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vroenis · 4 years

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Lost Legacy Exemplifies Naughty Dog’s Cultural Crisis

There’s a discussion about Ocean’s 8 that positions its existence around whether or not it's necessary as a counterpoint to the Ocean’s reboot - the Ocean’s Cinematic Universe - if you will (what a world we live in) - that it was only made as a gender flip of the reboot that spawned two sequels, three films in total cast almost entirely with men.

My perspective is that as much as I generally enjoyed the Ocean’s reboots for what they were, Ocean’s Eleven should have been a cast entirely with women in the first place.

The heroes we both need and deserve.

Massive spoilers for the original 1960 Lewis Milestone version and the Steven Soderbergh one in 2001 of Ocean’s Eleven - Soderbergh’s flip is of-course that they get to keep the money at the end so that they have to potentially give it back in the sequel he knew he’d be able to make, whereas I doubt Milestone knew he’d ever get a sequel back in the early 60′s so the rub for film-making back then is to burn the money at the end. Nevertheless even for the early 2000′s, the boldest of moves would have been to cast it with women, not to be progressive but also to be progressive, tho that’s still an absurd thought that to cast women is progressive - but to be smart. Ocean’s 8 is a fantastic film, deftly written, paced, acted, shot and edited. Would the world have responded to it in like-kind? I know how *I* would have responded to it, I think you can answer for yourself how societal cultures may have responded at any point from 2001 thru to now. In any case, I have Ocean’s 8 on blu-ray. I love it.

A reader asked me whether I’d played Uncharted: The Lost Legacy after kindly reading through my bludgeoning of Uncharted 4, and seeing as they were patient enough to endure that blood-letting, I felt I owed them and probably Naughty Dog the time of day to give Uncharted-And-A-Half a chance, and I’m really glad I did. Fair warning, there’s a lot I didn’t like about Lost Legacy, and there’s going to be some more pain - a lot of pain. I don’t think any of my tumblr audience is quite on the rest of my socials, but anyone who’s connected to me anywhere else on the Wire was subject to my frustrations as I played thru the game on Saturday, including the blurred image of my Google Keep notes I took while playing the game in preparation for this journal. I keep notes now.

Nevertheless, I can say that on the assumption that the Uncharted series is wrapped, or at least in the narrative arc with these characters as we know them, that Lost Legacy is easily without question my favourite Uncharted game by far.

On that assumption that Uncharted is more or less done, now’s as good a time as any to take a top-down look at the franchise as a whole. I know I already did a fair bit of that in the last piece, but some broader thoughts on what the series does and says have solidified while playing Lost Legacy, and I’ll discuss them as a lead-in to my thoughts on the game.

Again - this is going to be riddled with spoilers for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and most likely the entire Uncharted series, so if you’ve not played them and are interested in doing so, or don’t want to see them heavily critiqued, please stop here.

The first game was released in 2007 and was apparently in development for roughly three years. What was happening up to and around 2004 to 2007? September 11 had happened in 2001, the world was at war in the Middle East in Afghanistan and second invasion of Iraq had begun in 2003, Hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 - the same year the IRA ended armed conflict in Northern Ireland, 2005 saw the outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu - topical right now. There are so many more, I can’t list them all here - lots of momentous events that in some way or another highlight community awareness in some way - that’s probably a bit of an obtuse statement but hopefully it’ll string together in a sec. What struck me and a bunch of my friends odd about the first, then the second and then somehow every Uncharted game since, is that Naughty Dog seem to choose an ethnicity for their antagonists and scratch the surface of “what if this element of their cultural violence is bad”, but then leave it so shallow that it remains a caricature and comes off as casually and carelessly racist. The first game frames the theme around Nazis, but the actual enemies are anything but. Yes, they’re intended to be mercenaries, but they’re hardly nondescript, they’re absolutely of very specific ethnicity.

From the second game onward, Naughty Dog seem to want to make use of real world settings and do some nuanced research on actual sociopolitical conflict and I always feel uneasy about how its presented. Lost Legacy begins much the same way and I worried about the tone going in. An active war-zone in India as gravitas to your setting that is then almost completely abandoned until the very end? This is my problem with how the writers treat setting in Uncharted. They use very real conflicts that have real-world consequences for people in which actual lives are lost to inject gravity into their narrative and then quickly discard it for the sake of shenanigans once the wise-cracking starts when the tone shifts gear and the characters themselves take centre-stage in the foreground.

Here’s the thing.

The character’s are enough. I *love* these characters. Their story is fantastic. Nadine’s and Chloe’s story was the best and most cohesive of the entire series. Also it only took me roughly six hours to play thru and I only feel like half of that was wasted! That’s still probably being too generous but I’m grasping for positives, here. Still - I don’t know why the senior production team has never had confidence in the core of their product which is the charm of their characters and the play dynamic - Uncharted is primarily about *seeing* and *doing* - for the most part, unfortunately, separately.

The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is extremely interesting, it is absolutely the best thing in the game, yet it keeps getting interrupted by stupid gameplay beats due to poor timing of rolling up on level locations. Uncharted 4 was supposed to have locations hidden around levels where you could engage in dialogue between characters but I barely found them - why hide such interesting content in your game?? It’s completely absurd. Then the only few I did find were between Elena and Nathan altho I really don’t think those were meant to be hidden, and they were so poorly written and I hated them so much, I didn’t care to discover any more. Again - no disrespect at all to Nolan North and Troy Baker whom I absolutely adore and respect, but I didn’t find anything engaging or interesting *at all* about the brother narrative. I didn’t care one bit what that nonsense was about. What about Sully? Where’s Sully’s story?? I’m just so - so glad we got a story for Chloe, and that at least Nadine got some great screen time too as a part of it and that it all presented so well.

