Game of words

Disputes about whether video games are art are already tired of it. But at the end of 2013, reasons to talk on this subject arise almost weekly. The fifth of the Gangster saga “ Grand Theft Auto” turned out to be an interactive series of dreams and in the first day earned as much as “Avatar” in half a month: a billion. The actors Willem Defoe and Ellen Page starred in the game “ Beyond: Two Souls” , which is actually not a game, but a complex film. Microsoft and Sony released the next generation prefixes, opening new visual and communicative horizons. Recently, Kickstarter and digital distribution make it possible to finance and spread any game arthouse. Finally, on December 10, on the twentieth anniversary of DOOM , the premiere of the project “ The Novelist” took place. This amazing game should be played by everyone who works with the text - writers, journalists, screenwriters, advertisers. Honestly, it gives practical advice on how to synchronize this strange lonely work and life among people.

The game has a very variable plot, you can pass it dozens of times, but no finale will provide happiness for everyone and for nothing.

The action takes place in the idyllic suburban America of the 70s. The Kaplan family arrives for the summer in a large house on the beach. Not a very successful writer Dan - to gather forces and end the second novel. His wife Linda is to return to the career of an artist abandoned for the sake of raising a child. Their son Tommy simply wants to be distracted from school experiences, where both the hooligans and teachers are touching him. Unlike the Overluk Hotel from the “Shine” or the mansion from the “American Horror History”, the strange country house honestly tries to help kaplanes to understand itself. The ghost in it is one - and good: a player. In the afternoon, we quietly observe the heroes, read their thoughts, look into their diaries and touch their things to find out as much as possible about them. And at night we whisper how to spend the next day. Devote it to work or general walk. Fix the toy Tommy or arrange a romantic dinner with Linda. Decisions must be taken daily throughout the summer, and it quickly turns out that there are no perfect scenarios. Someone's interests will always be infringed. The marriage can decay, the child - to finally close in himself, the career - fly to tartarara. The game has a very variable plot, you can pass it dozens of times, but no finale will provide happiness for everyone and for nothing. At the same time, the power of the arsenal of the expressive means of “ The Novelist” is such that, be sure that you will suffer from kaplanes.

Video games can hardly be suspected of excessive humanism. Most of the games of the eighties and nineties were generally complete without a person: the main characters were either geometric figures, or cars, or fantastic creatures. In strategies and shooters, people have always been nothing more than consumable. In role -playing games with their support on folklore and fantasy, extremely simple -minded ideas about good and evil prevailed for a long time. Gamers here were obliged to behave well simply because such is the logic of the feat. If you want to go through the game, get all the bonuses and avoid unnecessary problems - be a knight without fear and reproach. When Alexei Navalny led his inventive election campaign, he tried to enlist the support of gamers, giving an interview to Kanobu . To the question, for what heroes he prefers to play, the oppositionist replied that for the positive ones - because passing for them is designed richer.

Complex and close to the mature arts of the relations systems were sometimes found only in quests - adventure games without violence, but with large plans and worked out characters. The best in the nineties was made by George Lucas Lucasarts . In between commercial releases based on Star Wars, this studio created real interactive books and films. The Monkey Island series about the young pirate Gybrash Tripwood was the witty novel of education and the most delicate chronicle of his first love. The quest about the PSA-Detective and his partner-collar “Sam & Max: Frealance Police” -the elegant game analogue “Who substituted Roger’s Robher Robert”. Biker saga " Full Throttle" - "Careless Drive" for the smallest. The esoteric parable “ Grim Fandango” is the most thorough study of the afterlife that has ever met in games. Europeans did not lag behind: the British quest “ Broken Sword” showed everything that was in the “Da Vinci Code”, almost ten years before the release of the book.

When Alexei Navalny led his inventive election campaign, he tried to enlist the support of gamers, giving an interview to Kanobu.

