Practise research

Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009


Video games, cognitive capital, the cognitariat,
and the dream factory's seedy streets:
patrolling the citizenry of LA Noire

by Dennis Broe and Ken Cohen in conversation

I chose this article as video games have always been of great interest to me. 

This article was a conversation between Dennis Broe and Ken Cohen

This article regards the detail and work put in to the 2011 game published by Rockstar, LA Noire.

It refers to the city in which the game takes place and how they went about creating the immersive experience of the game.

"The first area that I wanted to talk about, in fact something that I thought made LA Noire interesting as a game, is the driving that you have to do in the course of solving a case. As we discovered, it’s difficult. But also there is the “free drive” mode, where you can drive through the streets of LA without being on a case, and there is a good deal of care taken to accurately reproduce the topography of Central Los Angeles circa 1947." - Broe

"And that’s pre-freeway L.A., which is important because you have to drive on the city streets – you can’t just take a shortcut using a freeway." -Cohen

"Right. That also means you’re driving through neighborhoods, which is before this major thing [the freeway system] which essentially destroyed many of the neighborhoods in L.A. and shifted them. (And led the U.S. into its current carbon emissions problem.) The detail of storefronts and street signs is fascinating, but I want to make a couple of points about that. One is that we don’t get a sense of the “neighborhood.” What we get is superficial details – advertisements, the kind of place markers that place us in ‘47 L.A. but without giving us the idea of “neighborhoods.” These neighborhoods you’re driving through were a part of the landscape of the L.A. noir films of the ‘40s and ‘50s where what you were seeing were the flophouses, the trailer parks, the actual neighborhood. They figured prominently in, for example, a long walking sequence through a besieged section of Bunker Hill in Kiss Me Deadly(1955, Robert Aldrich) and in the extended description of the trailer park lifestyle featured in Cry Danger (1951, Robert Parrish). In the game, you don’t see it so much. You see the advertising signs and a lot of accurate detail of storefronts, but not much visual recollection of what made neighborhoods and collective." - Broe 

I agree with this as, although LA Noire tries its best to be an immersive and realistic experience for the player, it cannot completely replicate the very small details and the feeling of actually being in a living, breathing city, the experience is somewhat superficial, we get the impression that we're in 1940's LA, but we don't actually feel like we are. 

However I would say that the game comes a lot closer than most in accurately presenting this to us.