Review: L.A. Noire

Sorry for the delay, but here is my review of L.A. Noire.

This is most definitely an interesting piece.  Rockstar, the creators of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, set out with L.A. Noire to create the interactive equivalent of film noir, the genre to which black-and-white detective films such as The Big Sleep, Out of the Past (which I was delighted to see is actually playing in theaters across the game world of L.A. Noire), and The Maltese Falcon belong (if you've not seen any of those, I highly recommend you do).  In typical Rockstar fashion, they did so by recreating the entire city of Los Angeles as it may have appeared in 1940, because they like doing a lot of work.  Once again, that painstakingly detailed torture they have put themselves through has worked; though far from perfect, L.A. Noire is a fantastic example of interactive storytelling and investigative gameplay.

Rockstar hit the film noir, hard-boiled detective feel
directly on the head.  

L.A. Noire tells the story of Cole Phelps, a former marine who now serves as a policeman in the streets of L.A.  The game follows his rise to glory in the LAPD as he begins uncovering many levels of corruption within the system through his work in the homicide, vice, and arson departments.  Though the story takes a while to go from disconnected cases to a unified metanarrative, it covers a lot of ground, involving several twists, mysteries, and fascinating characters, and is truly entertaining and impacting in many ways.  Unfortunately, it largely fails in its depiction of the main character.  The picture of Cole that is given to the player in the first half of the game is suddenly and dramatically altered about halfway through, and since we get next to no understanding of his personal life outside of the occasional war flashback, there doesn't seem to be any good reason for it.  It implies character depth without actually developing any.  But the story just runs with it and expects us to accept it, culminating in a jumbled character journey for the protagonist that stands out as the jagged piece of gravel in the bed of polished gems that is L.A. Noire's story.  This does not ruin the story - it is still an exceptional and well-written tale that expertly mimics its filmic inspiration - but it does leave a rather empty feeling by the end (though that could be argued to be the point, considering the genre, but Cole's lack of real development made it ring hollow to me).

L.A. Noire has a particular visual element that really does define the rest of the game.  The game generally looks good, nothing to write home about, but the hugely publicized facial technology in the game creates some of the most realistic faces yet to appear in gaming.  This is accomplished by filming an actor from many angles with HD cameras to capture every little facial movement.  I think I agree with David Cage that the technology is a temporary solution, but that does not change the fact that it is really freaking impressive.  This does mean that the facial textures aren't quite as detailed as they could be (you won't be seeing the pore-revealing detail of experiences like Heavy Rain), but that hardly matters; the eye twitches, eyebrow movements, and subtle facial cues are extremely impressive, and they allow the game to do things we can expect to influence the industry for a long time to come.

Actor John Noble on the left, and his character in
L.A. Noire, Leland Monroe, on the right.  Yeah.  

The obvious thing this technology allows is easier connection to the characters.  They just seem more human than they may have without the detailed facial expressions, and everyone has a completely different face since they were all taken from real actors.  There is a level of non-verbal acting that has rarely been possible in a video game, allowing characters to make a strong impression even in only a few minutes of screen time.

However, the biggest effect of the L.A. Noire's technology is the ability to base gameplay not on systems and rules, but on observation of voices and faces.  This manifests itself in interrogation sequences not unlike Phoenix Wright's courtroom sequences in some ways, but much more dynamic.  Rather than simply scrolling through the character's words and finding contradictions or weak spots, the player must actively and carefully watch the character for signs of lying or discomfort.  The player must decide to believe or doubt the person being questioned, or if there is evidence that directly contradicts something they can simply accuse the person of lying and present the evidence to back them into a corner.  This creates an interesting and realistic experience that would not have been possible without the detailed facial movements, and has interesting implications for how video games can create non-combat-related gameplay.  There are also real consequences for messing up these interrogations, such as missing a vital clue or even charging the wrong person, making the game worth playing over to see what changes if less mistakes are made.  This often leads to frustration, as the answer is not always apparent, but there is always one right answer, and a chime lets you know if you got it right or wrong.  But once you get used to using facial cues rather than systematized rules to progress, it gets much easier and a lot more interesting.

