Open Thread on Videogames

In preparation for our discussion of new media and gaming, here’s a thread to discuss your gaming experiences and connect them to various readings or course ideas.

5 thoughts on “Open Thread on Videogames

  1. Matthew Yaggy

    One of the distinguishing characteristics of the western genre is its setting. The mythical wild west as presented by film is a wondrous place. Plains stretch as far as the eye can see. Herds of buffalo, horses, cattle, and other animals roam around for miles. Great mountains explode up into the air, seeming out of nothingness. However, in the western film, we are only offered glimpses of this. As the hero rides to the rescue or some other destination, the viewer is treated to brief views of the expansive landscape. We also might get some of this description from point of view shots during moment’s of introspection of during a moment of pontification about the wonder of the west. However, these moment’s of description are brief and fleeting. As Chatman would put it in his chapter on description in cinema, these are only tacit descriptions. Red Dead Redemption describes explicitly what its film equivalent can only do tacitly.

    In my opinion, one of the best parts of Red Dead Redemption is riding around on the sandbox world on my horse. The world, Rockstar games has built is so detailed and chock full of imagery that its easy to spend ten minutes just riding to your destination. While you ride your horse, you can take in all the details that fly by the screen in films because of editing. You can watch as the sun sets behind the mountains and watch as the sky turns from blue, to orange, to red, to purple, and finally to the black of night. You can ride through fields of cactus, watch deer run by, or simply watch the mountain line change as you ride around for hours. The beautiful part of it all is that it only effects play time in the game. The videogame western is able to create an effective pause in the narrative. We can linger over a scene taking it all in. After I’ve performed a raid on a gang’s hideout I can survey the area, taking in all the carnage i’ve carried out; I can even loot my victim’s bodies.

    The immersive description ties to another aspect of the game that I really enjoy. With its main story and all of its side quests it lets you experience almost every variation on the western film. One moment you may be fighting mexican bandits, another you may be protecting a stagecoach, you could even be breaking a horse, or herding cattle. In this game the possibilities are endless.

    1. Andrew Silver

      Your last comment is the reason I liked Red Dead a lot more than the two Grand Theft Auto’s I’ve completed (vice city and 4), Rockstar’s other big creation. I also felt that Red Dead truly lets you experience every type of Western film situation, getting to fight Mexicans in Alamo-style combat while also experiencing a classic Western shootout. In Grand theft auto, the missions really boil down to stealing a car, killing someone (or multiple people) or delivering a package (or a person), which gets bland after a while. However, I don’t think this is an innovation on Rockstar’s part rather than taking advantage of a new medium. Western films are almost always situation-driven as the American Ideal of a heroic cowboy is strictly defined while crime-films tend to be character-driven, hence nico and tommy verceti being such individuals.

      1. Dustin Schwartz

        I agree that the missions get tiresome in regards to novelty. I think that’s because we’ve played many GTAs and we’ve done this before. That’s the format of the game, and that’s something that just doesn’t really change. I do think, however, that in Grand Theft Auto 4, specifically, the missions allow me to experience the world in a different sense because it is a world with which I am most familiar–New York City. It makes me look at New York City in a totally different fashion. Creating murder and carnage in Dukes feels very strange, as I am interacting with my home of Queens in an entirely different level. The environment/space in the game is reminiscent to media/schema outside and interactivity is therefore heightened.

        Also, the different names for the realistic locales in the city actually added humor to the game when I was first exposed to them. In fact, it was a bit of a distraction from the narrative; I couldn’t take the story and missions seriously until later in the game.

  2. Andrew Silver

    Now having completed Reach, I think my favorite part of the game from a narrative perspective was the attention to detail the creators put in while creating the first halo game in a non-covenant dominated world. Surprisingly, besides facing a common enemy and being Spartans, Halo: Reach had very little to do with it’s three sequels, with only one character from the other three halo games making an appearance and a few sporadic references to future main events or characters.

    However, the attention to detail given to creating a world that believably could have existed before the desolation found in Halo 1, 2, and 3 is remarkable. The Covenant, infamous in the first Halo games for insulting the players while they attacked (like a grunt yelling “you can’t hit a thing”, don’t speak a word of English through most of Reach, talking their alien language. However, they slowly pick up words along the way, with main enemies giving orders in english by the end of the game. Animals, completely absent from other Halo games, roam the deserts, valleys, and villages you fight in. In the beginning levels of the game, the covenant (an enemy dreaded throughout the previous halo’s) is barely known to the soldiers fighting around you, immersing you in the feeling that they are a brand new alien threat rather than the same one you have been fighting throughout the other halo’s.

    The Reach creators did a great job doing a task not often done, completely re-creating a pre-apocalyptic world after the apocalypse has already happened.

  3. James Stepney

    Though I have already immersed myself into the series of God of War, playing the third and last installment gave me a greater appreciation for the time and effort to create such a massively scaled piece of software. Primarily being paralleled with this class, I especially prized—although there are many—the emphasis placed on the interactivity with the environment, which clearly can be interpreted as reverence to the epic scale of many Greek mythological stories. Though very linear, the fact that the avatar played/used, Kratos, can directly scale walls, mountains, and even moving Titans further enhances the experience a player will have as they both play and watch the game as if it were a film. In fact, the developers at Santa Monica studios separated the operational cues, telling what buttons to press at specific points on the outside of the screen to further enhance the visionary experience of the player. The game incorporates many familiar genre themes which hybrids itself as a significant adventure/action game (hack and slash, puzzle, role-playing, etc.), but its highlighted characteristic is the accent on its cinematic—dare I say—reliance to portray players/viewers to progress the story. The game even uses many stylistic techniques of the serial narratives we have been watching. Though I did not play the second installment to the series I was quickly brought up to speed in the many cutscenes and expository dialogue referencing the first and second game.

    Overall, this game borrows the same recognizable conventions of literature, film, television, and gaming in order to construct a world and narrative that literally anyone can just jump right into. And I feel for gamers, this experience is prized over any other form of gaming that requires a larger knowledge base in order to move forward, which—as well all know—can ruin the experience with that inclusion of exclusivity.

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