L.A. Noire: A Different Kind Of War

It’s not often I feel compelled to write a blog countering the arguments of a fellow Ready-Upper, but when I read Anthony’s blog Trust, Doubt or Lie, arguing that L.A. Noire reveals great dissonance between its gameplay and its storyline, I didn’t just feel compelled, I felt obligated.

L.A. Noire was a breath of fresh air. For far too long I’ve been jaded by shallow action games, desperately trying to milk a fix out of them in the absence of anything substantial. The likes of BioShock and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion are elusive gems of the industry. I enjoyed games in a very intense way when I was younger. I didn’t have to try to enjoy them. I didn’t have to strive for the climax. Sadly this is no longer the case.

But L.A. Noire was one of the few beauties that forced me to use my mind, and it gave me motivation to do it by giving me characters I cared about and a story arc I wanted to expose. The game rounded it all off nicely with a ‘40s L.A. that I wanted to explore. It even gave me additional reasons to explore it. For example, Team Bondi gave me photographic negatives of game locations where special badges were hidden, ready to be collected, as well as gold film reels scattered in more discrete areas of the game world. L.A. Noire gave me something that I rarely get from games anymore: excitement. It was released on May 20th and I’ve been playing it solidly since then. For that I praise it.

The fact that the game was published by Rockstar seems to have planted an idea in people’s minds that should not necessarily have been there. It wasn’t developed by Rockstar – it was never meant to be a film noire rendition of GTA.

I don’t agree with Anthony and those who share his view that L.A. Noire’s story was any more out of place for this medium than was, say, BioShock’s or Fallout 3’s. It’s certainly a different kind of game to that of the latter – an open world with many ways of going about the same task simply would not have worked for the game because of its mechanics. It was primarily a puzzle game – puzzles have a single answer. That’s how they work, there’s no point to them otherwise. L.A. Noire’s facial capture was incredible, taking the medium to new heights and allowing me to judge the authenticity of the game character’s testimonies and judging what, if any, evidence to confront them with. This all complemented the game’s puzzle mechanics beautifully.

I think Anthony’s opinions reflect a more pervasive matter of the industry regarding the way that stories ‘fit’ into games. Many people assert that the interactivity inherent to the video game medium renders traditional means of storytelling redundant, yet people continue to shoehorn them in, or as the game designer Chris Crawford puts it, “attempt to plug interactive storytelling into a medium that has no architectural slot in which the storytelling might be plugged”. This is a far more complex matter. I do hold the opinion that the industry has far to go to achieve a storytelling mechanism truly worthy of the interactivity inherent to video games. But in a world where this has yet to be achieved, I think L.A. Noire should be lauded for what it proffers.