In fact, combat and other action-oriented sequences take up a surprisingly small portion of the L.A. Noire experience.  Driving is a large part of the game, obviously, and high-speed pursuits, while sometimes frustrating, are exhilarating and no less of a spectacle than a well-directed chase scene in an action film.  Similarly entertaining is the ability to turn your siren on at any given time and cruise down the street while the good citizens clear your way.  Mostly, at least; sometimes the drivers in this game seem like complete idiots, and stop signs in 1940s L.A. definitely don't work quite like they do today if the A.I. traffic are any indication.  But still, the driving is great and the pulse-poundingly intense car chases never fail to impress.

In all seriousness, why does Rockstar insist on RB/R1 as
taking cover?  It just doesn't work as well as a face button.

Shootouts are the most disappointing part of the gameplay, but they are definitely not terrible, and they are a small enough part of the experience that it will not have much of a negative impact on your experience.  The cover system is similar to that found in Red Dead Redemption, but it is actually more clunky and difficult to accurately control.  I would often try to round cover or switch to the other side of a doorway, only to find myself standing in the path of a bunch of bullets instead of actually moving anywhere.  What's more, the right trigger both fires your weapon and makes you run.  You can imagine the confusion that tends to cause, aside from the fact that it severely limits the application of both actions.  In addition, the game's painstaking attention to detail falls a short here; namely, there is no way to take someone alive in a shootout.  You must always kill them.  For what the game is, this adoption of straightforward shooter rules seems a bit out of place.  If the game spent more time on shootouts I might take bigger issue with their shortcomings, but in the 25+ hours of gameplay I only spent about 2-3 of those hours in combat, so it's really not a huge deal.

The city of Los Angeles is absolutely huge, and the player will spend a lot of time traversing it.  Many landmarks have been faithfully recreated and can be discovered, and the architecture, music, and 95 specific types of cars from the time period and location have been perfectly recreated to make the atmosphere of the game spot-on.  The world definitely seems inhabited as well, with many people walking the streets and even talking about recent events such as Cole's cases.  There is even an option to play the game in black and white, a feature I turned on a few hours in and never went back; it made the entire game feel like I was playing a classic movie.  Exploring the city is fun not only because of the atmosphere, but because there are a total of 40 street crimes that will be called in on the radio every so often.  These are short and simple, usually consisting of a shootout or car chase, and can occur anytime you are driving around the city.

All in all, L.A. Noire is a game that stands as an example of what gaming can be, and though it wobbles a bit with the steps it takes forward, new ground is being covered and is well worth exploring.  Considering Take Two has said the game's sales make it a "powerful new franchise," here's hoping to a sequel where they can iron out the wrinkles and further develop the game's more groundbreaking elements.

ENGL 1337: Games as Lit.

We people of the last few generations have had the privilege of growing up with a new and exciting artistic medium.  Over the last three decades, video games have grown from entertaining pastimes to full-fledged interactive stories, taking storytelling places no other medium could have ever dreamed.  The children of the twenty-first century have seen it become possible to be a part of a story, which is, as Yahtzee put it, "a development as artistically significant as the moment Picasso realized which end of the brush was which."

Unfortunately, this is not the version we have been told. 

As we have grown up, video games have been subject to everything from misunderstanding to blatant demonization.  At the very least, these generations have grown up being told that video games are wastes of time.  Sure, maybe it’s okay to spend a few minutes here and there, but too much time playing Halo will rot their brain or turn them into serial killers. 

And kids that pose like this only
help them.  Seriously kid, we're
trying to gain respect over here.

The result is that, even while video games have amazing artistic potential and value, it is squandered on people who will only get out of them what they put into them, and all they put into them is an expectation of a good, if valueless, time.  This is not the fault of the people, but the fault of the way they have been raised to view the medium of video games.  The artistic value of video games is something understood by a precious few parents, and as a result they look upon their child’s gaming pastime as a waste, and use no subtlety making sure the child understands this. 

