how are fan videos better than what is on the trailers? like this one for example:http://www.moderndaymonster.co...
step your game up Rockstar games!
Art+Books
LA EventsTop PicksSubmit an EventEvents NewsletterGet MobileEntertainment AdsTicketsArtopiaTacolandia
LA MusicMusic BlogHenry RollinsConcert CalendarLA NightlifeSubmit an EventMusic NewsletterGet MobileMusic Ads
L.A. Noire: Perspectives From a SoCal Historian
In the video game L.A. Noire, we visit Los Angeles in 1947 through the eyes of a homicide cop in search of clues. We bump into as many as 400 characters. Since the producers of L.A. Noire also specialize in Grand Theft Auto, we can't help obliterating oncoming cars at every other intersection. We try to avoid the sharp turns by running over pedestrians.
1947, when cops used pay phones
Related Content
More About
The game can easily take 18 hours to play. Eventually, the murders make sense, inside an omelet that features practically every gesture that every film noir cop has ever made. It borrows most of all from James Ellroy's vision of the city, especially from L.A. Confidential. But the main character is not the cop. He is just another vehicle.
The main character is the city itself: an open world of locations, of L.A. cityscapes. Hundreds of photos from 1947 were scanned, then rendered through texture maps and, finally, set in an overcast, almost Flemish light, as if through a tinted windshield.
Many people will defend L.A. Noire as drama, and it's easy to see why. The motion-capture on the faces of characters is less robotic than usual. The actors register more expressively — let's say six expressions rather than three. And their poses and action are remarkably fluid, very much a trend in gaming.
But their conflicts have to be thin. They are performers in a game. It is the player who does the acting. Their faces are empty for a purpose. They are designed to handle extreme repetition, not unlike the symbolic characters in fairy tales.
Although much has been made of the game's sophisticated motion-capture of facial expressions, the characters still suffer from a problem first identified in 1970, through robotics, which has come to be called "uncanny valley." Characters in CG or 3-D can suffer a paradox: If they're close to — but not precisely — humanlike, it makes them look extremely unhumanlike. They suddenly look rather creepy, weirdly medicated.
Of course, that reminds us of people we know, after their 10th plastic surgery. So I guess the uncanny valley was a cultural warning. But it also speaks to another problem inherent in digital storytelling: Although computers open up many storytelling possibilities, what if they purport to — but don't quite — deliver the fullness of a novel?
Besides my histories in print, I also write "interactive" novels I call "wunder-romans," which use interfaces that contain thousands of images and are accompanied by printed novels intended to be read alongside them. They are different from a video game yet subject to the same issues.
Computer stories can "speak" and search at lightning speed. Data clouds emerge like creatures. But they also destroy the familiar sense of timing, of rhythm, that we expect in novels or films. As I often say in lectures: Their world may not be deep, but it is definitely shallow and wide.
L.A. Noire opens with Cole Phelps, who's a homicide detective and a regular guy — until sins from his past are revealed. In the last two hours or so, toward the end, the plot switches to a dubious cop, Jack Kelso, an arson detective living in a rotten apartment. The art direction shifts as well. Vice had a fine finish. Arson is cheap.
The story speaks to our mad condition in 2011. We learn that video is an apparatus that also can lie. Holes and distractions begin to pile up — a gag about games where all the pieces fit. Then we get a real estate conspiracy in 1947 that foreshadows risk capitalism in our day.
Storywise, L.A. Noire's 1947 feels more like 1953. Six years are essentially conflated into one. Freeways are about to be built, and while some freeways were under construction by 1950, the real push came after 1953.
Taking us to a kind of 1953 is a point well taken, as urban plans in 1953 echo our mess today. The boom of the '50s was also about decay. It was not simply gigantic and imperial — it was also artificial and flimsy, made with cheap lumber and fast credit. One can still see the traces today in slummy dingbat housing from the '60s, like tents made of wallpaper.
Something like simulated money was already present, not only in the chicken wire and stucco of the instant suburb but also in the financing of the Marshall Plan after World War II, in the cash during the early Cold War and in the early career of Nixon. Tax-haven strategies date to the early '50s. In other words, the suburban corruptions of the '50s foreshadow what globalism became. In some ways, they foreshadowed a meeting between suburban planning and global planning, as '50s Los Angeles was an early testing ground for how Iraq was "rebuilt."
But these connections between L.A. Noire and today also point to another inherent problem. Instead of the ultraspecific 1947, the game is a conflation of many eras, as if a thousand real estate schemes and racist policies were made into a soup.
That adds a burden for designers. Visually, L.A. Noire creates an overcoded fairy-tale city, like cappuccino posing as a cup of joe. Despite striving for accuracy using period photos, its setting seems derived from a mental picture that comes mostly from cinema, the harvest of 60 years of movie noir in the United States, France, Germany and Japan and new televised police procedurals like Law & Order and CSI, which also are sources for the game.
6 comments
Toothnail, I agree with all the points you make in respect to the game itself. And yes, I agree the author no doubt did not play the game in detail and missed those things that you clearly (and correctly) pointed out.
