I didn’t really grow up playing this kind of game the only ones I can remember from my childhood are The Neverhood, and Myst, but it wasn’t long after I heard about Wing Commander III that my interest in them was solidified. Wing Commander III extensively used live action cutscenes with actors such as Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Thomas Wilson to tell a cinematic story it's fantastic gameplay was hung around. It’s this melding of movie and videogame that continues to greatly interest me to this very day. Unsurprisingly it's difficult and expensive to make a competent movie AND a competent game so the majority of these games failed miserably. One of these failures is unique in quite a few interesting ways.
This game is Tender Loving Care: An Interactive Movie (TLC). First off it's fairly unique in that its definitive version was released on DVD a few years after its initial release on CD-ROM in 1996. Many FMV games are too complex and interactive to be playable given the limited interactivity of DVD. Most of them took the form of point and click adventure games or rail shooters such as the best selling Myst and Star Wars: Rebel Assault, relying on a pointer interface tailor made for the home computers of the time. TLC on the other hand has VERY limited interactivity. The VAST majority of the game is simply watching a psychological drama play out, the interactive portions of the game deal with multiple choice questions and snooping through the journals and books placed around the locations within which the movie portions take place.
It is important to highlight, however, that these multiple choice questions ARE NOT a choose your own adventure style mechanic, but rather they are questions about your responses to the events of the movie portions, and interpretive questions about works of art. These responses have slight influences on how characters respond to the events of the narrative. Dealing more with attitudes and less with plot decisions. For example the game might ask you your impression of a character with the choices being along the lines of: trustworthy, hostile, attractive, etc… and what you choose will effect ways in which the character behaves. As for the interpretive questions a game shows you a picture, usually a painting an early famous example being Edward Hooper’s Nighthawks, and asks you a question about the individuals in the painting such as “Why is the man drinking alone?” These questions are a simplified TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) a real world psychological test that asks the subject to narrativize a presented image to learn about the subject’s world view and social perceptions. It’s unclear if or how this affects the narrative of movie portions but the game does produce an analysis of your personality that changes the more you play adding an interesting albeit rather useless dimension of pop-psychology to the experience.
I imagine a common response to this style of “gameplay” is annoyance and frustration at the lack of control over the characters and narrative, and possibly boredom from the lack of interactivity. However, this attitude comes from approaching TLC as a game, and not a movie. Of course viewing TLC as a movie may also be underwhelming for most, because, quite frankly, it’s not a very good movie. It’s overlong and poorly paced, with subpar acting and a fairly predictable narrative. Just about the only saving grace of TLC as a narrative experience is the transgressive themes it’s centered around. The majority of the optional readables and questions presented deal with sexuality, loss, guilt, death, and mental illness; as does the film. However it doesn’t handle these topics with much grace and sensitivity. While it's missteps as a narrative and even thematic experience add some fun camp. A focus on these aspects isn’t the the most interesting way to view TLC and is endemic of how people typically engage with movies; preferring to sit and be told a realistic and believable (within the realm of its own universe) story and have a cathartic experience. What this approach is missing is a critical lens, and it is this lens that TLC both requires from you, and trains you to apply to get any kind of interest.
All art, whether it be films, novels, poetry, paintings, etc..., are all subjective experiences that trigger experiences. These experiences are social, intellectual, and emotional in nature. Between the movie portions of TLC the “game” asks you questions about your experiences both watching it, and viewing the other art (typically paintings) the game shows you. This asks you to think critically about the events and characters of the film: Is this person trustworthy? Why did that person react the way they did? What should the character have done instead? These are all questions a critical audience should be constantly engaging with over the course of any narrative film. The actual changes to the characters and their attitudes and responses are largely immaterial (probably because the implementation of the game mechanic is shaky at best); what is more important TLC encourages its viewer to engage and “read” it as opposed to merely watching it.
TLC also further encourages viewers to engage with it by allowing the player to explore the movie’s locations and read books and journals scattered around. These optional readables offer further insight to the characters histories and motivations as well as providing thematically relevant book excerpts. Primed by TLC’s questions an engaged “viewer” will wonder why TLC included these readables and further think about the themes and ideas at the core of the story.
The amount of effort I put into this mini essay on TLC begs the question: is TLC a good game? No it’s not. The next most obvious question is: is TLC a good movie? No it’s not. What makes it worth talking about is the “game’s” goals and ambition. TLC wanted to create a movie that responded to the psychology of the player; to read their responses, and subtly alter the experience to create a viewing experience uniquely tailored to the viewer. It didn’t succeed. However in failing it creates an experience that encourages a type of engagement that is unique amongst its peers. This is a “game” that in it’s faltering, not very successful way, encourages its audience to engage with it on a deeper level; something that is highly unique and unusual amongst its peers.
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