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.
Thirty Flights of Loving
