L.A. Noire Message Board older than one year ago
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Boom.
Does a game have to be fun? What constitutes a game, anyway? And what's a nongame?
These questions are more weighed after finishing Jordan Magnuson's The Killer (play it here). About a minute in, I died. A mine had killed me, something I had no control over. It's one of three endings to The Killer, an interactive...experience? The pixel artwork will remind you of a video game, and you are a controlling a character from left to right, but it's...well...
The Killer isn't about defeating an alien menace or terrorists or resurrected Nazi zombies. Set in Cambodia, The Killer involves a lot of walking. I'd recommend you just go play it, actually. I'll wait.
Done?
Powerful, right?
A photo snapped by Magnuson and his wife, while travelling through Cambodia this year."I was lying in bed one night listening to Jonsi's 'Tornado' when the idea for The Killer came to me," explained Magnuson, writing to me over email as he makes his way through Europe. "I was traveling in Cambodia at the time, reading about the Khmer Rouge, and I had just been to visit Toul Sleng: a prison camp in Phnom Penh where 10,000 people were killed between 1977 and 1979. As I listened to Jonsi's lyrics, and those haunting vocals, I imagined myself marching someone to the field where I would shoot them, or bludgeon their head in (as was more typical). Imagined getting to the field, and having that simple choice to make, of whether to carry out my purpose...or not. Once anything is in my head that way, it's only half a step to my imagining it as some kind of computer game, or notgame."
Magnuson has no problem with the term "notgame." When you say "game," that saddles certain expectations. Games have an ever-expanding history, compounded by a struggle with the very term of "video game," and having definitions is problematic.
I touched on this idea when writing about L.A. Noire a few weeks back, asking for game experiences that better reflected the broader range of human emotion. As someone who is paid to play and write about video games, however, I often wonder whether my colleagues and I are the only ones who'd like to see more of this. When you're exposed to a random violent military shooter number for the thousandth time (like this year's E3), you crave more. For the vast majority of players who use video games as escapism, the exhilaration of the power fantasy may be enough. Even if that's true, why limit the medium?
But I digress. Magnuson puts it much better, anyway.
"The Killer, as far as I see it, is something like a short interactive poem, and it doesn't intend to be anything more," he said. "I call it a notgame to try and spark a little bit of realization that not everything interactive has to be a game, and also to try and prepare the player for encountering something that won't be fun."
The Killer is a spiritual successor to Walk or Die, another Magnuson experiment.It's best to know as little about The Killer before playing it. The surprise, especially if you encounter the random element that is the mine, has an exponentially greater impact. And the point of game vs. nongame may be moot, as The Killer is simply using the interactive possibilities of software to make a point, and having barrels of fun while making a point is not required.
"In some ways it's an experience to be 'endured' rather than 'enjoyed,'" admitted Magnsun, "which some people may find odd or objectionable, as the idea of 'interactive experience' outside of the realm of software tools has become conflated with entertainment for most of us."
One of the most recent snaps of Magnuson on his GameTrekking trip, this time in England.There are three ways The Killer may end: encountering a mine, choosing to kill the person or firing into the sky, not killing them. The epilogue, explaining how the game was inspired by the horrors faced by the Cambodian people past and present, is the same no matter what.
Magnuson has made nongames in the past (play them all here), but The Killer's one part of a more ambitious, world-spanning project called Gametrekking, whose mission statement is to make games influenced by seeing the world. The Killer is just one example. Following the same path as so many others these days with a concept they're hoping people will love, he funded the idea through Kickstarter. He's been "trekking" for months now, moving through Taiwan, Vietnam, and others.
As mentioned, The Killer was inspired by Magnuson's stay in Cambodia.
"GameTrekking project is not about attempting some objective presentation of Cambodia, or any other place that I've been to," he said, "but rather about my trying to express something of my own particular encounters with places as I travel in the twenty-first century. [...] It was because of this project that I was studying the Khmer Rouge, and it was because I was in Cambodia that I saw how much its past history is still affecting the country today. I strongly doubt that I ever would have had the particular idea that turned into The Killer if I had not been able to actually visit Toul Sleng and the Cheong Ek killing fields."
I've spoken to Magnuson before, as part of a piece for EGM, not long before he hit the road. He's a man who takes the potential of games very seriously, frustrated by today's most popular games (read: Call of Duty) coming to define the medium for a great many people.