Before I continue to praise what went well, there are a few things I can’t let pass. While the driving has thankfully improved and controls quite well now, the exclusion of a minimap or GPS HUD element is interesting. I’m fairly certain it’s intentional as to not detract from the game’s clean, cinematic look, to not break immersion, but this just generates a horrific breakdown in actual player experience for me. Without any navigational assists, I constantly got lost and stopped every 20 meters to check the map, frequently driving into dead-ends, off cliffs and past where I wanted or needed to go. The game isn’t a 30 hour open-world experience with distinct and varied landmarks the player will familiarise themselves with and learn to navigate by, for the most part the level is fairly homogeneous in object geometry.

Some of the puzzles take far too long to mechanically execute, in particular the smashy-slashy statue block jumpy stupid whatever it’s called one and the sliding shadow motif. It doesn’t matter that neither actually takes too long once you know the solution, it’s that they feel long and then are actually over-long and also not interesting to mechanically execute. This is due mostly to clunky character animation and animation smoothing, and part of Naughty Dog’s overall obsession with being cinematic which is something I’ll return to towards the end of this piece, something which has been a strength but will ultimately be to their detriment. While cinematic visuals might be a benefit for traversal, it’s something that absolutely does not suit puzzle-solving. In the example of the statue-block puzzle, the hard reset each time the player is hit means laboriously jogging all the way back to the beginning and starting again - it’s just poor puzzle design having to begin again from a full reset. There’s no satisfaction in having to remember the whole thing and while I didn’t look up the solution online, I’m willing to bet many people will have just dialled up a clip on YouTube and copied it without figuring it out themselves. This is a failure of connecting what’s satisfying about moving in your game and what’s satisfying about solving puzzles, something Crystal Dynamics understood far better in the Tomb Raider reboots, in particular the second outing (Rise of) with their much more environment-centric puzzling.

The sliding shadow puzzle just simply takes way too long to jog around the space, then clip onto the hot-zone for each lever, wait for the animation to lift it, wait for the animation for the pieces to slide, rinse, repeat. Once you know what you have to do, it’s overly frustrating actually having to do it.

It brings me to a weird quirk of design where the puzzle designers perhaps don’t understand something that the environmental designers do. Maybe they didn’t get the same little notes in the Slack channel, or Trello board or Teams pin or whatever. Uncharted level-design has almost no back-tracking, less in each successive game, and it’s almost entirely absent from Lost Legacy - you’d have to look closely to realise you’re navigating the same area you came in thru and almost always moving over it in a different way that’s been modified - now it’s flooded, now there’s a bridge, now you’re swinging or leaping or climbing where you weren’t etc. I feel like this is the Hidetaka Miyazaki Souls/Borne effect of level design in which environments are designed to be both realistic and practical.

Great! Good for the level designers. Did the puzzle designers not get that note? Maybe they did. I need to stop thinking that every poor optimisation is a symptom of ignorance - that’s bad form on my part. What’s more likely is it’s a symptom of either bad leadership, poor tool implementation, lack of time or too narrow or strict an observation of representative vision - by which I mean - they can’t change the way the characters move or animate just for puzzles, because it has to be consistent with the cinematic representation of the game as a whole - and that sucks lemons. It means the overall play experience suffers for the sake of the overall cinematic experience except executing a puzzle isn’t cinematic unless it’s expansive...

Like the positive example I’ll give of the light reflector room. Shoplifted from Uncharted 2′s giant knife that has Nathan climb all over a giant knife, Lost Legacy’s light reflector room has slightly less climbing but is a much larger space, more impressive and a much better example of good puzzling in Uncharted. It’s not difficult to solve but again (I think again?) I’ll argue that you don’t come to Uncharted for difficult puzzles - you don’t come to Tomb Raider for difficult puzzles, either.

The puzzles in these games should be mostly environmental because they feel good solving them, and solving them should be more about the doing - the playing - and the playing should be moving - running, jumping, climbing etc.

Both the giant knife and the reflector room are a joy to execute because they’re fantastically realised - large cavernous environments that aren’t annoying to navigate, that give you time to appreciate both the scale of the spaces and the details the designers and artists have put into them. Lost Legacy’s is more impressive because you do a lot more puzzling and spend much more time in its vastly larger space, culminating in combat that usually I would be ho-hum about, but I guess exhibits more animation and destruction tech which while scripted, is still impressive nonetheless given how extremely difficult it is to have interactivity still occurring.

I have a few things I want to mention before I begin to wrap up, given it’s going to be a very long wrap - I’d say I’m taking cues from Joseph Anderson but I’ve always been this verbose.

The medallion puzzles were excellent, in part perhaps because they felt like the closest thing to the Tomb Raider reboots’ challenge tombs. Some of them were silly and lazily implemented, the worst offender being you just had to shoot mans and get the medallion from the lock-box that the mans had put it in (pfft), but the best ones were integrated into the environment such that you may well have walked past or thru areas that were puzzles before you knew what they were. This brings up one of the most interesting things I’ve been turning over for quite some time now. Ben Croshaw aka Yahtzee aka Zero Punctuation may have first mentioned “chest high walls” in his first Gears of War video, but it may well have been an Uncharted game. I don’t remember but he will have thrown in mentions of all the generic cover-shooters as a catch-all for how the environments immediately telegraph that Combat™ will happen. It’s a particularly astute remark and speaks volumes of video game design - developers always seem to have very specific design language to separate traversal, combat and puzzling. While I clearly don’t care for combat most days, and yes - I do acknowledge there are some practical concerns for combat that can’t be avoided, I always envisaged design that blurred the lines between puzzle and environment so that you never quite knew what was and wasn’t a puzzle. Everything should be the puzzle. In some senses, Cyan’s old Myst games were a bit like this but in a very rudimentary and crude way - sure, they’re quite old now, but even those had very clear not puzzle areas. It’s a complex and subtle subject, but something of a study of games like Fireproof Games’ The Room would be in order. Understandably smaller scale, but the thinking behind it is definitely adjacent.

