I returned to New York from Los Angeles late on Friday night, and I spent the whole weekend in bed, alternating between sleeping and eating. My limbs ache and my feet still sting. And that was E3! In case you’re interested in actually-relevant takeaways, I’ve rounded up some conclusions about the state of the industry after the event at Gamasutra — here you go.
Now, let’s talk a little bit about L.A. Noire, which I played in the time leading up to E3 and which I don’t feel much motivated to resume now that I’m home.
L.A. Noire is in a tough spot; you’d be hard-pressed to put it into any extant genre, as it ties a bunch of ordinarily-disparate elements together. The experience of playing it is disorienting and schizophrenic, as Kirk Hamilton highlights with
this piece on the game (it’s billed as a “review”, but I will call it
L.A. Noire fanfiction because I want to tease him about it).
Tom Bissell’s thorough assault on each little fracture in the game’s formula is
a long but largely fair evaluation, and it also doesn’t neglect all the things that are truly impressive about it. Now, I certainly can’t defend
L.A. Noire, as I don’t even really feel like finishing it, but I will play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you don’t mind.
I didn’t really crystallize my neutrality on the title until I spoke to players who weren’t heavy gamers — the mainstream, cinema-going, noir-loving audience that Rockstar and Team Bondi hoped to snag with this game. I certainly think that if any game can become a victim of the critical echo chamber, it’s L.A. Noire. With its weird dissonance between gameplay and story, its bold strides in the direction of lifelike conversation and its pastiched format, it’s a game critic’s dream; no title ever aimed for realism in narrative that wasn’t dragged under the lens of speculation for us to discuss amongst ourselves.
But as critics we have a perspective on games that the intended audience doesn’t often share. Most of the reviews I read complained of the listlessness of L.A. Noire‘s “open world”, a massive and beautifully-reconstructed 1940s Los Angeles that taunted with visual richness and epic scale, but was lifeless for anyone who deviated from the linear narrative.
To that, I say it’s not an open-world game, and only “people like us” would scrutinize how it does or doesn’t hold up to that label. It’s a game about conversations and investigations, and as such that entire massive city is simply window-dressing, a way to pace our transitions from one place to the next. That you can have your partner drive and skip those sequences was virtually horrifying to some — why would you want to drive if there’s no reason to and you don’t have to and there’s nothing to do on your way?
Because it engages you with the setting. They built that huge, gorgeous city just for setting, and I’ve always found the act of driving in Rockstar games to be a kind of narrative tourism, a zen-like gentle glide on the trigger buttons that gives me a sense of place, of backdrop. I don’t need to interact with it for it to have value; driving in L.A. Noire’s Los Angeles clears my head. It reminds me where I am. Yes, sometimes I just wanted to get to the next point in the story, to the next clue site and I’d skip it, but plenty of the time I liked reminding myself I’m in the driver’s seat, figuratively. This is a game that lets us feel what it’s like to drive through old L.A — that in and of itself was pretty cool to me.
On the one hand, I think it’s unfair to compare L.A. Noire to Grand Theft Auto. There are some surface similarities, but they are not the same type of game at all. On the other hand, it’s fair to expect that your average consumer will make that comparison: After all, they made Red Dead more comprehensible by permitting the “GTA with horses” characterization, so it’s fair that a game with vehicles, under the marquee of the same developer, using some of the same tech and colored with some of the same flavor should invite similar expectations.
I actually never liked action behaviors in Rockstar games. I always found the shooting clunky, missions unfairly time-crunched, overly demanding of precision. Especially as I was largely more interested in the larger arcs: The world-as-character, the typical GTA rise to power and control, and less individual missions where I have to dodge gunfire to pick off yet another fleeing gangster.
What I love most to do in GTA is drive and see what happens. I actually never got tired of exploring the vision of New York as presented in GTA IV — it felt so rich and alive. I drove until I crashed a car and made someone mad at me, and then I searched for hidden jump ramps as I fled the cops. I went to TW@ and I read all the personal ads. I listened to the radio. That’s how I play. Funnily, that’s how any guest to my home who’d pick up the game would play, too: We’d all sit on the couch and drink and people would just drive around smashing shit up. I didn’t want to play the missions. I didn’t care.
L.A. Noire is the first game in the family that was compassionate to my distaste. I hated those damn chase sequences, and I loved being allowed to skip them when I failed. The developers seemed to realize that in a game with numerous elements, some people will prefer some types and others will prefer other types, and they allowed the player to intuitively cause the types they preferred to come to the forefront. That’s worthy of praise.
I still wanted that sense of place and the ability to move through it in L.A. Noire. And because it’s not an open-world game, and it never even suggested I’d be rewarded for heading off the beaten path, I didn’t mind that the only place to drive was really from one location to another, albeit through whatever meandering route I felt like cruising.
Our job as critics is to explore systems and test their limits, but if I wasn’t one, would I have really run for hours just to see what would happen even though I had no reason to, even though the game had clearly placed my next locales in my notebook? Throughout the whole time I’ve played the game, I never drove any other car but the cop car — why would I? I’m a cop! When people are disappointed that Cole can’t shoot people up in the street, I wonder why? What about the game suggested that the player should want to do that?