We're in agreement there, even if I understand the precarious balance, as ultimately games need to make money. It comes back to this notion of fun for me, and whether fun is part of the equation that makes up an experience, game--or nongame.
Playing with this notion can lead to extreme reactions, as the comments on The Killer at Newgrounds underscore. Magnuson said most of the ratings are either one or ten, basically a love or hate reaction.
Take this one, for example.
"I came here to play a game, not wasting my time with this sentimental sob story crap," said a user named xzibition8612, not pulling any punches. "Who gives a shit what happens in cambodia? I don't care what happens there as long as they keep making my shoes and sushi. Don't waste everybody's time under the pretense of a game."
It doesn't phase Magnuson, but he worries about what it means.
"I think if we're afraid of 'losing fun,' we're going to severely limit our potential for exploration where this medium is concerned, and that would be a shame," he said. "Games are going to be around forever...I don't think we have to worry that our grandchildren are going to end up in some kind of grayscale world where they're forced to play boring notgames all day long. So my feeling is, let's not worry about it 'working.' Let's experiment, and see what's outside the box. I think there's plenty of room for all varieties of fun and emotion and meaning to exist together, and side by side."
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Team Bondi developed one of the year's biggest games in the acclaimed detective adventure L.A. Noire. Over the course of the years-long process to bring that game to fruition, the studio appears to have jilted more than its share of ex-employees along the way. And now they're speaking out en masse.
It all started when somewhere around 100 former developers suddenly found themselves uncredited for their work in the game and launched a website to protest this fact. It continued when IGN published a story from freelance writer Andrew McMillen, who took Team Bondi to task for reportedly troubling work conditions at the studio over the course of the game's seven-year development cycle, providing quotes from both anonymous former employees of the company, and even oft-complained-about studio head Brandon McNamara. McNamara's quotes (which halfway confirmed many of the complaints lodged against the company, and simultaneously brushed them aside as simple facts of being a developer in this business) seemed to tell all the story there was to tell at the time, but evidently, McMillen was far from done.
Things have gotten very ugly Down Under.In a story published yesterday on GamesIndustry.biz (you'll need a registered account on the site to read the whole thing), McMillen went to town on Team Bondi, bringing to light a lengthy series of internal emails collected by former employees of the studio which depict McNamara and the management at Team Bondi as complicit in grinding former studio workers into the ground with insane hours and minimal compensation.
Without just reprinting the entire series of emails McMillen posted in his story (you should read the entire thing, as it's fascinating stuff), the core issues pertain to McNamara and the studio's upper management, who allegedly dangled L.A. Noire's completion date as a perpetual carrot on a stick in order to secure lengthy, unpaid overtime hours from the rest of the company's staff. Multiple emails from as far back as 2008 show studio management proclaiming the game's completion as projected within a six month window of the email's send date. In nearly all instances, these emails were used as justification for increasing work hours at the studio, many of which allegedly were unpaid crunch hours. Sources then go on to list everything from misrepresented announcement dates (one email suggests impending media coverage a whole 14 months prior to the game's official unveiling in Game Informer last year), to non-existent raises and cost-of-living increases, despite hefty amounts of overtime work by employees across various departments.
The really bizarre thing about this whole story is how closely it echoes the now infamous Rockstar Spouse letter, which took the publisher to task for the alarmingly brutal hours it purportedly required Rockstar San Diego employees to work while finishing up Red Dead Redemption. That particular letter is something that one source at Team Bondi even mentioned as signaling something of an alarm bell for those working at the company. However, according to that source, studio management treated the letter as more an object of derision and mockery, rather than any sort of wake-up call to how their own employees might be feeling.
All these former employees bad-mouthing the company certainly seems like it might hit a little too close to home for Rockstar, though reportedly ties between the publisher and developer were strained long before any of this news hit. Though nothing has been said publicly by either company (and, again, these sources are anonymous, and thus cannot be directly corroborated), one source seems fairly sure that Rockstar's relationship with Team Bondi is merely a one-and-done.
"It's pretty well reported now that the working conditions were bad. What hasn't been discussed yet (from what I've seen) is the relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar. I've heard a lot about Rockstar's disdain for Team Bondi, and it has been made quite clear that they will not publish Team Bondi's next game. Team Bondi are trying to find another publisher for their next title, but the relationship with Rockstar has been badly damaged - Brendan treats L.A. Noire like a success due to his vision but I think Rockstar are the ones who saved the project. They continued to sink money into LA Noire, and their marketing was fantastic. Without their continued support, Team Bondi would have gone under several years ago."