Final notes - the young Indian girl in the prologue has amazing animations that you’ll miss entirely unless you swing the camera yourself. A whole team of people or a single animator has spent hours on those animations - that a director or team leader hasn’t forced the player to see and appreciate them is a disservice.

Every section where you have to do something under pressure like run from mans shooting at you or dash through a lengthy section of crumbling cave network etc. is a horrible play experience of not knowing where to go. They’re trying to inject excitement by applying pressure but there’s no clear guidance and no dependence on player skill, so you end in bizarre fail-states due to going in completely the wrong direction that glitches cameras or scene time-outs resulting in check-points and the whole thing just doesn’t scan as a cinematic experience. I hate hate hate them - you’re subject to the same musical swell that’s supposed to be like a movie only to fail again and it comes off as b-grade and pathetic. Every game has had this problem and it is just straight bad design.

Three? Four? Games in a row, Naughty Dog have recycled;

being pursued on foot by an armoured vehicle crashing through level geometry while you have to run and occasionally shoot/fight mans,

driving down a shanty-town on a hill pursued by an armoured vehicle - perhaps the same one as previous scene

a big chase scene of lots of vehicles jumping from vehicle to vehicle shooting and/or punching mans that may or may not include...

a train combat sequence where you start at the back of the train and work your way to the front of it shooting mans as you go

This lacks creativity at this point. I think duplicating these once each - so you do them twice total across the franchise is fine, but they hit the same beats in the same way - exactly - every time they appear. It just strikes me as Naughty Dog just not knowing what else to do. At one point, I think it was in Uncharted 4, when driving down the shanty-town on the hill, I literally had a brain-fart not knowing which game I was playing because I swear we did it in 2 and 3. Did we do it in 3?? Look, I don’t know. But it’s getting old. At least we didn’t do it in Lost Legacy, but we did the train and I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of doing the same things in the same way. It could have been a train but it should have been in a way that just wasn’t just another Uncharted train. It hasn’t worn thin, it’s worn out.

Overall, the games look great... but playing them feels like they’re stuck in PS2 and early PS3 era philosophies, like Naughty Dog haven’t evolved and don’t realise that people’s brains function much quicker and can process more, or that the media we consume, the games we play function at a higher level and we can digest more, we’re capable of processing higher functions. I’ve been playing Ubisoft’s The Division 2 and enjoying it more the more I play, much to my surprise. I understand the intent behind the gameplay is extremely different to the single-player experience of Uncharted, however there are some parallels in what it achieves animation wise;

The Division is also a cover shooter but of-course as a multiplayer, open-world live-service game, its intent is to telegraph to the player that the entire environment is a permanent play-space in which to always be playing. It utilises an information-rich GUI that is an always-on system with button icons telling the player what button to press over what surfaces to snap to, vault over, climb up, run to (and snap to cover), open and loot, interact with etc. I don’t know if these can be turned off but I like them on. It’s a pretty amazing feat that almost every environmental object has been mapped as a snap-to-cover and/or climbable object. For this reason, the character movement in Division is pretty quick and snappy, however it still manages to have a decent degree of natural human kinetics in the character rigging which is amazing. This means if you move-off from standing still, there’s a slight delay as your “weight” shifts, same if you change direction. When I say “snap” to cover, it’s not actually instantaneous, your character makes a movement and takes time to do so, yet it’s still not sluggish. Somehow the developers have worked at fine-tuning a balance between not-instant, but not too slow.

This is something that even in Lost Legacy, I feel Naughty Dog simply can’t do. The animations are decent during play - they’re outstanding during cutscenes (we’re getting there), but character models have a really awkward relationship with the environment. They clip awkwardly with ladders and buttons and wheels - with puzzles and levers - getting the grappling hook to prompt is again better than Uncharted 4 but still not ideal. I had far fewer glitch-outs than 4 too, which was a significant improvement, but I still had to animate back and forth a few times to get into hot-zones appropriately and with character kinetics not quite right, it wasn’t exactly easy.

And again to be fair, this stuff is suuuuuper difficult. I don’t mean to talk about this stuff like it’s cooking instant ramen. It’s so freaking tough. Rigging and mapping interactive character models has to be one of the most stupendously difficult things a developer has to do - making it work with all that scripting, getting it to play nice with all those assets and lines and lines of coding for the full experience. I have so much respect for game developers and what an astronomical task it is. So when I say I prefer one development team’s product over another’s, I don’t mean to say that the other team is absolute garbage - there are so many things that might contribute to that final product and we have no idea what’s been going on at Naughty Dog. If the team leaders and producers say they’re happy or even if they don’t, and the decision is made to ship, there’s nothing more they can say or do.

If there was one thing I absolutely loved about this game, it was the two main characters and the story that was told about them. I can excuse the main text as the catalyst that brought them together - even to the point that it’s a story about Chloe ultimately deciding what’s important to her. My issue with this comes full circle with the setting being in a real world conflict. There’s a bit of white savour complex in there in that Asav might be the narrative’s antagonist, but he at least is local. It’s not clear exactly what Chloe’s ethnicity is and I’m not here to judge what her stakes are in it because clearly her character has a sense of home and place in India, but she certainly also has a complex sense of being an outsider. So the point is not to judge, but the game also is unclear on its positioning other than she’s the heroic vehicle of deliverance. See what I mean about theme? This is what I mean by you could have just as easily written almost an identical story about Nadine and Chloe, with very similar interactions, tension, redemption and resolve - even with an antagonist, conflict and a happy ending, but either treated real sociopolitical issues with better care or not set your game in them at all. I’m all for setting games in the real world, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. I’m not the person to ask.

