@AssInAss said:
Tom Bissell is a great writer, he wrote on Max Payne 3 too.
Personally I thought that article was garbage. There's a popular myth that Max Payne 3 is like a poster child for 'ludonarrative dissonance'. I've seen the claim repeated on the Bombcast, Extra Credits and even in publications like the Guardian. Maybe Bissell started it, I don't know. The argument seems to boil down to one of two ideas: 1) that someone as morally tortured as Max Payne should not be killing so many people or 2) it doesn't make sense for someone who kills as many people as Max does to complain about being bad at his job. These ideas not only run counter to the narrative but they also kind of explain eachother away; Max doesn't like killing people and he considers himself bad at his job because his job really should have nothing to do with killing hundreds, since his job is usually protecting/rescuing a single person or finding out a single bit of information. However, due to noir-flavoured fatalism, he has to kill lots of people because they are either a) entire private armies that Max has angered or b) gangsters/paramilitaries who are protecting someone he needs to get to. I don't see where ludonarrative dissonance even comes into it. I find it amusing, too, that the man Bissell namechecks for having coined the term 'ludonarrative dissonance', actually did so when strongly criticising the dissonance in Bioshock - a game which Bissell uses as an example of having handled violence well, even though the enemies in Bioshock are waves of unsympathetic, spawn-triggered, faceless ciphers, beyond the first hour.
There's a really weird, puritanical, moralising tone to Bissell's writing when he goes on about shooters. He says "Max Payne 3 is grim and punishing; anyone who claims he had "fun" with this game needs to have his head examined." Apparently enjoying violent games is a sign of mental illness. Then you have his veiled sideswipe in the Spec Ops write up, implying that there is something 'filthy' about games which allow us to 'vent'. He says shooters allow his 'shadow self' to emerge and that we '[shouldn't] kid ourselves about what happens even to a sane, well-adjusted person after an entire day of watching [Max Payne 3]' - apparently an afternoon playing the game had made him act 'mouthy' and 'agitated' towards people at a dinner party. Honestly I don't know how to distinguish this kind of attitude from the moral panic we see exhibited by hardline, pro-censorship types, who believe that games present an insidious moral hazard to society. They are saying the same thing, but the things Bissell writes about definitely don't have any relevance to my experience.
I find his writing to be the very worst kind of video game punditry. He starts with a simple central foundation which can usually be summed up in a single sentence - eg. 'I didn't enjoy this game's story' or 'I don't like medieval fantasy settings' - then, through empty rationalisation, spins it out into many paragraphs of unsupported assertions and nebulous rhetoric. I dislike Extra Credits for the same reason, but at least they tend not to moralise or savage games quite as harshly as Bissell. I'm fine with him keeping his writing infrequent.
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