Two thoughts I had today: 1) that the beauty of great writing is that it can make you read an entire article about a subject you don't care about at all, like retired baseball pitcher Dock Ellis, or the new video game L.A. Noire. It's fair to say that the subhead of this second article, which reads "Can Rockstar's latest release change the face of gaming, or is it just Red Dead Detective?" is one of the biggest undersells in the history of journalism. Also. 2) Of all the science fiction novels I've ever read, Ender's Game probably came the closest to predicting something that, decades later, still kinda makes sense, if by "predicting" we mean the premise that eventually video games will, for a select group of people, supplant reality.
But today we're all about that article on LA Noire. So here we go.
"A lot of games go to such lengths to anticipate asshole players that they sometimes feel like a pool that has been preemptively overchlorinated to frustrate the one kid determined to pee in it."
Like so many, many things about video games, this is interesting from a human nature perspective. Bissell's point is that video game makers often conceive of elaborate safeguards - the example here is of a detective character who can't fire his gun in an open street - in order to keep players from turning into mass-murdering fiends who completely disrupt the imagined universe and intended rules of the video game. The psychological tug-of-war suggested here between the game developers - ethical creators who are concerned about the preservation of beauty - and the playing public - rapacious destoyers - is a little bit creepy. I was reminded of nothing so much as the big debate over the global financial system. For a little while there the global financial system resembled nothing so much as a pool that someone had peed in, thereby increasing his own fiendish glee but turning everyone else's experience into an unhygienic nightmare.
Who wins the tug-of-war? The creators or the destroyers? I'm not trying to be cosmic about this, I'm just wondering, for the sake of humanity, exactly which side is going to win. Video games don't necessarily provide a safe place to determine the answer to this question (one of the great debates in the gaming universe, over the idea of permanent death, really exemplifies the problems inherent in trying to answer this question in a safe universe at all). And let's not over-generalize the gaming market. One of this year's biggest online hits is Moshi Monsters, a "social networking game and virtual pet site", and most of the players are girls ages 7-14. Their main preoccupation is building things and preserving them. So if we look at boy and girl gamers side-by-side, we can safely conclude that from a tender age boys would rather break shit and girls would rather put it together. BUT the article suggests that these two human urges - creation and destruction - exist in an uneasy stasis. If most successful game developers are gamers themselves, then these twin urges exist in the same people simultaneously. Jekyll and Hyde, web edition.
"To find oneself unmoved in the face of such an achievement is like standing in the middle of Hagia Sophia and saying, "That's it?" Yes. That is it."
Really, dude?
"The most interesting thing about 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is how fun it is to play. Its batshit-crazy story revels, hilariously, in everything the medium does not do well. I played the game through in two days, after which I wondered if the single most damning thing about video games is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a better game than L.A. Noire."
In his attempts at over-analyzing while still sounding deep and worthy, Bissell manages to miss the broader point here about all forms of entertainment. His internal struggle over the 50 Cent-L.A. Noire divide is really the conundrum of anyone who loves anything too much. I love reading. I love it too much, and now it's a psychological compulsion, and the problem is that sometimes I read things I don't like. And sometimes I read things that are supposed to be good for me. And sometimes I read things that I love that probably aren't. If I were writing this sentence I would have said, "the most damning thing about literature is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that Wideacre is a better book than A House for Mr. Biswas."
But I would never write that sentence at all, because actually I think that's the great thing about literature. It reminds us that we're human! Sometimes, no matter how educated and intellectual we are, we have bad, bad taste. Castastrophically bad. Incestuous-sex-on-English-country-estates-with-lots-of-S&M bad. It happens.
When you love something, you get inducted into a tight community of other people who love it, and they have very firm opinons on exactly how that thing should be loved. Wine snobs are famous for this, so are gamers. But really, we're all like that. It's inevitable. Which is why it's good to be reminded sometimes that rules can be arbitrary, no matter how smart they make us feel.
"We actually have several names for it: "interactive film" or "interactive drama."
In this last bit, Bissell tries to define why exactly L.A.Noire is fun, even though it's kinda bad. His point about interactive films is interesting. It reminds of the tail end of 2008, when among other avant-garde things I helped design and run an alternate reality game at the Smithsonian Institution. In those days no one knew what ARGs were, and in that sense nothing much has changed. Interestingly, a lot of traditional video gamers aren't interested in ARGs, which would arguably be the next step in immersive virtual realities. This might be because ARGs use the real world as a backdrop, which means (oddly) that they aren't realistic enough for hardcore gamers, who demand that their fictional universes contain no inconsistencies that they themselves don't create. The real world is predictably messy. If a gamer runs amok, 50 Cent-style, it won't be a game anymore.
