Inferior Quality: Not for Structural Use!

[The following post begins with and contains a number of huge spoilers about L.A. Noire and in particular its last act, and so is behind the jump for those who wish to avoid such things.]

Beyond the Girl Gamer 2.2: We all live in a...

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 2.1  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are a lot of dead women in L. A. Noire.  The entire Homicide Desk sequence of the game is devoted to finding murdered broads, in fact.  It seems Los Angeles is just teeming with men who seem likely to strangle their girlfriends and wives, and that drunken dames are just leaping from bars left and right, waiting to be gruesome victims.

I am more okay with this than you would expect.

The casual racism and misogyny in L.A. Noire are never* gratuitous and might, in fact, be mitigated, as compared to some of the realities of the time.  This game strives, at its core, to be representational art.  Team Bondi / Rockstar went to an extraordinary amount of effort to recreate Los Angeles circa 1947 with as much detail and fidelity as possible.  The buildings, the streets, and the fashions are all as close to authentic as the developers could manage -- and so, too, are the attitudes.  Even the cases themselves, in classic Law and Order style, are drawn from actual historical events. 

There's actually a reason for photographing a woman's body close-up like an object, this time.

L. A. Noire is meant to represent faithfully a specific historical era, and it is meant to re-create faithfully (in spirit, at least) a specific art form -- the film noir -- that sprang from the same historical era.  Whether or not it succeeds at anything is a matter for debate, but no-one can argue that our current notions of race and gender equality applied 64 years ago, because they didn't.  We may still have miles to go, in search of a truly equal society, but the strides taken over the course of the 20th century cannot be overlooked.

And in fact, the game is based on the notion that its audience have, indeed, come through the 20th century understanding that violence against women is bad.  The designers count on the player having a certain reaction to the cases Cole Phelps is called upon to solve and to the story of Cole Phelps himself.  The intentional anachronism in the game is that 1947 Los Angeles is being measured against 2011 mores.

The playability of L. A. Noire relies on the difference between "contains" and "condones."  The space in time, and the space in cultural evolution over those decades, are a required baseline for understanding the game's subtext.  We are meant to understand that a character's attitude toward non-white citizens, or his attitude toward women, is part of the story of this character.  And we are meant to understand that rudeness and cruelty are signals: a cop's brushing off "dames" and insisting he have his way are signs to us within the context of the narrative that this man is A Problem.

Roy Earle is, how shall we say?  A world-class asshole.

That is the defense I can mount of visible racism and sexism in a game world: sometimes, it really does tell a story.  But having provided this "it's okay" discussion of L. A. Noire standing how it does, and having its own merits, we now need to ask the uncomfortable questions.  Highest among them is this: why is this the story we always tell?

Gaming has the potential to be anything.  A completely digital, completely constructed world can be anyplace we choose in time and in space, with avatars that look like anything and anyone.  We can inhabit settings as far-flung as the human imagination can conjure.  So given that a true historical drama is going to need to confront the unpleasantries of history -- why are we always plumbing the same histories?

Moreover, when we do plumb these same histories, we're willing to rely on an audience having a 21st-century understanding of civilization -- but we're unwilling ever to directly comment on those changes.  The periphery and the subtext are as close as we ever get.  Thus, even when serious problems are justifiable in the context of the narrative, we're still left with our same challenge from chapter 2.1: this game and this world are an artificial construct, entirely built for modern consumption, and we must filter it through the lenses of our current understanding.

For all that we can tell any story in a game, usually our western-developed stories -- of all play-type genres -- tend to be set in one of a few archetypal worlds:

• High fantasy
• Low fantasy
• Space opera style science fiction
• Near-term science fiction
• Modern urban (Grand Theft Auto, Heavy Rain)
• Fictionalized History (Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire)
• Modern Military or Military-esque (Tom Clancy games, Modern Warfare, Battlefield 2)
• Historical Military or Military-esque (every WWII game ever)

There are more, and obviously, these genre-classification walls aren't absolute, but I think they are the biggest buckets and manage to catch a hefty percentage of narrative games.  (Some games arguably combine world-types, as well.)

