Some thoughts on medium awareness.
Jul. 21st, 2012 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlSo a couple days ago I finished the main game of Alan Wake. Great fun, really good game. The ending, no spoilers, was interestingly ambiguous. I'm eagerly looking forward to starting the DLCs and the sidegame, American Nightmare.
Coincidentally I also recently finished Driver: San Francisco. Driver: SF is, real talk here, one of the best driving games I've ever played. Much like Burnout Paradise with a plotline, and a ridiculous and fun plotline it is. Your character (John Tanner) is a police officer who develops mysterious powers after a car accident. He can suddenly "Shift", leaping out of his body and possessing the driver of any other car in the city.
In a way it's a highly unconventional superhero story, as you leap from body to body righting wrongs, car-chasing suspects, helping teenagers win street races to make money for college, etc. It is a GENIUS game which I can hardly believe came out of the rather tepid Driver series and it's $8 on Steam for the next six hours.
The interesting thing here is that Driver SF is -also- a game that's heavy on the metatext. I've never seen a driving game work so hard to insert the mechanics into the story in a way that makes sense, and everything from the special powers you have to the havoc you're letting loose on the city to the fact that there are invisible walls you can't drive through 'til you progress the plot get a quick acknowledgement-check.
It's almost like I enjoy metafiction or something. Now why is that?
What you didn't see was the twenty minute pause as I sit here and go "Durr." Apparently this is a hard one to quantify for me.
I think what it is, for me, is that it makes the characters seem more like people I would know. A lot of you lovable muffins out there KNOW things. You've seen movies. You've read books and played games and possibly eaten the breakfast cereal. I suppose the way I think of it is, why shouldn't some of those characters have the same awareness? Why shouldn't writers and directors play with that awareness when creating?
It humanizes a character to me when I can nod agreeably as they point out the situation they're in is rather like a classic movie or a good book. Likewise if a character -doesn't- get it while all their friends do, it tells me more about what kind of person they are. (Dr. Brennan from Bones, as an example. Or Jeremie from Code Lyoko.) The media tastes of a character help me relate to them. Does this detective go for noir? Procedurals? Has he watched Blade Runner, or is he a Starsky and Hutch kind of guy? What music do they listen to? The more I know, the more I know about them.
(I've also found some great music this way. Thank you, Mercedes Lackey.)
This is where I'm stopping for now, because I'm having a curiously hard time articulating this, but I intend to come back to this point in the future. I clearly need to get back into practice writing and blogging.
Coincidentally I also recently finished Driver: San Francisco. Driver: SF is, real talk here, one of the best driving games I've ever played. Much like Burnout Paradise with a plotline, and a ridiculous and fun plotline it is. Your character (John Tanner) is a police officer who develops mysterious powers after a car accident. He can suddenly "Shift", leaping out of his body and possessing the driver of any other car in the city.
In a way it's a highly unconventional superhero story, as you leap from body to body righting wrongs, car-chasing suspects, helping teenagers win street races to make money for college, etc. It is a GENIUS game which I can hardly believe came out of the rather tepid Driver series and it's $8 on Steam for the next six hours.
The interesting thing here is that Driver SF is -also- a game that's heavy on the metatext. I've never seen a driving game work so hard to insert the mechanics into the story in a way that makes sense, and everything from the special powers you have to the havoc you're letting loose on the city to the fact that there are invisible walls you can't drive through 'til you progress the plot get a quick acknowledgement-check.
It's almost like I enjoy metafiction or something. Now why is that?
What you didn't see was the twenty minute pause as I sit here and go "Durr." Apparently this is a hard one to quantify for me.
I think what it is, for me, is that it makes the characters seem more like people I would know. A lot of you lovable muffins out there KNOW things. You've seen movies. You've read books and played games and possibly eaten the breakfast cereal. I suppose the way I think of it is, why shouldn't some of those characters have the same awareness? Why shouldn't writers and directors play with that awareness when creating?
It humanizes a character to me when I can nod agreeably as they point out the situation they're in is rather like a classic movie or a good book. Likewise if a character -doesn't- get it while all their friends do, it tells me more about what kind of person they are. (Dr. Brennan from Bones, as an example. Or Jeremie from Code Lyoko.) The media tastes of a character help me relate to them. Does this detective go for noir? Procedurals? Has he watched Blade Runner, or is he a Starsky and Hutch kind of guy? What music do they listen to? The more I know, the more I know about them.
(I've also found some great music this way. Thank you, Mercedes Lackey.)
This is where I'm stopping for now, because I'm having a curiously hard time articulating this, but I intend to come back to this point in the future. I clearly need to get back into practice writing and blogging.