Maxim about responsibility “for those we tamed” in video games was first articulated in the social simulator “ The Sims” (January 2000)-the famous Tamagochi about people. The premiere of the game coincided with three important events. The “Fight Club”, published in the fall of 1999, spoke caustically about the consumerism, the satire on which can partially be considered “ The Sims” . In September 1999, the “Big Brother” reality show, with whom the game coincided with conceptually: it also needs to be monitored in the personal life of the experimental “Sims”. Finally, then the series "Friends" exceeded the equator. “ The Sims” allowed everyone to shoot new series of “friends” on their own - one hundred pieces per day. It turned out that a video game can be not only a simulator of muscle motor skills and reactions, but also - in the future - theatrical, filming, literary platform.

In the fall of 2005, the game “ The Movies” was released, where the user not only controlled the Hollywood studio, but could also make the films “The Golden Age”. And in “ The Fahrenheit” he himself became a movie hero, on which the development of the plot of a strange blockbuster at the junction of Twin Pixes and “Secret Materials” depended. After that turning year, independent indie games chose two development vectors for themselves. The first is to make a large interactive movie or series. The most striking examples are La Noire , Heavy Rain , Last of Us , Beyond: Two Souls , Bioshock and, of course, “GTA V” . The second is to turn the gameplay into visual installation, interactive painting. This way went, for example, the Limbo Arcades (the story of the journey of a little boy in purgatory), “ Braid” (Mario’s adventures in the ontological labyrinth of Borges), “ Passage” (short tragedy of the fleeting of life) and “ The Path” (revisioning version of “Red Red Red Riding Hood”).

But for some reason, no one tried to go to the joining of the game with the theater and literature. In 2012, however, the epistolary drama “ Dear Esther” was released, where the player was supposed to wander around the deserted northern island in bad weather and listen to a sunbringing voice reading other people's letters. A beautiful, but terrible mosaic consisted of the letters - the story of Esther and her crazy widow who died in the disaster. The game was arranged so that with the help of graphics, music, votes, text and invisible index signs, lure the hero to the top of the cliff and put before the choice - jump or live on. If this is art, then very speculative.

With The Novelist (we finally got to it) , the opposite is true: today it is the most honest and talented literary experiment in the video game industry. Actually, the playing component - the need not to come across kaplan on the eye - here you can simply turn off. Excitement, adrenaline, and the joy of overcoming obstacles for the genre will disappear with her. But it will be possible to thoroughly evaluate a complex dramatic structure invented by the author.

The author, American Kent Hudson, has an interesting creative path. In the zero, he worked as a gam designer in large prosperous companies-in particular, “ Deus Ex: Invisible Wars” (gloomy cyberpunk-beoevik) and “ Bioshock 2” (playing with Ain Rand) did. In 2011, he took part in a round table about the mechanisms of involving a player in dramatic co-authorship with developers on Game Developers Conference . There, apparently, something happened to him: he threw a comfortable career to make “ The Novelist” alone, a game about the torment of creativity and human will. It turned out a classic American suburban story, only with variable playwright and a game interface that provides literary savings. In order to describe in words everything that the heroes see and feel, hectares of forest would leave and feel, would need the talent of the novelist. The Nevelist has graphics, a little crazy piano and wonderful voices for these purposes.

Morality can be reduced to the famous metaphor of the former chapter of Coca-Cola Brian Dyson: career, family, friends, health and soul-five crystal balls that are better not to juggle at the same time. In the “ Nevelist”, the ball seems to be only two: family and work, but the third one also interferes in the process. Trying to figure out the life of Kaplan, the player involuntarily switches to his own. Games have always been a form of escapism, but in The Novelist we find ourselves in the closet in front of the black mirror and we understand that the Escape button was stuck.

Soon autumn, the Kaplanes dress all the warmer, the yellow leaves are more and more, and the chances to correct something-less and less. By the end of the holidays, their house will inevitably turn into an crypt of unfulfilled hopes, but there is a chance that something will bloom in the viewer’s house. The game of lost time is a tautology, and nevertheless, “ The Novelist” is quite effective therapy when it is smoked, and an idiosinocrazia has already developed for a bottle of champagne and “Figaro's marriage”. “History is about us and for us” is still a cliche, but in the case of “ The Novelist” it is more than appropriate.