It's interesting that what people treasure about video games - the elaborate rules - depend on the absence of rules in order to thrive. In other words, the reality is always about the fantasy, and it probably always will be. Which means that the idea of interactive drama, and the entire concept of using games as a form of real-world mass story creation, is probably dead in the water. No one has figured out a way to get around the problem that the real world has already been built.
But today we're all about that article on LA Noire. So here we go.
"A lot of games go to such lengths to anticipate asshole players that they sometimes feel like a pool that has been preemptively overchlorinated to frustrate the one kid determined to pee in it."
Like so many, many things about video games, this is interesting from a human nature perspective. Bissell's point is that video game makers often conceive of elaborate safeguards - the example here is of a detective character who can't fire his gun in an open street - in order to keep players from turning into mass-murdering fiends who completely disrupt the imagined universe and intended rules of the video game. The psychological tug-of-war suggested here between the game developers - ethical creators who are concerned about the preservation of beauty - and the playing public - rapacious destoyers - is a little bit creepy. I was reminded of nothing so much as the big debate over the global financial system. For a little while there the global financial system resembled nothing so much as a pool that someone had peed in, thereby increasing his own fiendish glee but turning everyone else's experience into an unhygienic nightmare.
Who wins the tug-of-war? The creators or the destroyers? I'm not trying to be cosmic about this, I'm just wondering, for the sake of humanity, exactly which side is going to win. Video games don't necessarily provide a safe place to determine the answer to this question (one of the great debates in the gaming universe, over the idea of permanent death, really exemplifies the problems inherent in trying to answer this question in a safe universe at all). And let's not over-generalize the gaming market. One of this year's biggest online hits is Moshi Monsters, a "social networking game and virtual pet site", and most of the players are girls ages 7-14. Their main preoccupation is building things and preserving them. So if we look at boy and girl gamers side-by-side, we can safely conclude that from a tender age boys would rather break shit and girls would rather put it together. BUT the article suggests that these two human urges - creation and destruction - exist in an uneasy stasis. If most successful game developers are gamers themselves, then these twin urges exist in the same people simultaneously. Jekyll and Hyde, web edition.
"To find oneself unmoved in the face of such an achievement is like standing in the middle of Hagia Sophia and saying, "That's it?" Yes. That is it."
Really, dude?
"The most interesting thing about 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is how fun it is to play. Its batshit-crazy story revels, hilariously, in everything the medium does not do well. I played the game through in two days, after which I wondered if the single most damning thing about video games is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a better game than L.A. Noire."
In his attempts at over-analyzing while still sounding deep and worthy, Bissell manages to miss the broader point here about all forms of entertainment. His internal struggle over the 50 Cent-L.A. Noire divide is really the conundrum of anyone who loves anything too much. I love reading. I love it too much, and now it's a psychological compulsion, and the problem is that sometimes I read things I don't like. And sometimes I read things that are supposed to be good for me. And sometimes I read things that I love that probably aren't. If I were writing this sentence I would have said, "the most damning thing about literature is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that Wideacre is a better book than A House for Mr. Biswas."
But I would never write that sentence at all, because actually I think that's the great thing about literature. It reminds us that we're human! Sometimes, no matter how educated and intellectual we are, we have bad, bad taste. Castastrophically bad. Incestuous-sex-on-English-country-estates-with-lots-of-S&M bad. It happens.
When you love something, you get inducted into a tight community of other people who love it, and they have very firm opinons on exactly how that thing should be loved. Wine snobs are famous for this, so are gamers. But really, we're all like that. It's inevitable. Which is why it's good to be reminded sometimes that rules can be arbitrary, no matter how smart they make us feel.
"We actually have several names for it: "interactive film" or "interactive drama."
In this last bit, Bissell tries to define why exactly L.A.Noire is fun, even though it's kinda bad. His point about interactive films is interesting. It reminds of the tail end of 2008, when among other avant-garde things I helped design and run an alternate reality game at the Smithsonian Institution. In those days no one knew what ARGs were, and in that sense nothing much has changed. Interestingly, a lot of traditional video gamers aren't interested in ARGs, which would arguably be the next step in immersive virtual realities. This might be because ARGs use the real world as a backdrop, which means (oddly) that they aren't realistic enough for hardcore gamers, who demand that their fictional universes contain no inconsistencies that they themselves don't create. The real world is predictably messy. If a gamer runs amok, 50 Cent-style, it won't be a game anymore.
It's interesting that what people treasure about video games - the elaborate rules - depend on the absence of rules in order to thrive. In other words, the reality is always about the fantasy, and it probably always will be. Which means that the idea of interactive drama, and the entire concept of using games as a form of real-world mass story creation, is probably dead in the water. No one has figured out a way to get around the problem that the real world has already been built.
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