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By Tim Martin 11:23AM BST 20 May 2011
"Set in 1947 and placing participants in the role of a beat cop climbing the ranks of the LAPD, this week’s console sensation LA Noire is as much a statement of intent as it is a video game. The creators cite Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and the films of Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder as inspirations, and have included 20-odd hours of studio-quality dialogue voiced by so many members of the Mad Men cast that the game sometimes resembles nothing so much as a Sterling Cooper corporate away-day.
It emphasises deduction, clue-hunting and, courtesy of some astonishing developments in graphics technology, reading human expressions as the means of navigating its complex plot. And it arrives in tandem with a collection of short stories from writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Joe Lansdale and Lawrence Block, each one set in its murky and morally equivocal universe. In some respects, it seems less a game than a sort of full-scale cultural land grab. Its creator, Brendan McNamara, has said he envisages audiences “sitting on the sofa playing LA Noire with their girlfriends and friends and passing the controller around, almost playing it like a TV show”.
But LA Noire is just one example of a growing interpollination between the worlds of traditional narrative and the fast-growing sphere of computer entertainment. One recent and surprising phenomenon in novelism has been the success of printed works based in gaming universes: one of the novels based on the space-opera Halo video games has shifted more than a million copies, and graphic novels linked to both Halo and the Gears of War series have sold extremely well. But as the prospects for in-game narrative deepen, more and more screenwriters, novelists and comics creators appear to be going straight to the source and branching out into games themselves...."
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