Tom Bissell is one of our favorite writers on videogames.  His book last year Extra Lives, was a study in how videogames work (or don’t), why they’re a singular medium and why Bissell finds them so terribly addictive.  Last summer, when we talked to him about the book, he told us that his call for better writing in videogames had been answered – he’d been approached about developing a game.  He hoped to bring the skills of a novelist to bear on character development, plot and dialogue in a big, ambitious, shoot-em-up blockbuster.  Well … it seems things didn’t entirely work out.   In a recent piece on Grantland Bissell lamented:

Last year I published a book about video games called Extra Lives. A couple of developers read it and came calling. This excited me, given that one concern of my book is how poorly video games have told stories. Video-game storytelling is a more challenging conceptual problem than it may seem, and the manner in which this problem might best be addressed is in no way apparent. I was eager, all the same, to storm the castle. But of the various projects to which I found myself attached or within an eyelash of being attached, one imploded, one was canceled, one I removed my name from, and one entered stasis. But the whole reason I was playing so many games I neither liked nor loved was to see how they had stormed that same castle. At least, this was what I was telling myself while playing, say, Crysis 2 at four o'clock in the morning. So a month ago I decided to quit playing video games.

Luckily for us Bissell didn’t exactly quit playing videogames.  In fact the rest of the lengthy piece is a review of the latest offering from Rockstar/Team Bondi, a Los Angeles based noir entitled, unfortunately, LA Noire. Bissell certainly played the game.  And he proceeds to do the other thing he advocated heavily for when we talked to him last – offer a thoughtful critique.  Bissell thinks that videogames will only be taken seriously when they get the sophisticated criticism that every other art form receives.  So he’s a man with a mission.  And part of that mission is unique to the medium …

Video games can do a lot of things other storytelling mediums cannot. Their penance, however, is to have to deal with things foreign to other storytelling mediums, one of which is a uniquely damaging form of audience disruption. Just about every storytelling game employs various masking systems that attempt to anticipate internally disruptive player behavior. Say you have an in-game friend — what happens if you try to shoot him or her? Does the bullet fire and blood fly and nothing happens? Or does the bullet fire and blood fly and does the friend say, in so many words, "Hey, what gives?" Or does the friend actually die and cause a restart? Or does the gun maybe lower when you pull the trigger? As everyone who plays video games knows, masking systems can be greatly amusing to test and prod, and the first thing I did in L.A. Noire was drive my car directly into some pedestrians and plow through a few streetlights, after which I insisted on driving my partner and me to our first crime scene in a dump truck. Once we got to the crime scene, I stranded my partner there and took off, still in my dump truck, spreading more mayhem. Had this been GTA or Red Dead Redemption, the law would have come calling, but the most incisive criticism I got from my partner during all of this was: "What are you doing?" Isn't it obvious, partner? I'm playing.

 

As it turns out, L.A. Noire's masking systems are not so great.

But part of that mission is a kind of textual analysis. What’s the author’s intention?  And it’s only when Bissell has gotten frustrated with the limitations of the videogame-ness of L.A. Noire, the clumsiness of its gameplay that he starts to understand what it does best.  Good, old-fashioned character development – the kind you’d find in a more traditional narrative.   

This weekend we’re rerunning our special hour-long look at videogames.  I hope you’ll listen to Bissell’s contribution and check out his full review of L.A. Noire.  And I hope Bissell will break his resolution and start obsessively playing videogames again and give them the tough love they deserve.