"Rockstar also made a huge contribution to the development; their producers were increasingly influential over the last two years of the game's development, and overruled many of the insane decisions made by Team Bondi management. At a lower level, Rockstar also pitched in with programmers, animators, artists, QA, etc. Part of the conflict between Team Bondi and Rockstar was due to Rockstar's frustration with Team Bondi's direction, and eventually Team Bondi's management in turn resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control. It's also worth pointing out that Rockstar used to be very keen on making Team Bondi something like 'Rockstar Sydney' - the more they worked with Team Bondi management, the more they came to understand that this was a terrible idea."
This is, unfortunately, one of those ugly situations that we will likely never know the entire truth of. Rockstar is not a company known for its public displays of self-confession, and it seems unlikely that McNamara will be giving any more interviews following this latest volley of criticism from former employees of his studio. And while the veracity of their claims seems legit, given the sheer number of different sources (and the at least halfway confirmation of several of the claims by McNamara), it seems even more unlikely that any of these developers will step forward and give their names, either out of fear of lawsuit or blacklisting within the industry.
While L.A. Noire is unquestionably a major critical success, and at least a moderate commercial success, we are sadly now left to ponder at precisely what cost that success came at.
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In the story, we see a fracture begin to form in the developer's relationship with publisher Rockstar when the latter pulled out of E3 in 2010. We read why some environments in L.A. Noire seemed lifeless, and about developers scared to quit before the production wrapped, for fear that they wouldn't received accrued overtime pay.
We're familiar enough with crunch time in the industry, but this sounds like a particularly egregious case. We know we should be able to separate art from its artist but, frankly, stories like this make us appreciate the end product just a little bit less.
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Oh dear. Oh deary dear. All is not well between L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi and publisher Rockstar. Rockstar Leeds are busy working away on the PC version, but a report by GamesIndustry.biz, indicates Rockstar have no intention of working with Team Bondi again. Here’s the grisly details:
(more…)
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Thankfully, long-time LAPD veteran Skip Bauchman (yes, his real name) is here to tell us just how true-to-life Rockstar's true-to-life melodrama really is in the G4 video above. It's all fascinating stuff, but after watching the interview we're starting to think L.A. Noire hasn't given us the skill-set necessary to finally figure out who shot J.R.
[Thanks Michael!]
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Robbins told Develop, "Reports of 12-hour a day, lengthy crunch time, if true, are absolutely unacceptable and harmful to the individuals involved, the final product, and the industry as a whole," echoing sentiments made in the past by a variety of game industry leaders. He also encouraged the aforementioned folks tied to Team Bondi to shoot an email to "qol@igda.org," before he added, "But no lolcats please ... okay, maybe a few."
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LA Noire spent seven years in fiery development Hell under production by Team Bondi, and now the gritty details about its tumultuous birth are surfacing like a quick glance away on a pretty face. Following dozens of reports of inhumane work conditions, 60-hour weeks and extreme turnover, IGN Australia contacted 11 unnamed former Team Bondi employees and bossman Brendan McNamara for the lowdown on developing LA Noire Down Under.
One recurring point of contention was overtime: "No overtime was officially paid in the three years and three months that I worked at Team Bondi," one of the anonymous former employees said. McNamara responded to this complaint (and many others), saying Team Bondi had overtime pay in place, "but contractually, we don't have to do that."
Another anonymous source described McNamara as a "24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime." McNamara didn't seem to have a response to that one. Read all of the complaints and McNamara's rebuttals in the full interview.
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Okay, so Rockstar hasn't abandoned the platform, but what about the performance issues that plagued the initial PC release of Grand Theft Auto IV? The press release promises that not only will the PC release feature 3D support and "improved graphical enhancements" but it will "run on a wide range of PCs" - naturally, we'll wait until its release, when PC gamers will inevitably assault the game with every hardware permutation imaginable while clinically taking frame rate readings every 15 seconds.
L.A. Noire will find its way to PCs this fall, in both retail and digital formats.