When we looked at the map of Super Mario 3, backgrounded with dancing bushes for show, did we complain that we weren’t allowed to visit them? Nah. We didn’t need to; everything that was relevant was clearly demarcated.
L.A. Noire at least aimed to design for intuition, not for our knowledge of game systems. It wanted you to use human facial-reading, not guess at what the game wanted you to do. Unfortunately, this worked imperfectly (enough has been said about the evidentiary system and the doubt versus lie problems that I don’t need to add to it), suspending the player into a weird rift wherein you’re never sure whether to do what comes naturally or try to figure out what the game wants.
I also think that the developers understood that L.A. Noire in its optimal shape — a game that focused on interrogation, investigation and story, an “adventure game”, if you will — would have been highly difficult for a wide audience to understand. The mass market would not understand, and therefore not buy a Rockstar game where you can’t drive and shoot. I believe the developers wanted to court that wide audience to try unfamiliar game elements by luring them with more familiar ones. It was a double-edged sword in the end, but I think probably a necessary sacrifice.
Because of L.A. Noire‘s misshapen-ness, its schizophrenia, everyone has trotted out the whole “ludonarrative dissonance” thing again — you know, the fancy word us game bloggy types use to mean that the gameplay doesn’t match the storyline. Grabbing Bissell’s example, if Nathan Drake is such a good hero, then why can he kill like 800 people with wisecracking aplomb? How come Cole Phelps can offend witnesses, blow investigations, run over pedestrians, destroy police cars and steal civilian cars and still be commended as a hero, promoted up the line?
You know something? It doesn’t bother me. Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve never believed that a game would benefit from perfect realism, perfect immersion. No, soldiers at war will not regenerate all their wounds if they hide behind a crate, but the regenerating health bar has been one of the most useful and indispensable design developments in the first-person shooter genre. It’s just more fun that way.
And now we get to why I waited to decide how I felt about L.A. Noire until I could discuss it with people who were not game critics. Because until I had this job and spent all my time with other people who did, I never minded that games allowed me to do absurd, dissonant things. Only a critic looks at this beautiful, fascinating recreation of a place in time that doesn’t exist any more and worries about what you can’t have.
Back in the day, I used to like making my sprite run around in goofy circles when I got bored or frustrated, or trying to see if I could get them stuck in a wall. As Kirk and I discovered in
the FFVII letters, that we could do squats to earn a wig from a cross-dressing wrestler named “Bro” didn’t make the game any less moving, charming or meaningful to us. And I know
L.A. Noire made much of its kinship to film and its potential for immersion, but I don’t believe that other, older games cared
less about story than it did.
Maybe because L.A. Noire takes itself so seriously, we take ourselves too seriously, too. But I think being able to create that dissonance in games is actually important to our sense of power as a player; it helps us control the dispensary rate of the story and its intensity. It lets us know we’re the leaders of an interactive narrative when we can stop doing what the game wants and just do something dumb. That’s what makes games fun.
I don’t expect the game to compensate for my desire to push back against it from time to time. That’d be ridiculous. How would I feel like I’ve momentarily escaped their systems if the systems won’t let me, if they call me to account in a big way for every pedestrian Cole accidentally crunches, if they force me to be demoted because I scuffed my car? The thing people call “ludonarrative dissonance”, at least in this case, I call “being a video game.”
And I don’t know if I would have even noticed it, been bothered by it, considered it a mark against the game if I hadn’t been part of the critical sphere where we’re constantly examining and questioning immersion. All good video games, no matter how realistic they strive to be, require a suspension of disbelief in order for the game design to work.
That suspension of belief, that okay, I’ll meet you halfway, between player and designer, is something we elect to do. I say this all the time, but I think engaging with a game and its weird rules is always a choice. Any player who sits down with a controller in hand and expects the game to fill in all the blanks for them is going to be disappointed.
All that aside, it mostly doesn’t work as a game. The evidentiary and conversation system has players constantly feeling inexplicably punished, constantly second-guessing themselves. You can blow a case simply by visiting sites in the wrong order, with no clue as to what the correct order would have been until you fail. The core mechanic’s fundamentally busted, and that’s not all right.
I do think that engaging with it is still more fun than it’s getting credit for, and it’s interesting at least. When people ask me whether they should buy it I say it’s hard to explain, not “it’s bad” or “you shouldn’t.” That it’s hard to explain is an unfortunate consequence of the fact the game tried some brand-new territory.
I think L.A. Noire’s main problem is simply that it tried too hard not to be a video game. But if you read the E3 analysis I linked up top, you’ll see I believe there are so many titles out there content to just be video games, to just be products, and to just be the same kind of product, that I appreciate the effort. We must take halting steps before we can stride in different directions. L.A. Noire might be some kind of five-legged mutant, but I’d rather that than yet another cloned sheep.
