I haven’t had time to the play my PS3 at all lately, but back at the beginning of the summer I was playing Metal Gear Solid 4. This game has absurdly long cut sequences (the end of the game has a series totaling about 45 minutes alone), and most of them are extremely tedious. You know how everyone thought the whole “midichlorians” thing in Star Wars Eps. 1-3 was stupid? Well, imagine a two hour lecture on them broken into fifteen minute chunks, with occasional intrusions regarding a character with bad diarrhea (I’m serious), and this is what you have. So I did what any self-respecting gamer would do – I hit the X key, skipped them, and went back to the game.

It’s the oddity of videogame cut sequences – they’re trying to create a narrative around what is often otherwise simply a list of “go here,” “kill this guy,” or “stay alive” missions. Yet they need to be entirely skippable – unskippable cut sequences are the devil, and the kiss of death for many a bad game. Some gamers just wanna hack, slash, swing, parkour, shoot, and/or chat their way through the different levels.

We should also be honest that many cut sequences are simply bad. Videogame producers often hire their cast and writers on the cheap, leading to facile premises acted out by hack, fourth-rate “talent.” They’ve also been bad at trying to videogame-ize genres, and set pieces within genres, that seem to require the semblance of real humans. For instance, I just can’t take seriously a pixilated couple smoochying, for instance, nor is sexual tension between avatars anything other than sad and silly. Cut sequences are often fond of melodrama, but can’t deliver it.

Anyways, as a result, the cut sequences, though seemingly part of the narrative, and part of the “primary text,” actually take on the same function as bonus materials on a DVD of a film or television show. The latter exist, but don’t need to exist, and they can add layers of meaning, but needn’t. And so too with the former. In short, they’re extratextuals.

Why does this matter? Well, amidst all the excited discussion of convergent, transmedia storytelling, the focus has usually been on examining ways in which a narrative and/or text can “overflow” from one platform to another. The interest, in other words, has been on expansion. But perhaps what cut sequences remind us of is a fact just as important to understanding transmedia – namely that many elements of the “primary text” (and of secondary texts or transmedia extensions too) simply don’t matter, and won’t even be considered part of the text. This will change from audience member to audience member – some gamers, for instance, may be heavily invested in the cut sequences (I know I am for the GTA games) – but the point is that transmedia analysis might tell us more about what’s important in a text, and what’s irrelevant. Our focus could be on reduction as well, therefore.

Too much TV on this blog of late. Let’s shift gears.

I’ve been playing Prince of Persia on my PS3 lately. The other day I joked with my wife that it’s therapeutic, not because the fighting is cathartic (it’s not – the boss fights annoy and frustrate me), but because it forces me to face my fear of heights. It’s a little oddity of my experience with computer games that my fear of heights frequently transfers over to them. More after the fold …

The first time I experienced this was when playing one of the closing levels of Max Payne on the PS2, when Max was up at the top of very tall building, tip-toeing around the edges of it. My body went cold and my thumbs shook a bit as I tried to navigate Max to safety through wincing eyes and with shortened breath. It felt so odd that I was being frozen up by a fear of an avatar falling, and it reminded me of playing paintball at a few stag parties, where the fictional ploy of a war felt too real, and I’d hunker down for fear of getting hit by what, a tiny bit of paint.

Well, Prince of Persia multiplies these fears, since most of the game is played dangling from ceilings, poles, or walls, climbing massive walls, sliding down huge precipices, etc. For those who haven’t played, your character is a pretty nifty parkour practitioner, who can run along walls or ceilings, shimmy up cracks in cliffs, leap from pole to pole, and free the world from “the corruption.” So there’s no escaping heights. See above: picture from here.

My body temperature changes when playing the game. Not up but down. And it’s a mistake to play before sleeping, since it produces adrenalin. Even though one can fall a million times or more, and simply return to the previous platform from which one departed, the fear of falling is ever-present.

So part of me is amazed by games’ ability to tap into this fear, and part of me is appalled by myself that I allow it to do so. And yet, so very many games have ledges to teeter on the edge of, huge leaps to make, and sweeping backdrops of precipitous falls. Clearly game manufacturers have realized that there are many of us with a fear of heights, and that the rush of facing that fear is fodder for many a game or portion of a game. Especially as more and more games add “verticality” to what were previously horizontal sandboxes (I think here of Uncharted 2 letting you climb up things, Infamous offering a GTAish feel yet with the ability to go up and down, and others), laughing in the face of heights seems to be a key offering.