To make matters worse, schools do the same thing, but possibly even on a larger scale.  The academic community tends to be slow in accepting new ideas, and the acceptance of video games as an artistic medium has not broken this long-standing tradition.  As a result, we see schools disallowing portable game systems from their grounds and constantly preaching the value of reading over playing those useless video games.  They then join the parents in complaining about how their children spend all day playing Call of Duty with their friends instead of reading the latest Newberry Medal winning novel. 

The guarantee this book is about nature and history, and is
the exact same as the last Newberry book your child read.  

But if video games are an artistic storytelling medium, what is keeping children from learning from them in the same manner?  Why can someone play Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and yet only talk about the battles, the cool swords, and that impossibly tough library puzzle, never mentioning the story’s strong message of the dangers of coveting honor and glory or the way the romance is developed through nuanced dialogue in gameplay? 

Unfortunately, this culture brings it upon itself.  By painting video games as a wasteful pastime unworthy of any level of attention, parents and schools encourage students to play them as nothing more than that, effectively negating any value they may have by teaching children to ignore it. 

Instead, what if video games were incorporated into the school system?  What if schools were to meet children where their attention is already focused, present to them the values of something they already enjoy and use it to make them better, well-rounded people? 

The video game, not the recent okay
movie/terrible adaptation. Seriously,
couldn't the story have been similar?

This would not look very different from the current model of book reports.  Children in a class are assigned a particular game to play.  The aforementioned game, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, stands as a good example for jr. high and above.  I do not want to spoil the story (spoilers are manufactured personally by Satan in the pit of Hell), but anyone who's played it can tell you the prince’s character journey is one worth communicating and exploring, and the game itself portrays it well.  It is often praised as one of the best-written games ever made.  The gameplay ties into the story well, and the prince’s character development is deep and interesting, developed largely through thoughts and monologues while the player explores the ruined kingdom.  It would be easy to assign an essay with a prompt to explore the prince’s progression from a spoiled, glory-obsessed child to a mature man who takes responsibility for his
                                                         mistakes. 

Instead, many who play this game do so with the expectation they will be able to kill monsters in awesome ways, and they get that.  Many players even skip cutscenes whenever possible to get back to the gameplay.  They gain nothing from this experience but six to ten hours of virtual parkour and combat.  But if schools were to teach children of the narrative value of video games, teach them to play Prince of Persia and other games and pay attention to the subtleties, the characters, and the overarching themes, would this not cease to be an exercise in entertaining futility and become a worthy artistic pursuit? 

The negative portrayal of video games that children are given is not teaching them to use their time well, it is teaching them to ignore artistic value in a medium that is quickly becoming a cultural staple.  This is harming the artistic sensibilities and personal formation of entire generations, and cannot be tolerated.  Rather than resisting change and development, school systems must turn to the study of video games as a narrative medium and instill in children an appreciation not only for battle tactics and a positive kill/death ratio, but for interactive storytelling and the value that can be found therein.

See you next week!  Don't forget to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook if you like what is being said here!

The Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm: Why Games Depend on Violence

There is a phenomenon in game design that demands the presence of violence (as a specific type of conflict) in the stories of video games. Though this principle is not universal, and can be overcome, it is powerful, and the overwhelming majority of video games conform to it. This principle is the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm. This, at its heart, is the fundamental problem of the juxtaposition of gameplay and narrative.

Were I to sum this principle up in one sentence, it would be as such: A game’s structure must be known to the player, whereas the story’s structure should not. Hopefully this somewhat cryptic idea will make more sense by the end of this article.

First, though I am not going to launch into a lesson on story structure, I am going to emphasize one thing about it. Though stories are structured, and most good stories share many structural similarities (even all, if you strip them down to their most basic forms), the way that structure plays out should never be known to the viewer/player/reader (excluding, of course, adaptations of known stories or historical events). Though we usually know how a movie begins based on a trailer, we should not know how it ends. Though we know that the end of the movie will feature either the success or failure of the protagonist’s quest, we should not know which and what it will mean to the story’s characters and world afterwards. Stories are structured, yes, but the one experiencing the story should not have full understanding of a given story’s structure until it has ended.