However, I think the point of the article itself was perhaps missed by you. The author is using LA Noire as a vehicle for a much larger critique. This is a dialogue about the genre of digital storytelling itself; and its reliance on the "marketing of memories" which devolves into a "kind of playful tourism." He is exploring the notion that media tools have not yet truly developed, that they have not quite yet discovered a "new grammar for investigating our mess" (the problem with conflating eras within one time period is also inherent in popular history itself, not simply in this instance of a digital gaming medium.) Can digital media ever "deliver the fullness of a novel?" After all, the noire genre was initially novel based, only later to become film and radio as the author points out. And this current high tech digital storytelling media, which appears to really be striving to be cinema, still suffers from that lack of fullness.
And that is really the point of this critique. Not so much a critique of LA Noire itself, but a critique of current digital "innovative story telling tools" and what they are professing to accomplish.
For another L.A. historian's take on L.A. Noire's veracity, see Nathan Marsak on the 1947project: http://www.1947project.com/47P...
Buckus Toothnail, You nailed it far more eloquently than I could. The long monotone sound of empty disdain was all I could pick up from this article. I thought I was going to see some real criticism of both the good and bad from someone with some in depth knowledge but I only get the impression that Klein looked at the box art with a preset thesis ready to go. Your comment saved me a wasted page visit and actually added value to this page in my opinion.
The caption on the above screencap is wrong as well. The phone used by Phelps is not a "pay phone", but rather a police callbox, or specifically a "Gamewell" model, one of the callbox manufacturers of that time period. This goes to further demonstrate the stunning attention to detail the game pays to its 1940’s Los Angeles environment.
What an awful, self-aggrandizing self-promoting tripe of an "article". The prose is terrible. And badly, badly researched. If his point was to complain about anachronisms, he missed the most obvious one, in which the humongous outdoor set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" makes an appearance in 1947 when in "reality", the set was torn down in 1919.
But trying to take the game to task for "freeways" and complaining that most of L.A.'s freeway construction didn't begin until 1953 is not only dishonest, but highly inaccurate with regards to the game itself. Freeways are not present in the game, and the mention of them within the context of the story is that they were in the planning stages. What’s worse, the game is ENTIRELY accurate in featuring prominently into the plot the "Master Plan of Metropolitan Los Angeles Freeways", which yes, was adopted in August 1947, perfectly consistent with the game’s timeline.
But what is really dishonest about this piece is that to anyone that actually played the game, it’s obvious this “historian” did not. A dead giveaway is his characterizing Jack Kelso as a '”dubious cop” and “an arson detective”. The fact is that he is NOT a cop, but a claims investigator for an insurance company, a fact that is so conspicuously woven into the plot that it’s impossible for anyone not on copious amounts of narcotics to make this mistake if they actually played the game. Nor is Kelso “dubious” at all. In fact, in contrast to the other protagonist, Cole Phelps, who is the one that would be more accurately described as a “dubious” “arson detective”, Kelso is a positively straight-laced goody two-shoes, and it’s because of this characterization that he is involved in the plot of the story.
There are few things more shameful in academia than a critic that did not actually engage the work that he was critiquing. It’s quite obvious that rather that playing the game himself, this “historian” passed along this paid assignment to his students, who he characterizes as “serious gamers” (as if this brings any credibility to them or his piece or means anything at all), to do his “homework” for him. By doing so, this “historian” missed for himself all the wonderful nuances and minutiae of 1940’s Los Angeles that are littered throughout the game.
For example, while one would expect landmarks such as the Egyptian Theatre to be present in the game, seeing next to it the Pig 'N Whistle (established in 1927 and still standing today) presented in lovingly accurate detail is a marvelous discovery that is rewarding for those that are familiar with Los Angeles history and establishments. Same as for stumbling onto the historical Pershing Square with its original circular fountain that was demolished in 1952, which bears little resemblance to the re-designed and renovated park that is there today.
For an article that conceits itself as “L.A. Noire: Perspectives From a SoCal Historian”, there is an unfulfilled promise of evaluating the game’s thick fabric for historical accuracy. There are so many period details within the game that begged to be critiqued, from the fashions to the speech to the music to the automobiles to the street cars to the geography to the architecture to the interior design to the establishments to the signs. And yet instead, what we’re offered is a regurgitated second-rate “lecture” that has little to do with the game or the period. Worse, there’s an embarrassingly inept critique of the status of gaming in general from someone that clearly does not have not only the credentials, but the chops to do so.
I would suggest the editors of “LA Weekly” request a refund for the fee paid for this “article”, or perhaps give this “historian” a chance for redemption by having him first actually play the game before writing the piece. Given the game’s lush re-creation of 1940’s Los Angeles, if this writer is anything near a “SoCal historian”, the article would naturally write itself and may actually turn out to be interesting reading.
Now Trending
Browse Voice Nation
-
Voice Places
Find everything you're looking for in your city
-
Happy Hour App
Find the best happy hour deals in your city
-
Daily Deals
Get today's exclusive deals at savings of anywhere from 50-90%
-
Best Of...
Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city
Join
Log In
- Profile
- Newsletters
- Mobile
- Logout
