Another Time, Another World
What’s in a name, and what good set-dressing can do
The Fire Chief Fire Prevention Picture Book
You cannot beat a good name. There is nothing better.
I am a great fan of names. I like company names. I like the names people are given, the ones they adopt. I like city and national and regional names. Many’s the time I have looked at a world map or consulted an atlas and, solely from the stimulus provided by the names I saw, attempted to guess what the largest town on one of the Solomon Islands might be like, or theorised on how an autonomous region in west Africa may treat its tourists.
Company names, guild names, industrial names, the names of tools and products, names that are copyrighted and trademarked. Titles. Of works of art, books, movies, songs. Many of these are so evocative, so clearly resonant of a time and of a place, that for me they do much of the work of fiction. I don’t need to rewatch Double Indemnity to get a hint of its atmosphere. I just need to think about the companies that made matches and lighters for the American market in those days, or ponder a little about the precise legal language associated with death cover and assurance. I don’t need to re-watch the Rathbone and Bruce Sherlock Holmes films to enjoy their setting. I can instead think about soda water siphons and match folders. For the Holmes of the 1880s, the trigger is possibly ‘gas-lamp,’ or ‘coal-scuttle,’ or ‘hansom.’
I say all this because, although video games don’t swallow any of my hours in an average week, the thing the best of them can do, better than any other art form except music, is to provide atmosphere. The big open world games that dominated the imagination of many children who grew up when I did controlled our thinking about places, periods of history. Our minds were in their thrall.
It’s a game of associations.
Hearing the radio in Grand Theft Auto IV and V. The score and the accented conversations of passers-by in Assassin’s Creed II. That’s all we need, folks, we people who are sensitive to atmosphere, to get much of the satisfaction others get from playing, and progressing in, the game.
This long wind-up has taken us to the prince of atmosphere, in my opinion: the game which succeeds on the level of vibes far more than it could possibly succeed in other ways. Its vibes are immaculate even if it falls down on its gameplay, on its graphics, on its concrete and mechanical features. I’m talking, of course, about L.A. Noire, whose title is quite self-explanatory and whose music, sound design and ambience are so transporting they are like a dream or like a drug.
It is the dog-end of the 1940s. And you are a detective, lately of the Marine Corps, raised from the patrolman’s beat in Los Angeles. And it is a remarkable place. And things are getting real dirty in the city of angels, kid.
Who cares that the game does not, by modern standards, have much content? Who cares that the animations are limited, sometimes poor; who cares that it’s clunky and underwritten in places and never, for a moment, completely delivers on the promise of what we observers of its posture alone can create in our heads?
One film writer and director said, as he wrapped on a production which had cost millions he didn’t have, that he ought to have written a poem instead. George Lucas, meanwhile, is alleged to have told someone that the best thing he ever did re Star Wars was making so many toys. And not only for his wallet’s sake. Because the kids could come up with better, less predictable stories than he could. Better than the suits he sold his life’s work ever will. The children can play with the toys and they can make things that feel real. That is what George Lucas may want his legacy to be.
What the creators of L.A. Noire put before people like me, then, was not a game, per se: it was an accumulation, an agglomeration, of elements. Of names plucked from reality or sixty-five-year-old genre fiction. Of period-accurate music and decent set-dressing and clothing and decor.
And one of the names that is most evocative to me of that game, of that era — a name I still think of periodically, wistfully — is California Fire & Life.
An insurance firm, important to the plot.
It’s Don Winslow. It’s James Ellroy. It’s DOA. It’s In a Lonely Place.
And there are plenty of fires in the game — fires that need investigating — now aren’t there, kid?
And that is why I read this brief and charming pamphlet from the decade the game is set about fire safety. With its mentions of fire chiefs and ashtrays, and call boxes to report blazes out of control.
It, too, with its line drawings of typical 1940s life — left blank for a child to colour in — is fine set-dressing. It, too, is a portal to another time, another world.