I need to be careful not to direct that criticism at the base-level developers nor at Claudia Black who is the manifestation of Chloe’s voice because she does an amazing job of bringing her to life. The casting of Laura Bailey voicing a black South African Nadine was much more awkward given Nadine’s ethnicity wasn’t decided when she was cast - again that’s on Naughty Dog’s leadership, but I won’t knock Laura Bailey for it. It’s easy to say she should have resigned, perhaps she should have, that’s an economical question only Laura can answer and I’m sure it’s not an easy one. Suffice to say, VO work isn’t lucrative.

What a side-track.

I don’t think I ever cared about Nathan. I think I always cared about Elena, and not because WAIFU and also not because WHITE KNIGHT or whatever other bullshit reasons stupid alphagamerz will spit from their frontheads. Elena’s just more interesting, probably because Nathan is written like a design document and Elena’s written like a human being. Naughty Dog want to create a game about adventuring with lush expansive environments, shooty mcshooting and light puzzling. They want it to be cinematic and unrivalled in its quality and they have the smarts to build the tech around it, with Sony’s help. Backed by Sony money, they take VO seriously and do a great job at creating that cinematic experience, coupled with some above-par for video games narrative writing. The problem this introduces for me is Nathan’s raison d'être has to justify everything - action, tension, stupidity...

Nathan Drake really is the design document.

I feel like he’s just the unfortunate side-effect of being central to the game, and it’s typical of my character to just not dig the focus of things and get into subtexts a whole lot more. Often I get into things in the periphery, things adjacent - I don’t love or hate Shakespeare or for that matter Baz Luhrmann but Romeo + Juliet ‘96 is an amazing film and not at all because of the eponymous Romeo and Juliet and again, not for Leonardo di Caprio (spit!) or for Claire Danes (she can stay) but the absolutely divine cast of supporting characters (John Leguizamo will live in my heart forever oh baby).

That Nathan makes stupid decisions is already something that turns me off. That he makes poor decisions because... he’s an orphan? Because... he was bullied? Because... his brother left him? This is why he’s not transparent with his wife? Actually, he’s quite realistic. Except the people like him I’ve known in my life aren’t heroes - they’re pathetic or unreliable or abusive or dangerous. Elena is an adult. She’s not perfect either and that’s also great because neither am I. As a side character she has the conceit of being more nuanced, but as the contra to Nathan, she’s also mature versus his childishness. OOOOAAAAH EVERYONE LOVES A LOVEABLE MANBABY OOAAAH COMEON LIVE A LITTLE EVERYONE’S GOT A LITTLE CHILD STILL IN THEM SOMEWHERE yea fine, I get it, like I’ve said before, yes - he embodies the recklessness and playfulness in us, but that’s a confusing position for a game that frequently tries to ground itself in real world conflict to be taking. You’re reducing him to that but injecting complex and nuanced characters like Elena and now eventually both Chloe and Nadine? I’m telling you now - any male that doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to grow-up, when the time to set aside the playfulness and be TRUTHFUL AND TRANSPARENT WITH HIS PARTNER is a dangerous person and FUCK THAT NOISE. Nathan, as much as I do absolutely - make no mistake - adore Nolan North’s voicing - ends up being another Homer Simpson - as long as you laugh at his stupidity, you’ll excuse it, and you’ll excuse the hurt that’s done by it, and that shit doesn’t fly with me. His redemption was not earned. I say again - Elena should throw him into the sea.

Nadine ends up being a fantastic character, even if she’s given less narrative time, she’s a great example of her behaviour telling more story in contrast to Chloe getting to reveal her past and it’s nice to see them play off one another. I feel Nadine and Chloe as characters hit great story beats in ways Nathan didn’t get to with pretty much any of the other characters in four games - not Sully, not Elena, not his brother, not even Chloe - all told, we never actually get any back-story on Nathan and Chloe and I think we’re better off for it because I don’t care.

Having a quick squiz around tumblr reveals the obvious and rampant shipping of Nadine and Chloe and I couldn’t be happier. I think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing. There were so many moments. Those moments were for us. I think they were subtle enough that the fragile manbabies would have missed them but there’s no fooling us. Some of the babyboiz would have been seething thru their mouthbreething hairmouths and I’m sure probably took to the internet but that’s OK, they can remain unfucked incels for the rest of their lives or worse, serviced by whatever unwashed creatures want to dare fondle them in the dark. The elephant ride and that whole conversation was almost enough for me to forgive the absolute disaster that was Uncharted 4. It was given enough time to breathe, it was absolutely beautiful, and just when you thought they were going to terminate it and apologise for making things too awks, it concludes just perfectly and you get a phone picture that doesn’t have Nadine in frame, yet her presence in that picture is definite, pervasive and emotional. Again, some people may have completely missed it and maybe it chalks up to life experience, but as completely contrived as an artefact of complete fiction as that whole sequence might be, it was one of the most wonderfully tender moments ever created in a video game and I wonder if it makes the whole affair worth it.