As in the case of L. A. Noire above, some of our game-world types do operate, by necessity, within the constraints of real-world historical rules.  If I were to play a World War II-era military game, I certainly wouldn't except to have women infantry among my units!  Nor would I expect to find women among my ranks if I were arranging pixelated knights Templar around a digital Jerusalem.

But historically-themed games are not, generally, among the worst offenders.  (Indeed, the Assassin's Creed franchise handles women in a plausibly-recreated renaissance Florence and Rome better than I would have expected.)  The bigger problem, instead, shows up in our most fictional universes. Gender roles, expectations, and stereotypes common to our history and to our present-day worlds have this amazing way of persisting through worlds that are fully constructed, have never existed, and are not ours at all.

While I was working on this piece, a deeply relevant essay appeared at the Border House.  In The Skyhook Society, Quinnae describes this phenomenon:

It is hardly groundbreaking at this point to say that the social worlds painted in many video games and other fantasy environments tend to be based on politically charged ideas about gender, race, and so forth. Despite being wildly fantastic or surreal they are, just as often, presenting the player or the reader with a social world that is depressingly familiar. A world where the humans are white, where the power holders are men, where heterosexuality remains compulsory, where any sort of trans-ness is not even on the horizon; in other words a world with very familiar relations of ruling.

She goes on to describe how the deep-seated and often unexamined need to replicate real-world power structures in fantasy worlds can render them structurally incoherent.  The core of her argument is a call for more thought put into the construction of gaming worlds, and less "default" behavior in general.

Even a game that has some excellent tendencies within, in terms of race and gender, can fall down in its universe construction.  While taking on the universe from the deck of the Normandy, has Commander Shepard ever met a female salarian?  (No.)  What about a female turian?  (No.)  And of course no female krogan.

"There are reasons," one argues.  "The salarian matriarchy system!  The genophage!  Well, Garrus used to have a turian girlfriend!"

Those aren't reasons. Those are in-character explanations for a design choice that a team at BioWare consciously or unconsciously made.  Humans, in the future, do indeed come in an array of racial options, and in both male and female versions, but with only one exception (the quarians), this ability to extend the imagination on-screen apparently only covers the human race.  Well, except for when you can come up with an entire race of fictional female hotties.

Justicar Samara, older than the city of Boston, will kill you with her cleavage.

In general, though, I feel the most structurally incoherent societies we see in geekdom are in our fantasy worlds.  This is our sword-and-sorcery plane, our modern nerdery made incarnate.  Our RPGs pretty much all take place here (indeed, the fantasy setting tends to be one of the unspoken markers of the genre).  The high fantasy universe is easy to mock because it's so ubiquitous.  Post-Tolkien and post-Gygax, we're all familiar with the tropes of orcs, elves, and a version of the British middle ages that never was.

A game can include female characters galore, and yet still find itself an example of incoherent world-building that doesn't take gender or sex into account in any way.  Divine Divinity and Divinity II are guilty of this: you can create a female Divine in the first game and name her anything you like, yet by its sequel, the hero of the first game is canonized as Lucian, a goody-two-shoes of a man if ever there was one.  The first game mainly portrays female NPCs as servants, nobles, locals, or witches -- and though not ideal, this is at least theoretically consistent.  By the second, nearly all groups, factions, and character types are a fairly hefty gender mix.  Men and women both guard town walls, or oppose you with malice (i.e. swords), or are dungeon bosses.  And yet women who get lines or quest segments are still mostly there to be plot devices, rather than to be characters with agency.  Your player character can be female, and yet nearly the entire game is designed around the responses of a male player character.  Simply put, the player can't afford to think about any of it too long, because none of it makes sense on examination.

But the Divinity games really aren't about deep storytelling; they're about getting an awesome weapon and some awesome skills and slaughtering orcs and trolls 'cause they're there.  Fair enough.  On the other hand, Dragon Age is indeed about a deep narrative, and a carefully built world. In the interest of full and honest disclosure: I still haven't been able to make myself play Dragon Age: Origins.  I started to and got bogged down in gameplay mechanics that I strongly dislike.  But Kris Ligman has played it, thoroughly.

In all fairness, most characters, even the ladies, wear way more than she does.

