The ability
to remember aspects of popular culture is a skill that’s lost to me. ‘Remember
how great that line was in that film we watched a decade ago? It was right striking wasn’t it? To the point
where after hearing it only once we can now quote it verbatim and will do so
forever.’ “Well no, not really my old hypothetical chum. I certainly won’t be ‘cos I forgot it almost the instant it was
spoken in favour of paying attention to the intervening years of my life. Sorry
to have put us both in this very awkward position.” Quotes, scenes and
overarching narratives can all be heard ‘round water coolers the world over. Some
boffins can even remember and render entire
video game maps from memory; a feat which I find admirably super-human. I
though, am rubbish at remembering stuff.
It was
probably a bit foolhardy of me, then, to insist on playing Metro with the optional original Russian audio, rather than just
admit that I’d have an easier time of it with the (probably) dodgy Ruski-twinged
English dub. But I get dead peeved when hearing dodgy
Russian accents, so didn’t want to risk the whole affair descending into
the final third of most Sean Connery/Roger Moore-era James Bond film. Going
with this more wholesome and artistic option did give me a sense of
superiority, but it also threw up a few problems, especially where keeping
track of events and characters was concerned.
Our ability
to interpret sounds and images is neurologically
linked, to the point where if we’re familiar with both an individual’s
voice and face we’ll be able to
remember one without the other more readily (the full study’s here,
via the Public Library of Science). In
Metro, however, these cognitive
processes were disrupted for me by two fairly large obstacles:
i - Almost every noteworthy character I interacted with was a bloke with some
kind of beard (please refer to the images littered about), so they kind of all
looked the same.
ii - Said blokes were all speaking a language which I do not understand, with me instead reading the English subtitles.
These two issues combined to give me grief not only comprehending what was going on sometimes, but also remembering who these narratively important gentlemen were.
ii - Said blokes were all speaking a language which I do not understand, with me instead reading the English subtitles.
These two issues combined to give me grief not only comprehending what was going on sometimes, but also remembering who these narratively important gentlemen were.
The
comprehension problem is quite a simple one to explain away really. Unsurprisingly,
it can prove quite difficult to read subtitles placed at the bottom of a screen
when you’re concentrating on what’s going on in the middle. Especially if that
something is a cabal of identical enemies (they are all mutants to be fair, so no one’s sure whether this is
inaccurate or not) running at you for five straight minutes. Metro is littered with action-heavy
sequences filled with characters
talking to one another in that gung-ho Predator
kind of way. They do a rather good job of offsetting the more reserved sections
where you’re just walking about in tunnels or walking about in train stations,
but they’re all but unintelligible underneath all the shooting and staying
alive. I’d catch little drips of conversations as I reloaded (probably the best
reload mechanic I’ve ever encountered, btw)
and then lose myself again in the melee. Thinking about it though, maybe not
hearing every word uttered is actually a slightly more accurate experience of a
prolonged skirmish against a numerically superior force. Especially when
considered alongside the heavily scripted and stage-managed choreography of the
‘war is HELL and/or never CHANGES’ battle dialogue of many other shooty games.
Just a thought.
While not
being able to follow incidental conversations was a bit humbling - prolific
wordsmith that I am - not being able to remember who everyone was proved
maddeningly - and humorously - disorientating. A fair bit happens in Metro and you meet a few important
characters along the way; the problem is I’d be hard pressed to tell you what
many of them were called or even what they looked like. Characters would
introduce themselves in a dramatic ‘Listen To Me For I Am Important’ way, and I’d
be too busy rummaging about in lockers or shooting at railings to catch any of
it. This makes me feel pretty shameful, especially considering I really enjoyed myself down in them
tunnels. Was it just too dark down there for me to catch a glimpse of their
faces, especially behind all those
beards? So while it’s a linear game (it’s mostly set in underground tubes and
boxes) I often felt as if I was wandering off and missing the best bits of the
story, usually unintentionally.
Another study, this
one carried out at Indiana University, drew similar conclusions to the
previously cited PLOS paper, while going further and identifying individual
speech patterns and accents as key contributors to speech attribution. In
short: the way in which people speak
helps us to associate a particular voice with a particular individual. In the
case of Metro, I wasn’t paying a
large amount of attention to the individual voices I heard because I was
instead busy reading the
transcription of those words. This, if we’re on board with the studies I’ve
picked out to back myself up, goes a decent way of explaining why I couldn’t
remember who all of these lovely men were.
In having
to grapple with a foreign language I bypassed many of the linguistic pointers
we use to help us put voices to faces, thus making it more difficult for me to
remember and so recall these characters once they weren’t standing right in
front of me. Taking a look around all these picture as well; most of those
beards are actually pretty different, so perhaps our ability to recall faces is more closely linked to our
understanding of a person’s voice than we’re currently letting on. It’s
something video games could maybe do with investigating, because Metro isn’t the first time I’ve had
difficulty remembering characters. Many action games - especially shooty/militaristic
ones set in contemporary or near-future lands - suffer from casts chocked full
of men in matching outfits, identifiable only by a slightly different hat, gun
or facial hair configuration. It might all just be down to bad writing in some
cases, but maybe all the writing
could be made slightly better by every video game story having a couple of
obligatory dinner sequences slotted into them. That way the player would get to
sit down and study the faces and voices of their compatriots every couple of
hours, ensuring that they never, ever, ever forget what they look like, what
they sound like and - more importantly - who they are and why we’re all meant
to care when they die near the end.
The above prose was originally written with something else in mind, but the powers that be sought to shut me the eff down, such is the import of my observations. However, like a seasoned stand-up repackaging a joke for their fifth consecutive Edinburgh Fringe, I've sought Blogs of the Round Table as a worthy outlay for my hideously valuable opinions. More bespoke writings can be found below:
The above prose was originally written with something else in mind, but the powers that be sought to shut me the eff down, such is the import of my observations. However, like a seasoned stand-up repackaging a joke for their fifth consecutive Edinburgh Fringe, I've sought Blogs of the Round Table as a worthy outlay for my hideously valuable opinions. More bespoke writings can be found below:
Want to stop me living in tunnels?. I’ve set up one of them Patreon
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thought process and fancy helping me legitimise my type of video game criticism
to a terribly unsupportive girlfriend and the wider world, then please consider
a small donation to my peerlessly altruistic cause. It resides here: patreon.com/ashouses. Chrz.