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L.A. Noire spent seven years in fiery development Hell under production by Team Bondi, and now the gritty details about its tumultuous birth are surfacing like a quick glance away on a pretty face. Following dozens of reports of inhumane work conditions, 60-hour weeks and extreme turnover, IGN Australia contacted 11 unnamed former Team Bondi employees and bossman Brendan McNamara for the lowdown on developing L.A. Noire Down Under.
One recurring point of contention was overtime: "No overtime was officially paid in the three years and three months that I worked at Team Bondi," one of the anonymous former employees said. McNamara responded to this complaint (and many others), saying Team Bondi had overtime pay in place, "but contractually, we don't have to do that."
Another anonymous source described McNamara as a "24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime." McNamara didn't seem to have a response to that one. Read all of the complaints and McNamara's rebuttals in the full interview.
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So what should PC gamers expect from L.A. Noire? Well, for a start they should expect a strange hybrid of a point adventure game, a GTA-free roaming driving game with on-foot pursuits and shoot-outs, all hung on an arduous, sometimes perplexing interrogation game. But what else? And what could be fixed? What should be fixed? And what about Red Dead Redemption?
There’s lots of think about.
(more…)
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Ever since L.A. Noire crossed the barrier of retail existence on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, indignant PC players have shaken their fists angrily in the direction of Rockstar's offices, demanding that their chosen platform receive its own version of the publisher's critically acclaimed detective thriller.
I still kinda wish Cole was played by Jon Hamm.Congratulations are in order to the PC elite, for your incessant letter-writing campaign, steady stream of outraged story and forum comments, and repeated orderings of unwanted pizzas to Rockstar's offices have paid off. The publisher today announced that L.A. Noire will be headed PC way this fall in both boxed and digital formats.
No word yet on whether any of the DLC content released on consoles will be included with the package, or whether PC players will still have to download it separately, but I imagine we'll hear more about that closer to the game's release.
While this is great news for PC gaming fans, one cannot help but shudder at the prospect of what modders may do once they get their hands on the game's various mutilated, nude corpses. One can easily envision a Cole Phelps "naked dead lady" mod coming along at some juncture. Is there any concept more horrifying than that of Cole Phelps' shrill, accusatory voice shrieking humorlessly at you from the visage of a nude corpse covered in dirt and dried blood? Good luck getting that out of your head for the rest of the day.
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Okay, so Rockstar hasn't abandoned the platform, but what about the performance issues that plagued the initial PC release of Grand Theft Auto IV? The press release promises that not only will the PC release feature 3D support and "improved graphical enhancements" but it will "run on a wide range of PCs" - naturally, we'll wait until its release, when PC gamers will inevitably assault the game with every hardware permutation imaginable while clinically taking frame rate readings every 15 seconds.
L.A. Noire will find its way to PCs this fall, in both retail and digital formats.
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Yep. It’s happening. L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s 1940s crime thriller is coming to PC.
“L.A. Noire is a new type of game that makes players see through a detective’s eyes in 1940s Los Angeles,” said Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games. “Its unique blend of story, action and crime solving will be perfect to play on PC.”
Other details below.(more…)
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In this arson case, the titular facility explodes in downtown LA, and Phelps and partner Biggs have to figure out whether this was due to intentional arson or accident. Our first clue: OSHA was established in 1970.
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No one knows exactly why a child is born with Aspergers Syndrome, a disorder in the same family as autism. Those afflicted have significant trouble responding to typical social situations. Someone with Aspergers is can also be prone to intense interest in a specific subject. Unlike traditional autism, an individual with Aspergers does retain linguistic and cognitive development.
If you meet someone with Aspergers, you may not be able to tell. They may just seem...different.
You may also go several decades of your life without knowing you even have it. Like Jeff.
Jeff, a 25-year-old from Sweden I've been talking to, has Aspergers. His real name is not Jeff, but he is 25-years-old and he is from Sweden. Jeff, who was only recently was diagnosed, asked to remain anonymous because he'd rather people "judge me for who I am than my diagnosis."
I wanted to talk to Jeff because of an article on Joystiq about how L.A. Noire might be difficult for anyone with Aspergers to play, given the reliance on analyzing, interpreting and acting upon facial cues. Doing all three of those things are difficult for Jeff and others with Aspergers. Jeff has not played L.A. Noire, but he told me that he plans to eventually. Ironically, he's someone that's drawn to games with deep social aspects, like BioWare's Mass Effect and Dragon Age series.
