![]() ![]() The relationship between the two main characters (a disgraced black academic and a little girl) is genuinely affecting. That’s really what the game is about: talking to people, forming relationships. You walk around static environments, looking at stuff, picking stuff up, and talking to people. In fact, it’s using the devices of one of the purer, more literary game genres out there: the old-school, point-and-click adventure game. Obviously it’s got zombies, and so it’s both incredibly violent and upsetting, but, unlike most zombie games, you’re not just constantly pulling the trigger. There’s this eerily affecting game out from Telltale Games called The Walking Dead-the game version of the TV series. People are doing genuinely cool stuff with games as a storytelling medium right now. And seeing you talk about this game reminded me of that feeling, something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. What I felt about Hitchhiker’s Guide was, this is fun in the way that the sense of discovery in reading is fun, except that I am interactively making it happen I’ve unlocked this revelation. Here, Bissell expounds on the charm of “conceptual contrast” in Gears. I am no big fan of violent shooter games, but was sorely tempted by the excerpt of the book that appeared on Grantland. He wrote a 2011 book, “The Art and Design of Gears of War,” that could only be obtained as part of a special release of the game, the Gears of War 3: Epic Edition. Tom Bissell has a history with the Gears franchise. It turns out that the evolution of storytelling in video games is substantially more complicated than I imagined. For the first time, it seemed to me like video games might hold possibilities for the telling of stories in a newly sophisticated way. The description given by Bissell and Auten of this writing gig, so complexly interwoven with the efforts of designers, actors, and artists, struck me as the possible sign of a simmering new direction not only for video games but for literature. In this chapter of the saga, a group of comrades-in-arms faces a war-crimes tribunal, and their story is revealed to the player in flashback. The narrative pleasures once provided by my first video-game love came to mind some weeks ago, when I happened upon an interview with Tom Bissell and Rob Auten about their experiences writing Gears of War: Judgment, the fourth installment of the massively popular Gears shooter franchise from Epic Games, which comes out today. And now, modern video games are showing signs of morphing into other, still more subtle and complicated forms among other things, they’re becoming an increasingly sophisticated vehicle for storytelling. The scale, intricacy, and richness of today’s games would have stunned the table-rattling pinball wizards of yore. The delights of video games, from the first, were something altogether more inward, more purely intellectual, than those of pinball, however bellicose and violent the setting. I wonder whether even a modern video game has equalled the satisfying visceral chunk of a pinball table delivering a hard-earned (or fortuitous) replay-a sensation that coursed straight through one’s keyed-up paws to light the whole prefrontal cortex with a corresponding bong of pleasure. But, so far as wild graphics and kinetic surprises were concerned, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and even my beloved Crystal Castles (“Get the gems, Bentley Bear!”) really had very little on the powerful thrills of a state-of-the-art pinball machine. (There are many browser-based versions of these old games online if you’d like to try.)Īs matters progressed through the eighties and early nineties, the pleasures of controlling moving images on a screen, of bewitching sound effects and saturated colors, came to video games, and these were seductive in a new and different way. Your reward: the treasure of glowing new sentences-sometimes even a long scroll of paragraphs-to read.īy such halting, wonderfully infuriating means you advanced through the game-a game full of jokes! Splendidly goofy, yes, but also a game that would cheerfully annihilate you and return you to the starting point with the cruelty of an affectless, chomping, yellow Pac-Man. There is a washbasin, a chair with a tatty dressing gown slung over it, and a window with the curtains drawn. It is a small bedroom with a faded carpet and old wallpaper. Turn on the light Bedroom The bedroom is a mess. ![]()
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