film licenses. A new set of film licenses for games suggests that this stagnation might be ending... or worsening.

For example, EA bought the Godfather license, promising to bring Brando's voice to the small screen. Majesco bought the Jaws license. Warner Bros. announced its plans to adapt the Dirty Harry franchise, with Clint Eastwood approving his likeness for use in the series. And of course VU Games acquired the rights to Scarface.

All of the films listed above rely on a lot of action, but also quite a lot of drama (especially in the case of The Godfather). Whether or not such aspects of the source films will be explored in the games is dubious. Kieth Stewart over at The Guardian's excellent Gamesblog wryly asks, "is this going to be another case where a well-known license is used to front a bare-faced GTA wannabe?" Given our observations about the limited character agency in GTA itself, the prospects for meaningful interactions in these film license games do seem dubious at best, despite their interesting referents. All of which makes us wonder: what kind of new gameplay might be possible in such games. Do they have to be forgettable console shooters?

I've spoken frequently about this problem with a friend who runs the internal game studio at Sony Pictures. Despite their massive film library, ripe with opportunities for experimental games, he reports that it is near impossible to get the internal approval and funding to carry out such experiments. Finding a break even point on such games is still hard work, as Sony discovered with the medium-scale Charlie's Angels: Angel X.

One promising solution is to reduce the expectations for such games -- not in terms of gameplay but in terms of size and scope. Back in 2000 when Sony's broadband portal Screenblast was still alive, a number of us tried to build a casual asychronous multiplayer game (see my paper on that subject) based on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Even using the studio structure to get around the fact that a (widely panned) game license had been sold, we couldn't move the project forward. Some of this may have had to do with the contemporaneous dotcom bust and the ongoing troubles it brought to Sony's broadband initiative... but I still believe a lot of our troubles stemmed from the very idea of challenging the conventional structure of a film license game.

In 2001, I worked on a Palm game based on the Jet Li film The One that offered similar asynchronous multiplay in a much smaller gameplay experience (the game's offline, but I discuss it in the article linked above). At the time, we still had to give the game away to get a critical mass of players -- and we had an insane 3-week development schedule that still sends chills up my spine. Sony Pictures Digital has been trying to solve this problem in part through mobile games, which I see as a promising direction. Even the simple advergames created by my former colleagues to promote Kung Fu Hustle show the promise of this small-scale approach to film license games (while still unheard of in the US -- it will be released this March -- the film has broken box office records in Asia).

Still, look at the films these casual games are based on: Kung Fu Hustle, The One, Spider-Man, S.W.A.T. -- all still action movies whose core adapted gameplay is typically limited to combat. I know that Sony has some new mobile games in development that try to look beyond this frame, but the underlying problem remains fundamental: the best films depict the internal emotions of core characters, not their external actions. When I took screenwriting at UCLA, Dee Caruso urged us to avoid stage direction in favor of dialogue... exactly the kind of thing that remains difficult and largely unexplored in games.

If we look at the nominees for Best Picture this year, many have quite a lot of action -- but the films are not about action -- think in particular about The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby, which both deal with complex emotions like determination, or Sideways, which is largely about disappointment. How can we create precedents for film-based games that address these topics?

One possible solution is through drama management and expressive AI, as my colleagues Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern are working on in their interactive drama Façade. This is a worthwhile project, but it is also an extremely complex one. Another possible solution to the film license glut -- the one I want to propose here -- relies on simpler representations of procedural emotion. We can look for the core emotional moments in films and attempt to build computational representations of them. This kind of game could be small scale, using the film as a basis but extending its emotional representation to the general. This approach entails a narrower technology challenge, which may afford quicker experimentation and higher risk-tolerance. Games like The Sims, the forthcoming The Movies, and even Playboy: The Mansion make efforts to create procedural representations of character interactions -- but all of these titles favor generality over specificity, large-scale, holistic representations over small-scale, local representations. There is opportunity in this gap.

This isn't easy, and I'd rather let the concept simmer rather than offer off-the-cuff examples of procedural emotion. But the possibility space is tremendously large: psychological recuperation in Paris, Texas; bored desperation in American Beauty; loneliness in Lost in Translation... examples like these could thrive in small-scale experiences. Of course, actually selling such games requires a new publishing models, something the studios have the wherewithal to underwrite better than indie developers. While it's been a while since I've worked on anything directly related to Hollywood, I've been casually experimenting (as it were) with this problem for a while now. Last fall I created a small casual game experiment that deals with the issue of procedural emotion -- and coincidentally, albeit tangentially, with the subject of film. Sweaty Palms is a first date simulator that attempts to represent anticipation ... a tough subject for a videogame, but not so much for a film. Procedural emotion is a viable short-term strategy to reinvent film licensing in a way that could actually contribute to the long-term possibilities for games in general.