Montage: Thirty Flights of Loving

Thirty Flights of Loving, the seventh release in Brendon Chung's "Citizen Abel" series, launched on August 20 of 2012, is a walking simulator or game-film that tells a story in 30 minutes or less. It forsakes a deep plot, sub-text, and elaborate realism for something far more radical: a masterclass in interactive montage. The experience demonstrates how video games can appropriate the pure language of editing to produce meaning, emotion and narrative in ways previously found mostly in cinema.

The gameplay is linear and basic; the graphics a stark, polygonal simplicity. A lack of voice-acting which is replaced by quirky, bizarre mumbling à la Banjo-Kazooie. At first glance, the narrative seems like a disjointed chaos of flashbacks involving a heist, a romance, a wedding and a shoot-out. For the untrained eye, this fragmentation might initially seem like a flaw, but it's rather the foundational pillar of the storytelling. The genius of Thirty Flights of Loving lies not in what it shows, but in the gaps in between. It forces the player to connect the pieces and reconstruct the timeline of events into a coherent whole through the active process of play.

So, how could it be so relevant to the foundation of vidya as a serious platform in which art, like an edifice of audiovisual interaction, will arise to entomb the capitalistic desire of entertainment as a tool for profitable alienation?

This is where Chung’s use of montage transcends mere cinematic homage and becomes genuinely interactive. In cinema, as articulated by Soviet theorists like Eisenstein and Vertov, montage creates meaning through the collision of sequential images. A close-up of the eyes of two duelling samurai—one austere, the other frightful—followed by a wide shot where the fight ends with a theatrical splash of bright red blood. This visual composition of opposing images creates tension and momentum. Chung applies this principle, but with a crucial twist: the player controls the pace and perspective of the collision.

Where a film might use a quick cut, the game uses a literal leap. You walk through a door and are suddenly, violently, in the middle of a getaway car, the heist already botched. The harsh transition doesn't tell the player time has passed and turmoil has ensued, it makes you feel the disorientation and adrenaline of the characters.

In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov edits together disparate locations to create a portrait of a city's synchronized life. In Thirty Flights of Loving, the playable space itself is an edited construct. The claustrophobic, angular safehouse; the Hong-Kong-esque dense concrete and neon signs; the clinical blue airport —each environment is a cinematic "shot" with its own emotional tone. The act of moving through them, controlled by the player, becomes the edit that generates the narrative's rhythm. The long, silent walk through the airport terminal isn't filler; it's a deliberate, player-paced pause that lets the weight of the preceding chaos settle, a use of duration that only an interactive medium can fully deliver.

In this sense, the game is a mixture of Wong Kar-wai fractured romantic melancholy and Tarantino's genre-pastiche. But it’s more than that. It takes their cinematic language and grafts it onto the interactive frame. It proves that a story can be assembled by the player, not just received. It shows that omission and rupture, when expertly deployed, can generate more powerful engagement than exposition.