In a really solid piece about this kind of incoherent society, Ligman gripes about half-thought-through world-building, as it applies to class.  Her character of choice was a dwarf, a member of a despised underclass.  The player character, of course, rises to fame and power and general badassery, because that's the game we play.  It's what RPGs are for.  But although she intentionally created a very specific kind of character, the game failed to follow through on any promise of coherent recognition:

No one cares where I’m from, only that I look damned heroic right now.   ... [T]hough several game narratives exhibit an awareness of class, race, and the intersections of those two, the games themselves as systems display an exasperatingly predictable upper middle class image of social mobility, reliant upon fantasies of self-made wealth achieved at the expense of others and the local ecosystem.

Although she's writing about the incoherence of class markers, the truth persists with all out-of-"norm" characterizations in most games.  The NPCs are perhaps the result of a coin toss, but they all behave and are written in a way that results in world structures that don't hold up, or that show a lack of imagination.

The culture of medieval Britain was indeed rigid in a certain way.  So was Rome, or the Tang Dynasty.  So is 21st century Manhattan, or19th century Paris.  But any world in a game is none of these places.  Any world in a game is an intentional, theoretically thoughtful construction by a 21st century team of writers, artists, and coders.  So why do these fictional worlds keep clinging to real-world biases?

The long and the short of it all is, I can only second Quinnae's challenge to game designers (and in fact to all creators of fiction):

Ask yourself critical questions about the division of labour, ethnicity, and gender. Ask yourself if heterosexuality needs to operate in your world exactly the same way it operates in ours. Ask yourself if your culture needs to be an appropriating parody of a human culture, or if every human in your world must be white. Demand of yourself explanations for these things. What you will be weaving in the process is a proper social structure that can hold up your world, one that will almost automatically make it notably different from our own. It will put your world’s various power dynamics at a tantalising remove from our own, making it feel all the more creatively alien and unique. The most interesting fantasy worlds I’ve seen are ones that do make some kind of accounting for their social systems, that possess identifiable structure, rather than unsupported mirroring of the real world.

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Related reading:  Tanner Higgin, The Trap of Representation



*Caveat: we are, at present, only halfway through the Vice desk and still have probably a third of the game to go, if not slightly more.  If some crap does get gratuitous as the game concludes, you can rest assured that I will have a great deal to say about it.

L. A. Non-Noire

There he is, our square-jawed all-American rookie cop!  Ladies and gentlemen, Cole Phelps:

"Hello! I specialize in flying off the handle unexpectedly."

We installed L.A. Noire on Tuesday, but it then took us three hours to download all of the DLC so we didn't actually get to play until Wednesday.  Since then, we've been taking it a case or two at a time, when we have the hours, and so we're advancing slowly through the game.  Last night we just got promoted from Traffic to Homicide, and haven't started any cases yet on the homicide desk.

This is another game that's caused some marital controversy, though not on the order of, say, Portal 2.  My spouse wants to play in black & white, and I want to play in color.  Right now color's winning, because I put up a bigger fuss.  But on the occasional replay (it took us a while to get the hang of questioning witnesses, and then there was that time that I hit what I thought was X and turned out totally not to be) he switches it to black and white, so I get to see both.

The interesting thing is, it took that shift in visual tone for me to understand something about L.A. Noire.  The game actually suffers from losing the color, and not for any technical reason.  Rather, it's that when you're looking at it in shades of grey, it's easier to realize: L.A. Noire is not actually a noir.

The overarching story may yet get there, I grant.  Flashbacks of Phelps's time in the war, combined with the story unfolding from found newspapers and some other cut-scenes (visiting the singer Else between the end of the last Traffic case and the start of the first Homicide one), are building up into a large secondary tale.  We've hours of gameplay ahead of us yet, and we're still early on in our young cop's skyrocketing career.

But that's where I get stuck: a film noir isn't about a promising young man's skyrocketing career.  It's not about a man's successes at all.  Noir is, rather, about a man's critical failures, and the society that made him fall.

Double Indemnity, 1944 - film noir, as classic as it gets. Go rent it.

