Game developers get pretty short shrift on screen, mostly by not being represented at all. Filmmakers generally love to make movies about driven, uncompromising artists just like themselves, but for some reason — probably either snobbery, fear, or lack of understanding — they don’t often choose people who make video games as subjects.
On the rare occasions that they do, the devs usually fall into one of three categories: inane losers, like the stoner testers in Grandma’s Boy; sinister tech bros orchestrating some society-destroying corporate nightmare, like Michael C. Hall 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.
Imagine my shock, then, when I unexpectedly stumbled across a game developer character in a movie from a quarter-century ago who is poised, grounded, cool in an understated way, admired by his peers, and also a normal adult human. I am speaking of Mr. Ota, a Japanese game creator who appears in, of all things, the classic, three-hour Taiwanese family drama Yi Yi.
Yi Yi, which is a wonderful movie, is an expansive story about modern life in Taipei, centered on a computer engineer called NJ (Wu Nien-jen). After NJ’s mother-in-law suffers a stroke, the film variously follows his depressive wife, introverted teenage daughter, inquisitive young son, and idiot brother-in-law through some melancholy yet life-affirming ups and downs. Meanwhile, NJ suffers a midlife crisis in both his professional and romantic lives. He bumps into an old flame, stirring unexpected feelings, while at work he’s tasked with chasing down a contract with Ota, a famous game designer who causes him to question his purpose in life.
Ota, played by Issey Ogata, is introduced pitching NJ and his business partners in a contemplative mood. He asks why games have to be about shooting and killing, and proposes they could create something different together, something beautiful. He’s a little pretentious, like Hideo Kojima, but, in his sensible sweaters and wire-frame spectacles, he’s also kind of wholesome, like Shigeru Miyamoto.
NJ and Ota speak to each other in halting English. Ota’s soulful, philosophical musings, which sound so seductive in Ogata’s soothingly deep voice, stir suppressed artistic longings in NJ. The two hit it off and go out on the town in Taipei, where Ota brings the house down at a karaoke bar with his piano-playing skills. Later, NJ visits Ota in Tokyo, where Ota reveals that he wanted to be a magician as a child, and shows off some close-up magic. (What a perfect game-dev backstory.) He’s a total dude.
He’s also, admittedly, idealized. Yi Yi was written and directed by Edward Yang, a pioneer of Taiwanese New Wave cinema in the 1980s. Yang, who died in 2007, always loved film but trained as an electrical engineer. He was working in computers in Seattle when a screening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God rekindled his passion, and he decided to become a filmmaker. NJ seems like a version of Yang who never made that choice; Ota’s role in the drama is to symbolize the road not taken. (He even gently encourages NJ to reconnect with his old flame.) Yang consequently invests him with an aspirational level of philosophical cool and artistic purity which might come off as contrived, if Ogata’s performance wasn’t so disarming and deeply felt.
But still — a game developer as a model of artistic purity! In a movie!! A movie that was an international arthouse hit 25 years ago!!! I went to see a rep screening of Yi Yi without any knowledge of the Ota character, and was bowled over by him. I have no idea if Yang liked video games; his computing background suggests he at least had a working awareness of them, but the movie avoids going into any details. But the point is that a great artist like Yang saw no reason not to see himself — an idealized version of himself, even — reflected in a game creator. That’s beautiful. And so is Yi Yi.
Yi Yi is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
