L.A. Noire and the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm

I know I just reviewed this game, but it did things that merit some discussion beyond what I could do in a review, so here we go.

L.A. Noire did some very interesting things.  It created a pitch-perfect noir atmosphere to go along with its detailed recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, which is enough to make it worth playing in the first place.  It also made me curious as to when the word "noir" had an "e" on the end of it.  But its greatest accomplishment came by way of its technology for recording the faces of actors.

Nothing against you, Phoenix.  I still
love your games.  

I can imagine the cries of "Graphics whore!" I may get for that statement, but there's more to it than that.  The facial animations of L.A. Noire allowed it to take some of the game-like elements out of the gameplay and replace it with a sort of real activity.  Rather than watching meters or playing a silly minigame, or even cross-referencing Phoenix Wright style, the expressive faces in L.A. Noire allowed the gameplay to work off actual observation.  This required the player to judge the truthfulness of suspects and witnesses based on their visual and verbal cues, something that is much more difficult, complicated, and realistic than comparing notes or pressing the right buttons at the right time.  It allowed the gameplay and story to mesh on a deeper level by removing the game-like elements that normally govern the player's interaction and, to some extent, separate the player from the game world.  It managed to defy the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm on which I previously wrote.  But it did not do it fully or perfectly.  L.A. Noire did many things right and was groundbreaking on many levels, but what exactly did they do right and what did they do wrong?  What are these breakthroughs truly capable of, and where could they go that this game did not?

First of all, let me preface this discussion by saying I am not suggesting that all games should avoid game-like elements, or even that games must do so to tell a story well.  I've seen many people say that the "games as art" movement wants to see all games become abstract, boring experiences full of meaning but entirely void of entertainment or challenge.  However, I think I've made it clear that I consider many different games, from Shadow of the Colossus to Halo, to be great works of art; the concepts I discuss in this article aren't blanket suggestions to be applied to video games as a whole, but interesting possibilities for the future of what the medium will be able to do.  In this particular case, L.A. Noire offers a new way to eliminate black-and-white gameplay elements and instead present an experience that, while perhaps is not a "game" by traditional definition, it more of an interactive storytelling experience.

The interrogation process in L.A. Noire is, in its basic form, almost entirely devoid of "gamification," if you will excuse the use of the term in this context.  The idea of actually watching and listening for signs of lying or hesitance is exactly how real interrogations go, not an objective-based, formulaic system by which the player solves some sort of puzzle. This was fantastic, as it eliminated the certainty that most games depend on.  The player could not have a simple logical process of elimination or success at a simple challenge, they had to read the character's voice and face and trust their judgement.  Most people I know, myself included, took a while to get used to it.  It is far more abstract and less concrete than most gameplay processes; it was based on the player's judgement, not on quickness, not on coordination, not even fully on observation.  And if you don't get all the information out of the witness, you move on with the clues you have and hope you haven't missed anything too important.  If the investigations and interrogations go poorly, it is even possible to arrest the wrong person.  This process lacks certainty, lacks the sense of absolute victory that we gamers are used to; but so does the real-life process L.A. Noire emulates.

The amount of emotion the human face can convey is
astounding, and L.A. Noire emulates it well enough to
base its main gameplay feature around it.  

At least it would be like this, if not for a simple but important gameplay element; the chime that tells you whether you have chosen the best reaction.

In the interrogations in L.A. Noire, the player immediately knows whether they "won" or "lost," which unfortunately goes a long way toward invalidating the advancements the game makes.  The player should, as the in-story detective does, feel like they've done their best, like they have uncovered all the clues to the best of their ability and gotten as much information through questioning as they could.  The player should blame the suspect, not themselves, if they got no good information, because as far as the detective knows he did his absolute best.  If the police chief gets angry at them for putting the wrong person away, the player should be surprised and frustrated at their failure rather than simply saying, "Yeah, I did really screw up those last few interviews..."  The uncertainty that should mark each answer, each reaction, each question, is negated by the absolute knowledge of the player's success or failure.

The crazy thing is that the game's story is structured in such a way that this can feasibly be done with little extra effort (the only thing that may have to go would be achievements based on correct questions, but even that would only be for difficulty reasons).  Who gets arrested usually either doesn't matter in the long run or happens because they run or something, proving their own guilt enough to warrant the arrest.  In a few particular cases, the story dictates that the convicted person is innocent anyway, regardless of who it is.  It's not like the designers would have had to code in tons of different endings or events based on the player's success or failure; the player is led to an arrest regardless.  This would not negate the role of statistics; the game could give the player their information and statistics at the end of each case, so the player knows how well they did afterwards and how to do things differently if they play it again.

This is not to say I don't understand why they did what they did.  Absolute knowledge of our objectives, victories, and losses is something we, as gamers, are used to.  We were already far out of our element with these interrogations, and this made it a little easier for us, made the interrogations less frustrating (at least in the way gamers traditionally define frustration).  Unfortunately, this positive effect came at the cost of immersion.  Not that L.A. Noire wasn't immersive (I think a game that faithfully recreated 1940s Los Angeles is immersive by default, to some extent), but it could have become much more so if not for the constant reminder that this is a game, and we just totally bombed that question.  We, as gamers, must be willing and excited to get out of our comfort zones and abandon the security of traditional game design in order for video games to move forward in artistic viability and cultural impact.

This is the main thing I meant in my review when I said I hoped for a sequel that refined and expanded the revolutionary gameplay elements L.A. Noire introduced.  I would like to see this potential franchise develop these concepts into more of a storytelling experience than a traditional game; not because it makes for a bad game, but because the impact could be exponentially increased if the security of formulaic gameplay were further removed from the story and investigations.

I'd be incredibly surprised if everyone agreed with me on this, so feel free to post your arguments, agreements, or random observations, and make sure to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook if you don't hate my ideas!