10 Membranes

Gaming and Narrative Part II

A further observation on gaming. Techradar’s analysis of the technology behind team Bondi and Rockstar’s new game, LA Noire, makes the point that sophisticated new facial scanning techniques can bridge the “uncanny valley” that makes quasi-realistic computer characters a lot more unsettling then straight forward cartoons. Allied to this is a whole new invisible interface, a gameplay based on emotional reading and responses, a world building exercise that emphasises accurate period detail and the by now almost normal inclusion of moral dilemmas as a stock part of the narrative. While they are careful to avoid a direct comparison to Citizen Kane, that it is mentioned seriously is itself indicative. The Rose-bud moment is nigh. 

In essence this means that gaming narratives are now of a sophistication that they encroach on the story space of high brow film and literary fiction. It is tempting to see this as a direct front to publishing, although of course, books have weathered the storm of previous media. 

But this is precisely the point: publishing has managed to convince itself of its cleverness and long viability even when it has become more and irrelevant and this will be another example. Over the course of the 20th century we saw a succession of new media and entertainment forms each of which built on new technologies and social capacities and did in general did not destory those media forms that went before it but acted as an extra layer on top. So the book, the newspaper, the music hall and the opera did not disappear, but they were joined by the cinema, the radio, by television, by the CD and by the internet etc in an ever evolving and expanding circulation of money, content, leisure time and information. 

In 1900 publishing had a proportionately larger share of the leisure-informational complex as we might term this than it did in 2000; the reason for this is that the people in publishing did not understand the technologies and social formations behind the media. This is true of each and every technological advance. A combination of self definition as books, lack of capital or specialist skills etc meant publishers did not capitalise on new opportunities to expand their business. Many might argue that this simply was not possible: yet if you look at many of the biggest R&D spenders today, they are the same companies that were the biggest spenders on R&D in the early decades of the twentieth century - the GE’s, the big pharmas most of whom were founded in the C19th and so on. In fact, at the top big business has been remarkably resilient and only certain tech companies like Microsoft and Google have come from nowhere. Publishing was not necessairly destined to stay within its bracket. 

Why has there not been more thought about this? Because actually it was a success within its own terms. Book sales and number of books published increased throughout the C20th. We would though expect them to: populations ballooned and especially in the Western world wealth exploded in the years after the Second World War. Publishing was a success under this narrative because the West was a success, and this meant it could disguise a massive truth:

That although it was growing it was actually growing much less fast than all the other media forms. Proportionally therefore it was occupying a smaller and smaller space in the leisure-informational complex. This is the challenge of games like LA Noire, Heavy Rain and so on: they decrease the amount of oxygen and space for literary fiction by opening up new frontiers in the matrix of purchase and time decisions of educated consumers after quality content. Basically its more competition. And even if books do keep growing, and that is no longer a given, they will occupy still less of the leisure-information complex and will have a comparatively smaller role culturally and economically. 

The upside is that actually publishers are, at last, starting to abandon the idea of themselves as producers of books and teaming with those who do understand technology to create strategic partnerships, new forms of IP and hence move into new areas. It’s just they should have started doing that in 1910. 

LA Noire along with the new breed of mature gaming, is as pivotal a moment in its own way as the controller revolution of the Wii and Kinect etc, and it represents a dual challenge to literature: as yet another land grab from other media as a direct 1 for 1 purchase competitor.