In the Uncharted 4 piece, I threw in a few barbs about the most meaningful interactions, and in Lost Legacy, what I really loved was Chloe taking photos of things she thinks are beautiful and interesting on her phone, and feeding the elephant - these were the most meaningful interactions in the game. I love that the photos on the phone didn’t serve any gameplay utility at all, they were there because her character wanted to document her travels, because she thought what she was seeing was cool, and any time in the game, you could pull out your phone and look at what you’d seen. It was such a good and important decision to have the very first picture to be the Indian girl in the market, as that rather than the local conflict, does more to ground you and Chloe as a character in the setting. The game never forces you to look at it as a reminder, but you know it’s there.

I did steal these from the internet, sorry - so if they’re yours, let me know and I’ll be happy to take them down - this one in particular, seeing as it’s a photomode capture. I should have taken my own but I don’t do photomode caps on my first play-thru and there’s no-way I’m replaying this ever again.

It took five games for Naughty Dog to finally get some decent character writing, but a part of me still feels they couldn’t have existed without all the dross of the other games. There’s this immense amount of back-story and labour both the developers and the players had to slog thru to get to this point, and I feel as tho we get here and there’s just too little to show for it. I still really enjoyed the story that was told, the sense of character I felt, but a lot of that was contingent on the Uncharted universe in situ. Lost Legacy feels like a combining of all of Naughty Dog’s narrative motifs - the earnest redemption, the moment of tenderness and connection centred around peaceful animals - it’s a greatest hits of Naughty Dog in the best way possible because each narrative beat hits perfectly. I’m glad I played it with two characters who endeared themselves so much to me, that I truly cared about.

I’ve spend a lot of time praising the strengths of writing for at least Lost Legacy, but for each thing I’ve enjoyed about at least these two characters, there have been so many things I’ve been critical of. I feel like in order to get to the tiniest bit of enjoyment, I had to suffer thru so much. Honestly I don’t know if it really was worth it. It’s hard to know given that who I am now and where my tastes are and have developed as a consequence of my experiences, and I definitely would not replay any of those games again - so where does that leave me? I can’t go back and play The Last Of Us and I absolutely won’t play the second game, I just can’t do Naughty Dog games now, I don’t have it in me.

Naughty Dog have spent the better part of two decades developing tech for visual fidelity specifically for the Playstation hardware platforms (PS3 and 4). They’ve also been doing it by overworking their staff, many of which have left out of frustration or necessity. The problem they face is that as industry tools in general improve, there will no gap between games developed by Naughty Dog and any other contemporary studio from a visual perspective. Make no mistake - the Uncharted games are absolutely chock-full of objects, geometry and animation - somehow miraculously so on the Playstation platform in comparison to other games with the exception of other first-party and exclusive games receiving similar support from Sony such as Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Sucker Punch’s forthcoming Ghost of Tsushima. There are probably other similar examples for the previous generation on PS3.

Yes, there’s a certain style of game Naughty Dog create as far as narrative goes but because it’s becoming more cinematic, that style is judged more and more by cinematic standards and at best it’s barely semi-professional aside from the outstanding voice work. There are few striking visual motifs that set Naughty Dog games apart from a design perspective, and the gameplay and mechanical constructions that once distinguished them at least a little from others are ever diminishing at increasing rates - more-so as their work practices make the level of quality they set out to achieve ever more unsustainable.

Lost Legacy encapsulates a lot of what I feel about video games as a whole at the moment - as an industry and as a culture. It’s a snapshot of a culture that’s achieving wonderful, beautiful things that are in ways huge - immense, yet somehow can feel so small in comparison to some of the challenges it faces. It’s an industry and culture experiencing a period of great upheaval, where after years upon years of malpractice, terrible things somehow still endure. It’s a space where sometimes it feels like a battle to find the tiniest shred of beauty buried in the dirt and ash, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the frustration that working thru it brings about while grass-roots labourers continue to be burned.

Like many things in life, both at my age and at the level I guess a person gets to at the exposure rate of a thing, I’ve cut back a great deal on my engagement time with video games, so I’m a lot less patient with the functions and mechanisms of a game. There’s a labour element of video games that I feel developers might think is somehow necessary and there’s a component of that which is true, just not quite in the way they think it is, and it takes a unique frame of thinking to break out of traditional design to understand it. Again I’m not saying there’s anything special about how I understand games - there’s nothing at all original in my thoughts - I’ve shoplifted them wholesale from a hundred other people back from when I used to read Gamasutra and even now when I read designers and the people I follow and talk to on Twitter etc. There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with traditions and the people that enjoy them - just because they’re not my thing any more doesn’t mean they’re bad. It just means I’ve moved to something else and I shouldn’t engage with them.

That, I think, is what I’m waiting for. Kentucky Route Zero, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a whole bunch of others - these are the games I feel are pushing past the boundaries of tradition. Then the moments Uncharted takes itself out of its traditions - Nadine and Chloe’s elephant ride, Chloe’s phone pictures, Elena and Nathan’s house tours especially as Cassie - that’s when I think now you’re running! Run with it! Look, I’m still playing The Division - I’m still moving and shooting and enjoying it.

But we can do so much more. Many developers are doing more. We as an audience need to play more All of us together need to do and play more.

(The epilogue is me figuring I talk a lot of shit about AAA games and nary a word about KRZ, Howling Dogs, Dear Esther and the rest and I get it, but oooooo howdy is it really difficult for me to talk pragmatically about games I actually love)

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expatwhisperer · 7 years

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DECONSTRUCTING FRENCH MARRIAGE

IT SHOULDN'T BE A DETERRENT TO LOVE

"Courtship is romantic. Marriage ... is an act of will," said Pippa, taking a sip of water. "I mean, I adore Herb, but the marriage functions because we will it to. If you leave love to hold everything together, you can forget it. " -- Rebecca Miller, the Private Lives of Pippa Lee

As my husband and I cross the threshold of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I thought of the 50-50 odds that we might become an “uncoupled” statistic. Until 1990, nearly half the marriages in America did end in divorce, but, we beat the odds. According to the data, there’s a good chance we will remain married. Nearly 70% percent of marriages that began after the ‘90s in America reached their 15th anniversary, and many may never divorce.

