Game developer representation on film is terrible — except in one movie

Sport builders get fairly quick shrift on display, principally by not being represented in any respect. Filmmakers typically like to make films about pushed, uncompromising artists identical to themselves, however for some purpose — in all probability both snobbery, worry, or lack of information — they don’t usually select individuals who make video video games as topics.

On the uncommon events that they do, the devs often fall into one in every of three classes: inane losers, just like the stoner testers in Grandma’s Boy; sinister tech bros orchestrating some society-destroying company nightmare, like Michael C. Corridor in Gamer or Ben Mendelsohn in Ready Player One; or kinky geniuses unwittingly opening a portal to a psychosexual hellscape in arthouse fare like Existenz or Demonlover.

Think about my shock, then, after I unexpectedly stumbled throughout a sport developer character in a film from a quarter-century in the past who’s poised, grounded, cool in an understated method, admired by his friends, and likewise a standard grownup human. I’m talking of Mr. Ota, a Japanese sport creator who seems in, of all issues, the basic, three-hour Taiwanese household drama Yi Yi.

Yi Yi, which is an excellent film, is an expansive story about fashionable life in Taipei, centered on a pc engineer known as NJ (Wu Nien-jen). After NJ’s mother-in-law suffers a stroke, the movie variously follows his depressive spouse, introverted teenage daughter, inquisitive younger son, and fool brother-in-law by some melancholy but life-affirming ups and downs. In the meantime, NJ suffers a midlife disaster in each his skilled and romantic lives. He bumps into an previous flame, stirring sudden emotions, whereas at work he’s tasked with chasing down a contract with Ota, a well-known sport designer who causes him to query his function in life.

Ota, performed by Issey Ogata, is launched pitching NJ and his enterprise companions in a contemplative temper. He asks why video games need to be about capturing and killing, and proposes they may create one thing totally different collectively, one thing lovely. He’s a little bit pretentious, like Hideo Kojima, however, in his wise sweaters and wire-frame spectacles, he’s additionally form of healthful, like Shigeru Miyamoto.

NJ and Ota communicate to one another in halting English. Ota’s soulful, philosophical musings, which sound so seductive in Ogata’s soothingly deep voice, stir suppressed creative longings in NJ. The 2 hit it off and exit in town in Taipei, the place Ota brings the home down at a karaoke bar along with his piano-playing expertise. Later, NJ visits Ota in Tokyo, the place Ota reveals that he needed to be a magician as a toddler, and exhibits off some close-up magic. (What an ideal game-dev backstory.) He’s a complete dude.

He’s additionally, admittedly, idealized. Yi Yi was written and directed by Edward Yang, a pioneer of Taiwanese New Wave cinema within the Eighties. Yang, who died in 2007, at all times beloved movie however educated as {an electrical} engineer. He was working in computer systems in Seattle when a screening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God rekindled his ardour, and he determined to turn out to be a filmmaker. NJ looks as if a model of Yang who by no means made that alternative; Ota’s function within the drama is to represent the highway not taken. (He even gently encourages NJ to reconnect along with his previous flame.) Yang consequently invests him with an aspirational degree of philosophical cool and creative purity which could come off as contrived, if Ogata’s efficiency wasn’t so disarming and deeply felt.

However nonetheless — a sport developer as a mannequin of creative purity! In a film!! A film that was a world arthouse hit 25 years in the past!!! I went to see a rep screening of Yi Yi with none information of the Ota character, and was shocked by him. I do not know if Yang favored video video games; his computing background suggests he a minimum of had a working consciousness of them, however the film avoids going into any particulars. However the level is that an amazing artist like Yang noticed no purpose to not see himself — an idealized model of himself, even — mirrored in a sport creator. That’s lovely. And so is Yi Yi.

Yi Yi is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.