Team Bondi / Rockstar have shown extraordinary dedication in re-creating post-war Los Angeles.  The degree of geographical fidelity and attention to detail that they put into this game has been lauded everywhere.  They also deeply understand, and start showing early on in Phelps's flashbacks, that film noir is an expression of post-war cultural crisis.  The Film Theory 101 definition is this:

Like Double Indemnity, these films thrived upon the unvarnished depiction of greed, lust, and cruelty because their basic theme was the depth of human depravity and utterly unheroic nature of human beings -- lessons that were hardly taught but certainly re-emphasized by the unique horrors of World War II.  Most of the dark films of the late forties take the form of crime melodramas because ... the mechanisms of crime and criminal detection provide a perfect metaphor for corruption that cuts across conventional moral categories.  These films are often set in southern California -- the topographical paradigm for a society in which the gap between expectation and reality is resolved through mass delusion.  The protagonists are frequently unsympathetic antiheroes who pursue their base designs or simply drift aimlessly through sinister night worlds of the urban American jungle, but they are just as often decent people caught in traps laid for them by a corrupt social order.  In this latter sense, film noir was very much a 'cinema of moral anxiety'' of the sort practiced at various times in postwar Eastern Europe ... i.e., cinema about the conditions of life forced upon honest people in a mendacious, self-deluding society.

Here's the other thing, though: what we the modern audience recognize of a noir is its artifice.  We recognize the shadows, the blinds, the hats, and the women.  We recognize the black and white film and the framing.  There's a very specific visual language used to tell these stories, and that visual language conveys crucial elements.  The decay of society, the moral ambiguity (or amorality) of the characters, and the literal and metaphorical darkness of the world they inhabit -- we take those lessons from the camera.

The Killers, 1946

By now, these artistic tactics are cliché.  The audience of 2011 hasn't seen The Naked City, but they've seen thousands of episodes of its modern heir, Law & Order.  Our cynicism no longer lurks in shadows, but rather is worn on our sleeves from a very young age.  Our society is so inundated with media that most of us start learning to speak the visual language of the camera before we learn to speak our mother tongue.

But in a video game, we lose that framing.  Cole Phelps is a detective, not a shadowy killer, and so much of his work takes place in broad daylight.  Shadows are minimal and carefully placed, because otherwise they will interfere with the player's ability to read witness faces and find crucial clues.  A game, and especially an investigative process game, must by necessity cede a significant amount of framing and camera control to the player, who maneuvers Cole Phelps at will.

I deeply appreciate the use of actual history in the game, but part of what happens when you set a game in such a carefully re-created reality is that you lose the artifice attached to the genre.  Film noir isn't about faithfully investigating the crime scene in the California sun; it's about the shadows cast across the face of a disillusioned man, the shadows that allow him to hide his true intentions from a man like Detective Phelps.

Cole Phelps is indeed a character type that exists in film noir -- but that character is never the protagonist.  The protagonist in a noir is the antihero, the man that has become corrupt from the degeneration of society (and in particular has often been brought low by a degenerate grasping woman).

What we are seeing, in L. A. Noire, is a long series of film noir stories in which we are playing the bit part.  A case about a scheming B-movie actress, a starry-eyed young girl, and a licentious and immoral film producer?  As a two-hour cautionary tale in which people end up dead at the end, that would be a classic noir.  But instead we're the cop.  We come in after everything's gone all to hell and then reverse engineer the story.  Our player character is not in these stories, but rather is an observer of them.  As a player avatar, that's a little eerily on target.

All of this said -- please don't mistake this criticism for dislike!  So far L. A. Noire is playing out like Ace Attorney: Grand Theft Auto Edition, and I love that.  I'm into investigations, I love finding clues and solving mysteries, and now that we're getting the hang of Cole Phelps it's starting to be quite fun.  (I was taken aback the first time we selected "doubt," thinking that the witness might not have been entirely truthful, and Phelps immediately burst into a loud and angry tirade and accused the witness of being the killer.  What?!)

I look forward to seeing the shape that the game takes by the time we finish it.  We may yet find that the story wrapped around all of these cynical little nuggets is, itself, a film noir frame.  But even if we don't, I'm enjoying the ride.