I’ve been playing quite a bit of GTA4 recently. Its graphics and world-building are remarkable, often beautiful, and really intricate. What I’m finding very interesting, though, is the experience of playing this game, ostensibly set in New York City (even if called Liberty City), while living in the city myself. I’ve got some observations about this, and then, towards the end of this post, I apply them to a consideration of spinoff and licensed games.

One of the reasons the GTA games have been so successful, I believe, is because of their writers’ savvy, exacting, and satiric sense of urban space, sounds, and living. Neighborhoods flow into one another seamlessly, the voices, cars, and architecture changing in subtle and organic ways. Talk radio, too, has never been so brilliantly satirized as in the GTA games. Impressively, moreover, the designers have often captured the feel of certain spaces to a tee. I once noted to a friend, for instance, that I couldn’t go into a sparsely populated mall without thinking I was in GTA Vice City’s mall, and he’d had exactly the same experience, since GTA captures the soullessness, the stasis, and the mind-numbing brightness of shopping malls with such ability.

With GTA4 and Liberty City, the designers have captured some spaces very well. Large parts of Brooklyn feel very recognizable, to the point of hyperreality – Brooklyn feels like GTA to me, rather than vice versa. The cars on New York streets have also thrown me for a loop, as I’m recognizing them all by their GTA names. I found it profoundly odd last week in particular when I came home to find that the car parked outside my window was almost exactly the same model that was parked outside my safehouse in GTA. I’ve also tried to use my knowledge of NYC to work out where I’m most likely to find good cars, or certain types of pedestrians, in GTA. Funnily enough, too, my greatest annoyance in NYC – commute times – has become my greatest annoyance in Liberty City, as I spend way too much time going back and forth across the Triborough Bridge (ironically, the bridge that would make my commute quicker if I had a car in NYC). But all sorts of little details have made it into the game – the plethora of pylons at the entrance to each bridge, jokes about Roosevelt Island (the helitour pilot says it’s like the appendix – we know it’s there, but don’t know why), sidewalk preachers in the Bronx, recognizable stores and store types in Manhattan, the army recruiting center at Times Square, the cavernous and claustrophobic feel of underground subway stops, the fact that almost every car around Times Square or on the Brooklyn-Manhattan is a taxi, and so on.

And yet there are also some glaring omissions. GTA’s Bronx captures a small section of the South Bronx well but includes none of the recognizable streets, and the rest of it feels nothing like the Bronx that I know. I was disappointed, too, and felt somewhat displaced, to find that my neighborhood of Queens doesn’t exist in Liberty City. Personal landmarks don’t exist either, so that Lincoln Center exists, but no Fordham at Lincoln Center, my favorite block of the East Village is missing, and my subway line has been mixed up with others. Fifth Avenue is spookily under-populated by pedestrians or city buses, and at times feels more like Will Smith’s New York in I am Legend than a thriving metropolis. Subways are empty, and Niko always gets a seat.

This sometimes subtle, sometimes stark mix of real NYC and missing NYC defamiliarizes the actual city. And thus while I’ve always appreciated the GTA games for how they capture some of the patterns, sounds, sights, and feels of generic urban spaces, GTA4 is making me pay way more attention to the structuring logics and patterns of the real New York. I’m listening to passersby when I’m out, I’m looking at which cars can be found in which areas, I’m thinking about how one neighborhood bleeds into another and how the texture of those neighborhoods change or mix, I’m observing elevated subway lines’ design and structural supports, and in general, I’m spending way more time looking at the city. I’m deeply impressed by how this game has made me look at the city again. All for 60 c/hr.

In this regard, GTA may provide an example of how licensed games work, and it may provide the key to understanding the pleasures that they offer. When we purchase a licensed game, we likely do so because of a certain familiarity with the storyworld of the media product in question. In other words, we already “live” in that world to a degree. Licensed games rarely extend the plot of storyworld, nor do they usually add much in the way of depth to the world’s characters. But neither does GTA4 extend New York City in any real way. Rather, as I’ve said above, GTA4 defamiliarizes parts of New York, drawing my attention to nooks and crannies and governing logics. Licensed games too can pull us back from the familiar storyworld and give us the means of appreciating nooks and crannies and governing logics, sometimes because they’re there in the game, sometimes because they’re missing.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is the only source of pleasure in licensed games. The best licensed games will be enjoyable regardless of whether one knows the storyworld or not, just as GTA4 doesn’t require one to know New York in any way. But even when a licensed game’s gameplay is rather ho hum, sometimes its value comes from how it encourages us to think about the texture, structure, and tone of the licensed property.