![]() ![]() Almost every story in videogames is - I don't love this term but - ludo-narratively dissonant. And that story is intended not to be about what's going on in the game. When I play a videogame there are all kinds of systems that work on my brain, and most videogames try to hide those systems under a story. The goal was to create a videogame that examined what shooting does to us in a videogame. There's not really anything I would point to - I mean, there are a couple of things missing I guess, but those things supported points that are already made. Jeffrey Yohalem: My goal was to say exactly what I think I say. ![]() What was your overall goal when you started writing this game? RPS: My impression of Far Cry 3 was a game that wanted to say a lot more than most games do, but also a game that perhaps didn't quite manage to say some of those things. That's the position from which I began our spoiler-filled conversation. It felt like it was there for a reason - but a reason I couldn't grasp, and one I didn't think was explained by the time the game had ended. Along with that was a strangely vapid sequence in which you learn of the repeated rape of a friend, and some very peculiar sex scenes, all of which seemed like the worst of gaming in the midst of the best of gaming.īut at the same time, it didn't feel that simple. While there was certainly no hatred or malice displayed to a particular race (unless that race is translucent white Hollywoodians), it seemed difficult to understand how the game wasn't employing stereotypes more familiar to 19th century literature. Many who played it, including me, found its apparent use of "white messiah", "magical negro" and "noble savage" tropes to be somewhat disconcerting. I return at the end with some thoughts on the conversation.Ī frame of reference: Far Cry 3, an undoubtedly brilliant shooter, seemed to come with some odd baggage. What follows is a heated chat about what gaming could and should be. Fortunately, I'm animated and passionate too, so we get to discussing how successful this really was. It was, he says, an attempt to break the loops of modern gaming, to ask the player to start to demand better. ![]() Yohalem proves to be a very animated, very passionate writer, who sees Far Cry 3 as a complex exploration of many ideas, mostly questioning the role of the player in a game, and what they'll do in order to win. So I pursued the game's author, Jeffrey Yohalem, to talk it through. That the game was trying to say something to me, perhaps partly through that which I found problematic, and I hadn't been able to hear it. ![]() Not simply in the sense that it appeared to contain colonialist nonsense and clumsily handled rape plots, but that I felt I was missing something. Having completed Far Cry 3 a while back, I found that so much of the game's story just didn't sit right with me. ![]()
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