LA Noire's psychological concatenations are perfectly designed to test how well your cheater detection ability is wired. Evolved and domain specific, your cheater detection ability predicates your deductive reasoning and can save your life. In the late 1980s psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby theorised the human brain has innate mechanisms for information-processing and amongst the various modules regulating social discourse there is a distinct "cheater detection module".
Sending an innocent to the electric chair is not good game-play. A flick of the eye-line, a shrug of the shoulders speak volumes, should you doubt them, believe them or accuse them? Make the wrong assumption and you will fail the case, losing precious intuition points. Police interrogations take place where you are required to mindread suspects by correctly interpreting their non-verbal communication.
What is most striking about LA Noire is that you need to employ your emotional intelligence (EI) to enhance both your success and Phelps' redemption. Not so in LA Noire, in this game you earn "intuition points". In so many video games accruing shooting points is what counts. It's your job and the raison d'être of the game for you to clean things up. One parallel story is of the "shrink to the stars", the maverick psychiatrist Dr Harlan Fontaine, who sinisterly informs, "The mind is the last great mystery in medicine." (Sodium pentathol, a long discredited "truth serum", was commonly administered by psychiatrists in the 1940s.) The American dream prologue sets the scene of a post war LA population promised "a city on the verge of greatness", but you/Phelps have to confront the truth of a nightmarish and toxic city on the verge of moral decay as police corruption, homicide and vice weigh heavily down upon you. You get to chase suspects across Hollywood studio lots, climb over DW Griffith's epic Intolerance set of Babylon, while Orson Welles' now classic noir, The Lady of Shanghai, is flickering at the down town picture house. LA Noire articulates the psychopathology of 1947 LA and the attention to detail is impressive. Team Bondi have gone for a 1947 true crime content, all the cases are based on authentic events, the " Elizabeth Short-Black Dahlia" murder being the most infamous. While second guessing psychopaths you come to understand " Custer syndrome" and your own redemptive drives. As the game progresses the mystery of Phelps' inner psychological landscape is filled in, as flashbacks tantalisingly offer up key moments of insight. Playing as Phelps you start the game without self-knowledge or memory and from the moment you press the right trigger you are in at the hard-boiled deep end. Your alter ego in LA Noire is Detective Cole Phelps.
0 kommentar(er)
