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Thoughts while playing the new Uncharted
Oct. 29th, 2017 06:53 pmThe main character is obviously in the ideal physical shape for the crazy parkour crap they have her do all day long. I remember looking at Nathan in the previous game and thinking the same thing. I also remember thinking: "There are lots and lots of men who are just genetically not designed to be in this shape. They're too fat, or too skinny, or too tall or wide to be as good at this stuff. And yet, we all remember being kids, running around and climbing on things. Perhaps that's how we can relate to this game. Does steering Nathan and Chloe across exotic worlds remind us of climbing the jungle gym in the schoolyard? Perhaps so."
But, all the wall climbing and parkour that these characters do is deceptive. Every other move they make defies gravity, and it's too easy to think "hey, if I got in better shape, I could do the same stuff!" No. Ten seconds hanging off the edge of a building by my fingertips is already way too long.
These environments are always such overload. In the real world, any one of these buildings would be a major find and a tourist attraction. In this game, almost all of them are disposable. You drive past them, blow them up, run through them, bash them over, and leave behind hundreds of bizarre artifacts to get buried in mud or washed away, all because they are not the single item relevant to the plot. It feels really self-contradictory.
Take this hidden city for example. It's a square mile of gorgeous carved stone and brickwork, all inside a cavernous valley with rivers flowing through it, and enough jungle inside to support families of elephants. In the real world, it would be a global must-see tourist attraction, and with careful development could enrich countless lives and generate millions of dollars a year, for hundreds of years. But! There is one specific artifact, about the size of a burrito, hidden somewhere inside it. So we're gonna blast our way in with mortars and C4, snatch up the artifact, and leave the rest of place to the rats.
It's even more contradictory when you think about how many people play these games, myself included. We just go through the environments at a walking pace, panning the camera around and absorbing what we see and hear. It's an opportunity to relax in a designed environment -- or at least hallucinate that we are in one. Strange that it's sandwiched between action scenes that play out like terrorist attacks, eh? Humans are weird.
This is the first Uncharted game with a female protagonist, and she has a female companion. I get the impression the studio tried to avoid any hint of sexism in the dialogue by just writing it for their usual character Nathan, then tweaking it a little to add gender-specific jokes. But perhaps that's the only way to do this, since Nathan himself is an unreal character? That is, he's purpose-built for far flung adventures full of "extreme sport" athleticism and gunfire. Maybe the only way to write a character plausibly capable of doing those things is to start from a template that is often stereotyped as male, and Chloe and Nathan sound alike because of that.
Oh, I don't know. Some of my favorite female characters are from Terry Pratchett novels, e.g. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. I don't question Terry's approach to them, I just take them at face value. I guess I'll take Chloe at face value too and forget about the analysis.
But, all the wall climbing and parkour that these characters do is deceptive. Every other move they make defies gravity, and it's too easy to think "hey, if I got in better shape, I could do the same stuff!" No. Ten seconds hanging off the edge of a building by my fingertips is already way too long.These environments are always such overload. In the real world, any one of these buildings would be a major find and a tourist attraction. In this game, almost all of them are disposable. You drive past them, blow them up, run through them, bash them over, and leave behind hundreds of bizarre artifacts to get buried in mud or washed away, all because they are not the single item relevant to the plot. It feels really self-contradictory.
Take this hidden city for example. It's a square mile of gorgeous carved stone and brickwork, all inside a cavernous valley with rivers flowing through it, and enough jungle inside to support families of elephants. In the real world, it would be a global must-see tourist attraction, and with careful development could enrich countless lives and generate millions of dollars a year, for hundreds of years. But! There is one specific artifact, about the size of a burrito, hidden somewhere inside it. So we're gonna blast our way in with mortars and C4, snatch up the artifact, and leave the rest of place to the rats.
It's even more contradictory when you think about how many people play these games, myself included. We just go through the environments at a walking pace, panning the camera around and absorbing what we see and hear. It's an opportunity to relax in a designed environment -- or at least hallucinate that we are in one. Strange that it's sandwiched between action scenes that play out like terrorist attacks, eh? Humans are weird.
This is the first Uncharted game with a female protagonist, and she has a female companion. I get the impression the studio tried to avoid any hint of sexism in the dialogue by just writing it for their usual character Nathan, then tweaking it a little to add gender-specific jokes. But perhaps that's the only way to do this, since Nathan himself is an unreal character? That is, he's purpose-built for far flung adventures full of "extreme sport" athleticism and gunfire. Maybe the only way to write a character plausibly capable of doing those things is to start from a template that is often stereotyped as male, and Chloe and Nathan sound alike because of that.
Oh, I don't know. Some of my favorite female characters are from Terry Pratchett novels, e.g. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. I don't question Terry's approach to them, I just take them at face value. I guess I'll take Chloe at face value too and forget about the analysis.