However, games, by nature, are not like this. A game, be it a video game, board game, sport, whatever, requires the player to know their goal and the ways they can accomplish it. Even games like the classic point-and-click adventure games, in which much time is spent trying to figure out what the player has to do, the structure is constantly present. The controls are the rules, the tools by which the player completes his/her goals. Completion of the goal is success, whereas failure is to lose the game, and the criteria for either outcome are part of the rules. Even if the goals are unclear, the game’s rules, its structure, must be understood by the player. The game cannot be played otherwise.

You may already be seeing the paradox that is forming between the two. The combination of a game, which must be understood in order to be played, and a narrative, which must involve mystery in order to have full effect, can cause issues. Namely, if you know that victory in the game equals victory in the story, there is no surprise in the narrative, but how can one know they are making a victory-oriented decision in a game if the mystery of the story is preserved? Both narrative and game need conflict, but how can both play out when the structural difference is so great?

Sometimes it's hard to tell what the
best choice is in Clannad's
emotional romance story.  

For instance, consider a video game that tells a romance story. What is the goal? You could say it is for the protagonist to “get the girl,” but is life really so simple? Is there any one “right” way to win a girl’s heart that could be emulated by a set of rules? If the protagonist ends up losing this girl, is that really failure? In a game it could be, but that approach weakens the story by not considering the potential good that could come of this outcome; life is never so simple for such a thing to be considered an absolute failure.

However, the opposite is true as well. If story attempts to wholly dictate gameplay, how can a game possibly emulate the amount of choices and abilities that would be available in real life? It is a technological and creative impossibility. There is a reason the player cannot roundhouse kick an enemy in the face in Halo; it would be fully possible for the Master Chief as a character, but including every action he could perform in the gameplay mechanics simply would not be possible, least of all practical (thus leading to the whole, "That cutscene was awesome; why can't I do that in the game?" issue that plagues so many action games). For that matter, if you’ve played Phoenix Wright, you know how frustrating it can be to work out a solution and find out you were mistaken, not because your conclusion was wrong, but because it’s not the specific solution the developers programmed into the game. This is inevitable; it is impossible for a game to include every response Phoenix could have, or even every logical path he could follow to a solution.

In this way, gameplay and narrative are inherently at odds. How does one provide the player with a clearly rule-based game while also presenting a narrative not driven by these rules, but by a workable plot and natural characters? It is a difficult question that few developers have even dared to stare in the face, which leads to the most important function of the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm.

Take a look at your game library, or at least think through the games you own for a second. Consider how many games you have that are not centered around a life/death conflict. If you have mostly adventure games or visual novels, you're in a minority; think about the majority of games as a whole. The vast majority of narrative games are like this; one obviously thinks first of violent games like Grand Theft Auto or God of War, but even Pac-Man and Asteroids are defined by a life-or-death struggle. Have you ever wondered why this is?

The Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm gives us this answer (though it’s hardly considered anymore since violence has become the base model for most games); death is the only thing in life that can really be considered an absolute form of defeat. Guy doesn’t get the girl; maybe he can win her back, or maybe there’s another girl. Detective doesn’t find the evidence he needs; there will be more opportunities, more crime scenes. But death is the end. Unless a game's story goes into the afterlife or something, death is the end. No questions asked. If the player character(s) die, that is the end. There is nothing left.

What better way to work around the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm than this? Consider Halo: if Master Chief dies, the player fails and has to try again. If he lives to advance through the story to the eventual end, he wins. Survival is success, death is failure, and there is no reason to question either. The same works for Mario, Prince of Persia, even older games like Missile Command. The struggle between life and death is the easiest thing to portray in an interactive context, because it provides a straightforward framework for victory and defeat.

The resulting problem is that video games mostly tell stories that could best be compared to action films. There is nothing wrong with that kind of story: as it is, video games have told plenty of stories that, in my opinion, belong among the best works of classic literature and great film. But video games can only evolve so much as a medium when genres such as romance, domestic drama, and mystery are as overlooked as they are.

