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Always call
‘shotgun’ in
MAFIA II
into some game discussion now.
First up, let me just say as someone
who loves great narrative and story
in big blockbuster games, the praise
Enslaved attracted in 2010 baffled
and saddened me. Please, people
– simply not hating characters
doesn’t immediately make them good
characters. Solid facial animation
doesn’t equate to personality. The
characters here manage to be both
illogical and yet utterly predictable at
the same time, and the three primary
protagonists are as archetypal as they
come. The Journey to the West riffing
was weird and undercooked, beyond
the initial ‘I see what they’re doing here’
phase. Enslaved is an awful example of
‘OMG games CAN tell stories!!!!’, and
I’m damn sick of reading half-baked
arguments on the contrary.
I’d also like to briefly discuss an
interesting moment from Mafia II:
a game with great ambition and
design, but so-so (or bad) writing and
incredibly awkward racial stereotyping
(the game’s portrayal of the Chinese
is flat-out disgusting). Mark Smith
called it “the best and most immersive
interactive cinematic experience (he’d)
had in 25 years of gaming”, which
is an insane statement that cannot
possibly be true. There’s one moment
in the game that really sticks out to
me, though, in terms of awful narrative
design. Mild spoilers follow, but I’ll
avoid being specific.
Late in the game, a character dies.
That’s expected – mafia fiction, no
matter how good it is, has a bad habit
of never letting anyone live. The setup:
your character, Vito, and his best friend
Joe, are on their way to meet up with
this character. When you reach them,
you’ll presumably all get into the car
and drive to a second location, such
is the game’s structure. But from the
moment you meet up with Joe and get
into the car, you know the guy you’re
about to meet won’t be coming with
you – that his death is but a cutscene
away. Why Because the mission gives
you a two-seater car for the mission.
There’s no room for your friend to
come along – so obviously he’s about
to die! What a terrible piece of scripting
that was – and yet so obvious, and so
easily avoidable!
It’s shit like this that makes the
road ahead of me both difficult and
interesting. My studies are focusing
on big blockbuster games – exploring
narrative in a big-budget explosionfests
seems to me far more worthwhile
than explaining how games that are
primarily narrative focused succeed.
And yet these are the games people
are going crazy over, while the games
I’m interested in are dismissed as
Michael Bay handjobs and constantly
called ‘overrated’ because of this
industry’s bizarre case of Tall Poppy
Syndrome.
And now, I need to go and replay
Grand Theft Auto IV.
JAMES O’CONNOR
Australia’s best gaming
-zine
www.PIXELHUNT.com.AU
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