note: I took two quotes (“a widely applicable model,” and the one in the third paragraph) from Sarah Manguso’s book, The Two Kinds of Decay.
One self-made maxim I live by is “All men who hear the truth / Hear their own voice.” Writing for a site, like writing anything, is an act of buying your own bullshit, to believe that your within is “a widely applicable model” to the universe. At best it’s a delusional and, at worst, a fascist assumption about your place in the world.
That posture is a natural defense mechanism against the democratic anonymity we face. Floating in the web, surrounded by a talented and articulate mass will inflict anyone with a case of “I’m just one among many.” But the communities we surround ourselves in, and in my case, the conversations I participate in, are the remedies—I may be one among many, but the many give meaning to me.
I believe, like poet Sarah Manguso, that “to look at something carefully is to love everything.” I believe that criticism is a part of and apart from that love, which is to say even words of rebuke or disappointment or disagreement, however vehement, are methods to return the wrongs we perceive back to that love. Criticism gives the necessary autopsy that helps the world to parse the pretense from the source. It is the act of seeing through one’s own eyes, and hoping the world will see your own focus. I find that useful, just as I find all criticism necessary.
Which brings me to the first two Critical-Distance Podcasts. It’s a sincere and intellectually demanding session that, though touched slightly with that NPR crust of self-seriousness, I admire and recommend as I fall asleep. Using Clint Hocking’s post on ludonarrative dissonance, the participants did a reading of Gears of War 2. The result? A mixture of opinions, with the voices against Gears of War 2 coming out a little louder. One argument I have a problem with concerned the alleged ludonarrative dissonance with the characters’ movement—specifically, the dissonance created between the encumbered physical features of Marcus and the dexterity and agility with which he moves.
What Hocking proposed in his original post was simple: to find harmony between a game’s theme and the expression of that theme through the game’s mechanics. Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when a game’s theme (or story) and gameplay are at odds (Hocking seems to use the terms “narrative” and “story” interchangeably, though I see a difference between the two. That is a topic deserving of an article of its own).
I disagree that Gears of War 2 suffers from ludonarrative dissonance—the story and the expression through its mechanics (“the play”) are completely in sync. Furthermore, applying the principle to a subjective dissonance between the avatar’s physical appearance and its movement (which I don’t think is the case here) completely misses the point.
The story of the game is simple—fight off a horde of monsters to save humanity. Everything about the game, from mechanic to design, is created to satisfy that power fantasy. Your avatar is physically overpowering and mentally uncomplicated—bullets bounce off you (to an extent), you can shoot a shotgun without bruising your palm, and everything is black and white. Even the miscalculated execution of Dom’s wife fits into the be-or-be-killed internal logic of that world and its mechanics (though Epic wants the imposed “feeling” of that scene to floor the player, it only refuels the player’s need to chop down more enemies, and reiterates the power that your avatar holds to protect the weak and destroy the corrupted, no matter the form and person in which the corruption occurs).
I don’t think you can completely dismiss a game based on one element. Immersion must be determined by looking at the total package of the game. When I play Gears of War 2 I know that this is a fantasy where I relinquish my reality for the internal logic of a constructed world; and that internal logic of ex-professional athletes covered in armor and leaping over obstructions while carrying guns with chainsaw attachments is completely consistent with the “story” of the game. Every time the avatar falls into cover, you can feel the weight of his body as it slams against the walls, the dust kicking off the ground, the boom and the crack popping from the speakers, and the sharp zing of tracer rounds amplifying the imminence of death. The character movements feel properly sluggish and boorish; and the extra agility transforms our perceptions of reality and physical plausibility to the hyper-macho fantasy we love to play.
Sometimes, it’s ok to shoot, and not ask—especially when you’re wrong.