There are many ways to overcome this paradigm. Far too many for me to cover here, else you’d still be reading this article an hour from now (or, more likely, you'll have stopped a good deal before then). I’ll cover them later, either in their own articles or mentioning them in other contexts, whatever works best for them. Until then, feel free to comment with your thoughts on this concept! This is one of the original ideas I’ve had, and I’ve been developing it for a while, so feel free to criticize and help me develop it further in your comments or emails!  If you think this stuff is interesting, please consider liking Binary Narrative on Facebook.

The Importance of Video Games as Art

I was trying to figure out how I could start this off, and I think this is a good topic to cover early on.  Hopefully this first post can address some of the basic questions and criticisms people might give early on.  I can’t possibly address everything, so if enough people make comments I may very well write another post on this subject, but for now I’ll address this as I can.

Now and again in various internet forums someone will post something regarding video games as art, and many views on the subject start flying.  There are often some interesting things said within this sea of mostly repetitive arguments, but there is one simple thing I keep hearing that has been getting to me for a long time: “It doesn’t matter.”

Most gamers argue that video games should be looked upon more favorably by society, but many of them do not feel as strongly that society should look upon games as an art form.  The ideas behind this viewpoint are varied.  Some claim that as long as they can enjoy their games, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are an art form.  Some say as long as gamers know and understand games as an art form, society as a whole does not need to.  Yet others claim that the very meaning of “art” is subjective, meaning that video games are art if you think they are, and they are not if you think they’re not, so the entire issue is meaningless.  All of these arguments are based on some degree of subjectivism, but regardless of whether that fits into your personal philosophy, there is something very important that they all ignore.

If you’re not one for art theory, think back to your high school or college sociology class and what it said about art.  In short, art is an absolutely vital, critically important part of culture.  Art is the way humans try to explain and explore some of the less quantifiable aspects of the human experience.  It’s the way we both influence and record our culture of the time.  Creativity, the driving force of art, is one of the things that separate us from animals.  Art brings culture together, defines and enforces societal values, and has the power to affect both individuals and culture as a whole.

'Cause these two are totally the
same, right?

Since art is so important to culture, it makes sense that the concept of art must be solidified enough to study it.  In fact, this is already done in many ways that we often take for granted; consider genres, for instance.  Despite the complexity of art and all the ways it can be presented, in order to more effectively study artworks, we have assigned them labels based on their themes and settings even though these things are much too difficult to grasp with a system of simple labels.  What chaos would ensue if we tried to study Citizen Kane in the same way we study District 9, or if we applied the same analytical logic to Sense and Sensibility as to Lord of the Rings!  However, there are always the occasional works that challenge these genres, often resulting in new genre labels until there are so many sub-genres that most people can’t figure it out.  How do you categorize Apocalyptica, a hard rock band comprised of four cellists and a drummer (no, I’m not kidding; check them out)?  Has anyone yet put Shawn of the Dead in a definitive genre, or does it still stand alone in the “romantic zombie comedy” category with a healthy dose of parody thrown in?  Genres are important because they allow us to more effectively study artworks, but they are ultimately an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.  Impossible though it may seem, it is very important.

So considering the importance of putting a definition on the indefinable, one must ask what bearing a subjective art theory has on this.  The answer?  Nothing at all.  Because even if the very definition of art is up to the individual, that is not an effective way to study or categorize something.  Such ambiguity has its place, but this, a situation where something must be categorized and studied, is not it.  We as a culture must attempt, as best we can, to solidify these slippery concepts of art and creativity so that we may analyze them, explore them, and allow them to affect culture as they can and must.

This is why, regardless of whether “art” is a subjective or objective concept, definitions regarding what general medium is and is not an “art form” must be made if a culture is to effectively study, explore, and truly experience what art has to offer.

This is my view on the issue, at least.  If you have any questions, disagreements, encouragements, suggestions, whatever, feel free to comment.  And if you like what I’ve said so far, like me on Facebook!  Or if not, just wait to see if I ever say anything good first.