Yet half the couples I know do. They live in the same house, but effectively lead separate lives. Others stay together, but live in different houses or states (or countries). These are the marriages of convenience, for the kid’s sake; either until the kids are in college or a way to keep the employee benefits rolling. There are couples who divorce because of an infidelity. Then there are the rare breed of couples who manage to stay together in spite of it, especially in the United States. Overlooking the indiscretion is more common in other cultures like Italy, France, or Greece, who appear hardwired to ignore it.This is latter category intrigued me because those societies that tended to accept this behavior as part of the marital bargain, were unflustered by the American moral outrage. While we may not be above desire, we are unable to get past the deception. So I couldn’t help but wonder, why are those cultures less troubled by infidelity than others and why is infidelity a sin for Americans?

"The bonds of marriage so heavy it takes two to carry them, sometimes three." -- Alexander Dumas

Infidelity is on my radar because I’m hooked on watching HBO’s dark soap, “The Affair.” I can indulge vicariously in the drama of an affair without the consequences. It’s a very American perspective of two people who have “cheated” on their spouses. Ruth, “the other woman” is wracked by the “guilt” of her past and the cad, Noah whom he has thrown his family overboard for. Season two unfurls this cautionary tale in the “aftermath” of their affair, strewn with the “wreckage” of their infidelities. The language of the narrative implies destruction and punishment. Our judgement is further beguiled by an innovative interplay two, sometimes four, different perspectives, but they are American. Viewers and creators alike condemn “the affair” because they’re sure they’re on the right side of morality. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are, so that one man’s sin could be another man’s blessing.

Clues to decoding French attitudes concerning infidelity begin with self-awareness of American national culture. Not evident culture, such as language, food, and dress. If culture was that easy to identify, rest assured there would not be the current clash of civilizations. Evident culture is the tip of the iceberg. Unless you’ve spent a significant length of time abroad, it’s doubtful you can attest to culture’s consequences. The invisible hand of culture drives our behavior in ways you never imagined. By deconstructing the American mindset and comparing it to other cultures, we can steer safely around the unseen and more profound dimensions of hidden culture below the waterline, an avoid simplistic attribution to moral positioning.

For example, the French film “5-7,” (“cinq a sept” is the French expression for the time of day made for visiting lovers and has subsequently been adopted by other cultures as “happy hour”) infidelity is not only acceptable, it’s institutionalized. The Greeks take a pagan view that if the gods intended making love strictly for procreation, they’d have made people come in heat like the animals once a year.

Human attraction may be too hard to comprehend, but by connecting seemingly unrelated dots about why people do what they do based on national culture offers an interesting explanation. Culture is the result of a series of historical events that have occurred in a certain place. The result is a set of values, attitudes, and perceptions that explain the world accordingly to a certain group of people. What’s important, especially for Americans who rarely expatriate to understand this point is, people do what they do not because they don’t know any better, it’s culture making that decision for them

It doesn’t matter that we are offended by French views about infidelity no matter how much self-righteous indignation our views. There’s no way to shame them into monogamy because they don’t share our puritanical legacy. Of course, every culture thinks it’s on the right side of an issue, but it’s worthwhile to note that Homer’s Odyssey was the Greek bible for 5,000 years and continues to informed their mindset.

Cultures are dynamic, yet few of us know who are we or why, but the powerful lens of culture helps us understand why behavior like infidelity is or isn’t tolerated. While every culture shares common traits -- how they think and make decisions, how they process information, view time and communicate -- culture explains the differentiating approach. For example, Americans believe people should be INDEPENDENT with the FREE-WILL to decide and form their own opinions. The truth is, we think our opinions are purely our own, but in reality, it’s a decision that was already made for us.

Americans prefer rules over relationships, so crime shows bringing offender to justice appeals to our values. The same show might get lost in translation in Asian or Arab cultures where the witness would look the other way. Most people are born dependent and connected. Americans are the exception to this way of thinking, not the other way around. In their mind, it is as if they were related to the offender, so they cannot betray that relationship. They don’t believe they are complicit, they’re just not going to squeal if it means sending mom to jail. In fact, for the majority of the world’s cultures, not all of the rules apply to everyone all the time. It depends on the situation and context. This is why we have difficulty negotiating with Eastern cultures. Nevertheless, Americans think they’re absolutely right when people from other cultures behave differently. We think they’re being deceptive but actually it’s our linear thinking and expectations that everyone should adhere to the rule of law.

DIRECTNESS is one of the 6 major values of the American national mindset. We need transparency, even at the cost of divorce. We view seduction negatively because it’s an indirect behavior. We’re also uncomfortable with “veiled” cultures because we feel manipulated by it. What’s more, because cultural maturity takes time, America is an “adolescent” culture that’s experienced few significant cultural shifts compared to older one, but when cultures do change, powerful imprints alter our frame of reference and the change is passed on to the next generation.

What is the basis for our national values and just how much the world shares them is important message for Americans to learn because most of the world doesn’t. The rest of the world may like Hollywood movies, not because admire American culture so much as a car chase is easy to understand. It’s LOW CONTEXT. Americans miss signals because we don’t know how to look for them. Listening goes beyond words. The Japanese call it reading the air. What’s not being said is significant. So is body language. Voice tone. Timing. Message location. I think of the closeness and implicit understanding relationship I have with my husband; certain references, messages, and ideas are understood without words or explanation. We speak a matrimonial shorthand. Our shared meaning is the backstory. Similarly, this is how other cultures communicate. Imagine trying to do business with high-context communicators and it becomes clear we’ve got a lot to learn.

