L.A. Noire - An Experience in Gaming

L.A. Noire is a game built for me. It takes a broad classical adventure gametype and drops it into late 1940s Los Angeles. Your role is a detective, working your way through various sections of the LAPD, catching cases in the moral shithole you'd expect. The game is James Ellroy-lite, though it mainly fails to transcend the cliches he blasts open so spectacularly. Still, a "crime" game? Yeah, I can get behind that no matter what. Collecting evidence, interrogating suspects, breaking cases? Distill it however you want and I'll lap it up. My threshold for enjoyment is perilously low. But really, L.A. Noire has been billed as much more than that, both by its creators and players. A lot of talk has centered on it being the first video game to transcend that pesky "game" label. Instead, it holds the category of "experience".

A caveat up front: I'm not here to be the dreaded defender of the games industry from all those proles and their Modern Warfare fix that destroys my chances of getting the latest JRPG translated. However, I do think the attempted re-branding of L.A. Noire is related in a way to how mediums are often interpreted. You see it a lot in comics, where people talk about sequential art as just a storyboard for a potential movie, everything already laid out, both interchangeable, completely missing the unique qualities that separate them. Sadly it's not just a question of the form, as the countless godawful movie pitches as comics, ready-made to lurch onto the screen attest. I rarely see anyone talk about the relationships movies have to comics on a formal level. This has started popping up in games discourse too. When surefire successes like Halo and Call of Duty drop, the developers are aiming for the blockbuster action setpieces you're used to seeing every summer at the megaplex. They're quick to trot out the dreaded (by me at least, YMMV) word: "cinematic". As in, they want the games to feel like movies. Once again, I'm not going to overextend in the other direction and say all this pap is diluting the industry and pretty soon you'll be watching a game more than you'll be playing it. But just look at how non-interactive cutscenes have become a standardized focal point of games. Sure, they've always been there, but now they're at the forefront of hype and advertising. Cinema's influence is more and more apparent.

That aside is meant to show that labels for media are often changed to denote an uptick in quality, relevance, or importance. Look at "graphic novel". No more of that comics crap, this shit is real. It's like a novel, but with graphics! Let's not focus on how inadequate that term is, being tied to the novel format, but on how it took something and tried to take the same contents of what it always had been and then drag it out of the doldrums and into the light. The same thing is happening with L.A. Noire. This is no game, it's an experience! Now I get to try and destroy that connotation.

After all, what is an experience? You experience anything. A song, a comic, a novel, a movie, a TV episode, a painting. But wait, games are all about inserting actions you make into that experience, thereby personalizing it. Well maybe. I've got two big problems with that. The first is that anyone's experience with anything is different. Sure, commonalities, themes, reactions, they certainly spread across all manner of people, but deep down everyone feels differently about the same thing. How you're feeling at the time, a personal situation that mirrors what you see, someone you just saw, these are just a few of the countless things that affect how you experience anything. So saying L.A. Noire is an experience is really as one-dimensional and unhelpful as you can get. Everything is personal to some degree.

Second, and this is the bigger one, games are at their heart no more personal than any other medium. A stock line might be, "Well, you're controlling what's happening, so you're invested in the action way more." And to an extent that's true. But anything can get you to care about what happens or want to see what happens next if it's compelling. And games operate in the relatively confined, linear world that other things do. Within reason, a book only keeps going as you keep turning the pages, music has to keep playing to finish, and games only play out if you do what is prescribed to you. Princess is in another castle? Keep jumping on stuff and shooting fireballs. Zelda's been captured? Use that hookshot and work through those temples. Some guy that might be a clone of you is about to melodramatically threaten the entire world with a weapon of mass destruction? Hide in boxes and use the codec. If you don't, you're getting nowhere. The rules change specifically from game to game, but the one that differentiates games from other mediums is everything the creators wanted you to see is there and you must work through it in the order that they prescribe. You can open a book and read a random chapter. You can look at any page in a comic separately. You can look at a painting an artist did at any point in their career. Now that may not be the most compelling or fulfilling way to accomplish something, but the option is there. How do you get to the final boss? You beat all the other bosses, overcome all the other challenges, acquire the upgrades. Your choice is severely restrained, if there is one at all. Sandbox games and other types certainly give you more options and things to do, but there is always a larger plot that is meant to be moved along at some point. You might also rebuke this by mentioning that you can play a single level or section of a game just like you can read a single chapter or single page, but the key difference is access. Unless that level or section is the first one, it's almost always going to be blocked until you've gotten there.