He credits Anticipation on NES and translating RPGs into Swedish with teaching him English.
"It's kind of ironic that what I shy away from in real life is that I seek the most in video games--to interact with people," he told me. "It's not really been a problem in games, in fact it is probably part of the reason I love any game that have social interaction like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and such. For me those games are more about interacting with the party members than anything else."
Games like Mass Effect allow Jeff to have the satisfaction of social interaction without the pressure.Jeff's messages to me are long, detailed and very specific. At one point, he apologizes. When he begins to describe what his metal processes are like, his sentences go on and on and on.
"I have to stop before I flood you with my theories about everything," he said. "I cannot stop thinking about these sort of things. It's like my brain is constantly running folding@home or something. It is always analyzing my actions, people's reactions etc etc. In fact when I play games is one of the few moments where my brain can relax and not run several different threads and analyze things. I become immersed into the video game world and can forget about everything else."
The way Jeff describes it, he struggles to slow his brain down. Stuff that happens in the background for us, seemingly automatic, is foreground for him. When approaching a traffic light, you and I wait for the light to turn green, then cross. That's not possible for Jeff. He calculates the speed of traffic flow, how each of hits steps and hand movements will influence the action of crossing the street, and spends time calculating when--or if--he should press the crossing button.
"To make a perfect choice you'd have to be God, and see every possible outcome and choose the best one," he explained. "In games the number of outcomes is limited, but not in real life. Otherwise I would not be able to live any sort of normal life. The only problem is that I will spend a lot of time analyzing if I made the correct decision afterwards which takes up a lot of my 'CPU time' to use a computer analogy. But analyzing the outcome is at least a lot simpler after the fact since you know what happened the only question is why it happened. It becomes a sort of reverse engineering of every encounter which is how I learn. It is not unlike how a computer would work."
When a conversation starts in Alpha Protocol, you have a limited window to make a choice.Sandbox ridiculousness aside, in games, there are a finite number of options. When Jeff boots up a game, even one with many "choices" like Mass Effect, there are limits.
You have all the time in the word to decide which path to head down or which dialogue option to exercise in Mass Effect--time to analyze. Some games apply pressure to the player. Alpha Protocol provides a finite choice space. The moment a conversation is initiated, a timer begins counting down. If you don't quickly make a decision, the game will force you to make one. In the game, however, the results of those actions impact the avatar, not the player. Thus, Jeff doesn't stress.
"I just went with suave the whole way through because I wanted it to role play as that kind of character," he said. "Also it is not me in games. If I say choose an option that offends someone only my in game character has to deal with the consequences so it doesn't stress me out. Not to mention that there are a limited number of choices in a game which makes it easy to analyze each one compared to in real life when you can literally say anything. "
And while games have spent years coming up with new ways for players to influence the world, in the end, it's all in a virtual environment. Jeff has spent most of his life's free time playing games, and since encountering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, he's been enamored with role-playing games. In many ways, social interactions with video game characters give Jeff an opportunity to practice his own lacking social skills and feel the satisfaction of a social interaction.
You can take your time making a choice in KOTOR, but you also have a finite choice selection."It's basically a primitive form of holo deck for me," he said. "Have you seen the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Barclay suffers from holo deck addiction? He creates holo deck representations of the people in the Enterprise because it is much easier for him to interact with them there and he feels more confident. In real life he can barely speak to women, but on the holo deck he is the exact opposite. I think it is safe to say that it fulfills a need for social interaction that is not fulfilled in real life because I'm too worried about saying something dumb or offend someone that I just don't speak to them."
One obstacle Jeff hasn't overcome is multiplayer. Those people are real. He still plays online--just muted. Then again, that's usually what I end up doing after the fifth racial slur is dropped, too.
We all play games for different reasons. Maybe it's escapism for one person, exploration of a new medium for another. For Jeff, it's something else. It realizes a need. Throughout our conversation, Jeff dropped the term "in real life" many times, underscoring the personal disconnect he feels between his ability to interact socially in a virtual environment through games and "in real life."
"I think many people who become very successful in an MMO often are not successful in real life which is why it means so much to them to be successful somewhere," he said. "You may be just another guy in real life but online you are the king of the server. It just so happens that the need I want to fill is the social interaction need, although that is certainly not the only need, but I think it is the largest."
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