To understand French acceptance of infidelity, we must begin with the American mind that’s entrenched in INDIVIDUALITY perfectly defined by Robert Day, “American’s have a hard time telling you specifically why this is a good thing; either because it’s something they haven’t thought about, or don’t think it’s worth going over.” Again, thanks to our history, this is a fundamental American value that stems from the early PIONEER and PROTESTANT settlers who were brave RISK-TAKERS; nomads who left everything and everyone they knew to live somewhere else. Having said that, like so much else that’s changing right now in real time, America’s rugged INDIVIDUALISM is becoming uncharacteristically risk-averse, abrogating personal responsibility which is being substituted by rampant litigiousness. Crybabies. He goes on to say “Although Americans may think of themselves as being more unique than they actually are, what’s significant is that they think they are.”

The unintended consequence of expressing personal opinions and feeling so special can feel self-indulgent to the outside world. For example, while Americans believe each person is unique and entitled to a personal opinion, they cannot fathom that other people outside America differ with it, regardless that they represent only five percent of the world’s population.”

"The French communication style is clinically direct and they see no advantage in ambiguity or ambivalence. The French language is a crisp, incisive tongue, a kind of verbal dance or gymnastics of the mouth, which presses home its points with an undisguised, logical urgency. It is rational, precise, ruthless in its clarity." -- Richard Lewis

Which brings us to their tendency for ASSERTIVENESS, which compels Americans to tell you what they’re thinking. Consequently, these unsolicited opinions can sound self-righteous. However, in their mind, this behavior is not desirable but a deeply help truth based on their certainty and entitlement to the Manifest Destiny; not considering they didn’t come to that conclusion personally. In the end, they are astounded that not all cultures share their views, much less their moral position on infidelity.

While the French are nothing if not articulate, they might even say nothing at all about their feelings, leaving you to “read the air” because the way to disagree may be to say nothing at all. Such silence leaves Americans genuinely bewildered and while they don’t mean to be rude, this direct US communication style is often irreversible in the wrong company. Once you've let it out of the bottle, it’s hard to get it back. For many cultures, saving face is impossible to reverse, and may resort to an error of omission, an outright lie, change answers, or rearrange the question to suit the situation. This appears deceitful to Americans and intolerable. In most other regions of the world, including Asia, Europe, South America, and parts of Africa, this kind of answer is a necessary function of interactions and holds no moral underpinning. For them, the goal is harmony and the end justifies the means to achieve peace over justice.

Brandi Moore underscores this utterly foreign notion, “Nothing like it exists in America or to Americans who never lose face. Being embarrassed is not losing face. Embarrassment is about guilt, which contains a causal nature. Face is about shame and the ripple effect of one’s actions on the group, now and for the future.” Striving for harmony, or “big picture” thinking conflicts with our “bottom line” mentality. She goes on to say “Americans operate in a matchlessly DIRECT culture, where losing face is nearly impossible. The level of separation, homogeneity, and variety in America that focuses on the individual, eliminates the possibility, and therefore why we seem to be so opinionated to others.”

Therefore, something as innocuous as expressing an opinion about infidelity can be perceived by others as self-righteous and the American will not refrain from doing it or become being embarrassed; remember, honor is not at stake. Moore goes on to explain, “Their remarks are born of a direct communication manner that’s essential to the dissimilar nature of Americans. Because virtually everyone originated from somewhere else, no matter how far back, they must understand one another and they must communicate with the utmost explicitness. Meanings relay through a direct route of words, unlike other cultures, and to a lesser degree France, that can feel like an eternal kabuki dance before getting to the point.” She concludes, “Communication consists of shared meaning, encrypted signals, environment, or an elaborate contextual backstory that requires a lot of deciphering. Americans who are not in the habit of hearing these messages and become exasperated with their circuitousness because they haven’t learned how to “listen loudly.”

"You can, believing that you’re obeying French dining etiquette, say bon appétit at the start of a meal — but you shouldn’t because this isn’t correct it’s too direct a reference to the body, leaving little to the imagination, and thus less seductive. Or you can treat food as a task (are you still working on that?) — but you shouldn’t do that either." -- Elaine Sciolino

Clear and clever language from people who never apologize. They are known for being unafraid to share their opinions and argue a position. You’ll find this is embedded in their national motto of Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite and also Edith Piaf’s lyrics that are a battle hymn testament to this sentiment, “Je ne regrette rien” means “I have no regrets” (about straying from the marriage). The message itself, however, may not be expressed directly in the words. Reading between the lines is often necessary to find the full message. The way a message is communicated may be determined by relationship, rank, status, and position. The way someone speaks, dresses and behaves also communicates who that person is. Sitting quietly and not participating may show lack of interest or commitment to the French, so sharing opinions, demonstrating a passionate, well-presented position will earn you their respect. Use of title is the norm until a relationship has developed. New acquaintances address each other with “vous” until it is agreed that they will switch to the familiar “tu.” This is relaxing with Millennials but it’s still pervasive in traditional business or government settings.

"In Paris, women and men are supposed to please each other on the street, and never go out in public without looking impeccably put together. You can dress as you like, but you shouldn’t neglect your appearance; a reflection of the Gallic approach to virtually all area of life in which seduction is so pervasive." -- Elaine Sciolino

When it comes to American INFORMALITY, our kids seem authorized to treat elders as equals. As adults, bosses are handled the same level as subordinates without much distinction. This kind of cultural tendency is famously depicted by Hollywood in the “California minute” in which two complete strangers can meet for the first time and yet immediately reveal intimate personal details without regard. Again, Americans hold no recourse in stating opinions publicly as mentioned before because as Moore concludes, “honor is not at stake. Everything must be said, and (it’s presumed) everyone is open to hearing it.”