To be sure, games have mixed it up. Choices in video games have become all the rage lately, but they've been around forever. Do you wait for the train or keep going in Final Fight 3? Do you save Kid or leave her in Chrono Cross? Do you go light side or dark side in Knights of the Old Republic? The game plays out differently and it makes you feel like you have some control, like you're shaping things. But of course you're not. You make a choice, and one formulated avenue is brushed aside for another. Then you replay the game and go the other way so you can see it or to just get the achievements/trophies. Character customization, depending on the game, is one place where games can allow for strong user involvement and individualization, even though it often can paradoxically become almost non-existent in the games where it has the largest potential, like in World of Warcraft or other MMOs.

So now that my opinions are out there, what about L.A. Noire itself? It is really an experience, a new take that transforms games and elevates the form to new heights? No, not at all. In fact, by trying to paint itself as something other than a game but coming up short, L.A. Noire blatantly (and I would guess unintentionally in some ways) screams that not only is it not an experience, but that it is a G-A-M-E through and through. A few thoughts on why that is.

Choice is certainly a major factor in the game. In a certain case, you might have to find close to 20 clues at various crime scenes and interview people, asking close to 20 questions. If you miss a clue you have less information to work with which cuts back on the options you have during an interview. Whenever there are clues to find there will be a certain backing music, and once you've found all the clues for a certain area, a sort of "victory chime" will play and the music will go away. Finding the clues is usually only a matter of walking up to the few noticeable objects in an area and then pressing the corresponding button when the controller vibrates to let you know this is something you can examine. It's a very simple process. Sure, you can turn off the music, but then how do you know if you've gotten all the clues? That might not be a huge deal, especially if this was an "experience" but the game makes sure to point out how you did after the mission is over, when you get what is basically a score report, showing your stats for the case. It's tied to the linear nature of games. By placing a statistic on how you play the game, the developers are trying to railroad you into playing the game how they have designed it and grading you on it. Why not remove that from the equation? Because that's how games are made and how people consume them. If Team Bondi really wanted to push, that would have been a great way to start. You work the case and it ends and you move on to the next one. No report that shows you how your "experience" was wrong.

The interrogations have a similar problem. They likewise show up as a statistic on your case report, but there's little subjectivity present when they actually take place. Whenever you ask someone a question, you can respond by believing they're telling the truth, believing they're lying, for which you have to have a piece of evidence to back it up, or doubting them, which basically is when you think they're lying but you don't have evidence to back it up. It's a pretty good system that usually works well. Sometimes it's hard to decide on which piece of evidence to use if you believe the person is lying, but that's about it. Whenever you select a response you get a "good chime" if the answer is correct and a "bad" one if it is wrong. More blatant examples of the game telling you there is a specific way to play each case and even though it continues and changes in ways, you still got it wrong. Why not strip all that away and just let the case play out within an overriding framework that hides as much from the player so the gameplay gets further into opacity (I'm trying here, I swear, it may not look like it) and unpredictability.

One of the reasons this is all a problem is because L.A. Noire has an overarching story that goes on in the background at first and slowly moves into the main part of the game. Sure enough, you can't control any part of this narrative. So even when your character does stupid things that are barely explained (HE'S FLAWED, SEE BRAH? SHIT IS DAYEEP!) you get to watch and marvel at the dismal goofiness happening. So no matter how you do in a case, that story has to continue, which, in a surprise to no one, involves you climbing the ranks of the department and great scenes where you're lauded as the crime solver of crime solvers even if you punted the entire previous case. Even worse is when you see or hear details in a case that you want to act on but have no ability to. Obviously we're not near a point of interactive games, but this is really frustrating, especially if you're supposedly in an experience. It comes across as the developers cutely playing with you, knowing that if you do notice, you don't have the capability to act.

A final point of frustration: the telephone. Throughout the game there are various spots where you can use a telephone to contact dispatch or records and information. You sometimes will also get connected to other members of the department or be given messages or updates. The thing is, you can only use the telephone when the game allows you to. It feels badly artificial, especially when it blatantly shows up on your minimap whenever you're "supposed" to use it, and always very convenient to your current location. There are also a few spots in the game where it is far from obvious that you should use the telephone, but since the icon pops up, you know you'd better dial away (it's not like you always know who you're calling, in another annoying quirk) because you risk losing out on information if you don't. At times this can make you feel like the game is on auto-pilot, playing itself.

Throughout this it might seem like I'm being unfair to L.A. Noire, especially since overall I like the game. I just really hate the experience wording, it being one in long trend of trying to replace unique forms with watered down versions of other, supposedly better ones. Just for fun, and because this really went off the rails near the end, here's my dream take on how L.A. Noire should have played out.

No overarching story. Instead, you have various cases set around a locale (in this case Los Angeles post-WWII). You could switch up the playable characters and the supporting cast to keep it interesting, with enough differences so that they aren't the same person with a different graphics model. There's not success or failure indicators in the quest. The evidence and interrogation methods can stay. Instead of focusing on a greater story, spend more time putting in multiple angles and directions that each case can branch to.