In the LA Weekly print edition that hits newsstands today, the video game L.A. Noire gets an examination from from Norman M. Klein, a professor at CalArts and an urban and media historian who wrote the book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory.

He finds relevance in the game, writing:

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.

Still, the game's story is based on our collective memory of the time period, rather than an accurate picture:

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.

Check out the full article here: “L.A. Noire: Perspectives From a SoCal Historian”

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