Lewis points to the French education system, “From childhood, places a premium on articulateness and eloquence of expression. Unlike Japanese, Finnish or British children, French children are rarely discouraged from being talkative. In the French culture, loquacity is equated with intelligence and silence does not have a particularly golden sheen. Lycée, university and École normale supérieure education reinforces the emphasis on good speaking, purity of grammar and mastery of the French idiom.” The French language, unquestionably, is the chief weapon wielded by authority and less articulate French show no resentment. Masterful use of language and logic implies, in their understanding, masterful power.

"Americans don’t have sex, they have problems. " -- Marlene Dietrich

While both the French and the Americans share the space of DIRECTNESS, it’s express differently. Americans are perplexed when they’re labeled rude and inappropriate, but they would be genuinely surprised to learn that eighty-five percent of the world views the American values of INDIVIDUALITY and ASSERTIVENESS not without reservation. To put their opinion of infidelity in sharp focus, the English Broadway actor, Allen Cummings aptly remarked, “America was established by Puritans who left England because it wasn't puritanical enough.” Yet, they hold these beliefs because they are “self-evident” or because they choose them, when in fact they were chosen for them by history.

If the underpinnings of the French communication style is of the mind and they revere history and AUTHORITY, the American mind has an honest aversion to it. With a past rooted the in both the PIONEER and ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM that prevents Americans from exploring profound concepts deeply, this may well be their tragic flaw; tainting the entire American education system. It seems as though American history categorically precludes itself from producing many more great thinkers, philosophers, or theorists given a COWBOY QUICK sense of urgency, pragmatism and self-reliance to survive. Diane Johnson observed this and an increasing “religious fervor comes and goes like seasonal flu, and each time leaves it weakened for the next attack.”

"Culture hides more than it reveals and strangely enough, what it hides, is most effectively hidden from its owners; not unlike the American attitude about infidelity. " -- Edward Hall

While they prize the fine Cartesian mind: “I think, therefore I am,” PROCESS counts enormously. The revealing, enjoying, ritualizing, codifying, and tantalizing pursuit about the idea of an affair counts more than the affair. For Americans to characterize France as an immoral culture is the result of their unconscious PURITAN legacy the French were untouched by. A culture of taking mistresses was inherited by the French kings, beginning with Henry II during the Middle Ages, serving a practical purpose. It unambiguously established a kind of psychological national security with a demonstrable virility, signifying longevity and preservation of the throne through succession according to French historians. France created a culture of love by his wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine single handedly. Marriage had little to do with love and sex was vulgar. The rules of love codified by Andreas Capellanus, were idealized in poetry during the Crusades, enacted by Chivalrous knights, who declared Courtly love only to a married woman.

"You can remain faithful to your husband instead of taking a lover — but you shouldn’t. After all, you have your foundation as a couple, a history, and a marriage. You’ve built something you can be proud of, and this tiny romance in Paris is not going to disrupt it." -- Inès de la Fressange

While they make a good case for taking a lover by elevating the behavior through poetic words, razor sharp intellect, and codifying love, not even the French have a vaccine to prevent the pain of infidelity, but the rules of love mitigate the possibility of exposure. Central to that is discretion and never to confess: “Rule #13. Public revelation of love is deadly to love in most instances.” Ines De La Fressange observed, “After all, why forsake the natural and inevitable pleasures of the long seductive run up to the affair, simply for the cause of loyalty?” Despite the long and winding history and process of these centuries old French attitudes about love, not even they are inured to the consequences. The real reason for the rules are to preserve the FAMILY because family preserves the order of society. The rules keep the HARMONY. Parents stay together; children are spared emotional trauma; property stays in the family; and voila, financial security is retained. In stark contrast, while Americans can’t tolerate dishonesty, we’d be just as inclined to take on a lover, but it seems the French handle it more pragmatically because does the American disclosure-confession solution really solve anything with the destruction of the family? The rules of love established the thought of a great epoch and explain this much-maligned propensity for adultery. They are French to the core; didactic, mocking, and lighthearted, preserving the attitudes and practices of a medieval tradition about love’s alternatives.

"Divorce rates are about the same and there's the same amount of infidelity going on, and French spouses get as angry as American ones. The difference is that Americans carry the weight of a puritanical legacy that France does not." -- Author Diane Johnson of the L’Affaire, Le Mariage, and Le Divorce

These attitudes persist through the 19th century, when love, marriage and infidelity are treated lightly in the popular comic "boulevard theaters". The plots were centered on a love triangle--a husband and wife and a lover who hides in beds and cupboards or jumps out of windows to avoid being discovered. For over the last hundred years, the cocu (cuckold) has been a source and symbol of amusement, characterizing adultery as less tragic and more of a laughing matter, explaining, at least in part, why their attitude seems blasé.

In 2001, Lynn Smith wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Americans won’t admit the nature of lust, forgive it, and create a separate compartment for it that doesn't affect our feeling for somebody. The French resembles the Dutch, who prefer transparency when it comes to pot and prostitution because they know people do it, so it might as well be regulated to minimize health risks. She goes on to say, “We insist our natural impulses must be managed and contained for the sake of the family or because adultery is a sin and violates marital vows. In reality, French and American couples behave about the same and they both want the same thing: to preserve the family. It’s just that we go about it differently.”

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Surveys

http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/04/15/global-morality/table/divorce/

http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/01/14/extramarital-affairs-topline/

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