The Ryan Lambie Column: Dark Void and the porn connection

There are many, many things that porn stars are good at. They're good at pretending to be plumbers, doctors, cowboys, secretaries, school teachers and television repair personnel. They're good at removing their clothes. Male porn stars are good at growing luxuriant moustaches. To this already colossal roster of talents, porn stars can now, it seems, add videogame criticism.

Last week, legendary mucky movie protagonist Ron Jeremy (who, since Iraq's former dictator went to the gallows, now sports the most bountiful moustache in the world) boldly pronounced that videogames are a more corrupting influence than porn.

And on the subject of porn, I've been spending a great deal of this week with Capcom's Dark Void (reviewed here), a third-person shooter that borrows ideas from several of the best games of this generation, and yet succeeds in being far worse than all of them combined.

It was while I was playing this terrible misfire that I began to think about the links between videogames and what Ron Jeremy would call the adult entertainment industry - and there are far more of them than he would probably realise...

Listless acting

It doesn't help that Dark Void's character models are about as humanlike and emotive as the Cadbury's Smash robots from the 80s, but it's the phoned-in quality of the voice acting that makes the game's cutscenes feel like the opening gambit in a blue movie. The normally dependable Nolan (Uncharted) North recites his lines in glorious monotone, though with lines like "He's not alright, he's dead", he probably had one eye on the script and the other on the fire exit.

Dodgy characterisation

Dark Void is full of the kind of bogus ethnic stereotyping that should have been consigned to the dustbin years ago; the island's natives all wear grass skirts and require a white American male to come and save them from their alien oppressors. James Cameron's Avatar movie also suffers from the same affliction, and thinking about it, that often looks like a porn film minus the fornication, too.

Gratuitous plot

It's fair to say that porn films are seldom watched for their astonishing turns of fortune. Similarly, the plot of most videogames acts as little more than a glue that sticks all the action set-pieces together. You'd be astonished if a plumber appeared in a porn film, only to spend its duration unblocking a U-bend, and in the same capacity, Nikola Tesla turns up in Dark Void, not to impart any scientific knowledge, but to provide more hardware for the player to smash things up with.

Studs and starlets

In no other form of entertainment will you find more muscle bound alpha males and generously proportioned women as you do in videogames, except, of course, in porn films.

Of course, the above criticisms aren't just applicable to Dark Void. Far too many videogames fall back on generic, familiar characters, stock situations and ideas borrowed from old Hollywood movies.

In Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe programme, a typically acidic look at the medium screened on BBC4 last year, Graham Linehan spoke eloquently about the pitfalls of writing for videogames. Too many game script writers, he suggested, drew inspiration from films rather than books. In a game like Dark Void, where a character responds to a gigantic, slug-like creature emerging from a fallen robot with the immortal line "That's odd", I'd suggest that they're drawing inspiration from some pretty bad films.

And while Dark Void was never meant to be a 'serious' game - in, say, the way that the forthcoming noir epic Heavy Rain is likely to be - it's one example of how clunky and almost comically disjointed a game can become when its characterisation and plot aren't given the same consideration as the gameplay itself.

Whether you agree with Ron Jeremy that videogames are a more corrupting influence than pornography or not (and he's wrong, by the way), the medium of interactive storytelling has come a long way in little more than three decades of existence, with titles like Bioshock, Ico and Mass Effect proving that games can create characters and stories that are the equal of any other medium. In this respect, Dark Void harks back to a bygone age.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.