Note: Feel free to read the rest of this post in a southern accent.
Let me get this out of the way: I'm a southerner, born and raised in the state of Mississippi. Needless to say, I've heard every damn stereotype joke out there. I'm intimately acquainted with all the problems and history that comes with the region, and, growing up there, I've come to appreciate its complexity. Despite its rich presence in literature and film, few games have attempted to use the region, and none that I've played have used it to its full potential. Of the few, Infamous 2 and Left for Dead 2 both occur in the southern United States. Even the godawful Redneck Rampage franchise makes fun of Arkansas, but the game itself is a parody rather than a solid game in its own right. The South is not a simple place to live, and it's an even harder place to defend--which is why I'd like to see some developers take a crack at the region.
When I heard that Infamous 2 was taking place in New Orleans (though in the game, it's New Marais), I couldn't wait to play it. New Orleans is my favorite city in the world. The architecture, the music, the food, the endless flow of alcohol...I have fond and foggy memories of each. Running and climbing across the rooftops of New Orleans (New Marais) would be great, as I would visit familiar places like Bourbon Street, Cafe Du Monde, the Garden District, and Jackson Square. And the game nails the look:
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| Bourbon Street, NOLA |
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| Infamous 2 (2011) street view of New Marais |
The architecture of New Marais is beautiful and bizarre, equal parts elegance and debauched slum--much like its real-life counterpart. The city of New Marais boasts beautiful cemeteries, an old cathedral, swamps, a plantation, parishes, and even a flooded region due to a a hurricane that hit sometime in the recent past. The city plays host to an excellent game with all the trappings a superhero game should have, and, since I no longer live under three hours away from the Big Easy, I must admit that nostalgia plays no small part in my attachment to the game.
As much as the setting factors into the game's mechanics, I can't help but feel that the game shortchanged the city of New Marais because it's mostly a covering. New Orleans is a weird, wonderful, haunted place full of fascinating people and a painful, beautiful history. There is nowhere like it in this country or any other, yet the game seems bent on keeping these aspects under wraps. We get hints of the racial tensions that possesses the town with Cole's war against Bertrand and the Militia as well as Nix's origin, and we get the weirder folklore side of the city in Festival of Blood. There are hints at religious fervor and drunken debauchery, the trauma of a natural disaster, and plenty of redneck stereotypes, but it just seemed to lack soul. I get that it's a "fish-out-of-water" type game in that you play an outsider in a hostile insider world, and for the most part that's fine--it's a hell of a lot of fun. So much of the game though, could have taken place in damn near any other city out there. After I finished the game, I couldn't help but ask, "Why did this game need to be set in the South?" It was the South "lite," which, to be honest, is fair for a game that's not about a Southerner--just a guy passing through on his way to better things. But for God's sake, the game's set in New Orleans, and they did so little with it! If you set a game in New Orleans (or some type of facsimile), then you best give this Southern boy some home cookin'.
New Orleans provides the easiest entry into this field because it is both urban and Southern, and it's different enough in its own right to not be completely absorbed by the South so much that it alienates visitors. In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (a native Southerner) fields his Canadian's roommate's request for him to "[t]ell about the South. What's it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?" Indeed, the novel is largely about the difficulty to encapsulate history and culture of the South through written and spoken language. Yet Southerners are, by nature, storytellers (God knows I've got mine). It's what we're raised to do. So why not incorporate that in a videogame. Let play a game where a Southern protagonists attempts to recreate or understand dark past events or a family secret. The Southern literary tradition boasts some of the most freakish characters out there, and, as Flannery O'Connor one said, "Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
The South is a world where the values of the old are constantly troubled by the region's bloody past and the encroaching progress of the new, and so much of Southern fiction focuses on trauma. For Faulkner, the two greatest sins of the South were the destruction of virgin land for industrial agriculture and, of course, slavery. While there have been plenty of games that deal with a protagonist fighting an evil corporation that wants to greedily tear up the land for whatever reason, few, if any, games deal directly with the history of American slavery. It's a tough topic, but if film and literature can attempt it, I see no reason why games could not. The shadow of slavery looms long over the South, but it hasn't made it into the video game medium as it has in film and literature. Perhaps a game set in the American South that deals with the issue of race directly could broaden the very, very problematic portrayal of race in video games. There's so much there to mine, even Quentin Tarantino is tackling the issue with his new exploitation-type film, Django Unchained:
As much as the setting factors into the game's mechanics, I can't help but feel that the game shortchanged the city of New Marais because it's mostly a covering. New Orleans is a weird, wonderful, haunted place full of fascinating people and a painful, beautiful history. There is nowhere like it in this country or any other, yet the game seems bent on keeping these aspects under wraps. We get hints of the racial tensions that possesses the town with Cole's war against Bertrand and the Militia as well as Nix's origin, and we get the weirder folklore side of the city in Festival of Blood. There are hints at religious fervor and drunken debauchery, the trauma of a natural disaster, and plenty of redneck stereotypes, but it just seemed to lack soul. I get that it's a "fish-out-of-water" type game in that you play an outsider in a hostile insider world, and for the most part that's fine--it's a hell of a lot of fun. So much of the game though, could have taken place in damn near any other city out there. After I finished the game, I couldn't help but ask, "Why did this game need to be set in the South?" It was the South "lite," which, to be honest, is fair for a game that's not about a Southerner--just a guy passing through on his way to better things. But for God's sake, the game's set in New Orleans, and they did so little with it! If you set a game in New Orleans (or some type of facsimile), then you best give this Southern boy some home cookin'.
New Orleans provides the easiest entry into this field because it is both urban and Southern, and it's different enough in its own right to not be completely absorbed by the South so much that it alienates visitors. In William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (a native Southerner) fields his Canadian's roommate's request for him to "[t]ell about the South. What's it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?" Indeed, the novel is largely about the difficulty to encapsulate history and culture of the South through written and spoken language. Yet Southerners are, by nature, storytellers (God knows I've got mine). It's what we're raised to do. So why not incorporate that in a videogame. Let play a game where a Southern protagonists attempts to recreate or understand dark past events or a family secret. The Southern literary tradition boasts some of the most freakish characters out there, and, as Flannery O'Connor one said, "Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have this penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
The South is a world where the values of the old are constantly troubled by the region's bloody past and the encroaching progress of the new, and so much of Southern fiction focuses on trauma. For Faulkner, the two greatest sins of the South were the destruction of virgin land for industrial agriculture and, of course, slavery. While there have been plenty of games that deal with a protagonist fighting an evil corporation that wants to greedily tear up the land for whatever reason, few, if any, games deal directly with the history of American slavery. It's a tough topic, but if film and literature can attempt it, I see no reason why games could not. The shadow of slavery looms long over the South, but it hasn't made it into the video game medium as it has in film and literature. Perhaps a game set in the American South that deals with the issue of race directly could broaden the very, very problematic portrayal of race in video games. There's so much there to mine, even Quentin Tarantino is tackling the issue with his new exploitation-type film, Django Unchained:
A similar project could work in a video game. Though a Tarantino unltraviolence-soaked revenge fantasy provides an interesting experiment with the subject, a quieter, more contemplative game could provide an equally interesting approach to the subject. We just need a development team brave enough to try.
Other genres are also well-suited for Southern settings. A survival horror game set in an old, haunted plantation would work well in the Southern Gothic tradition. The drug trade with the Dixie Mafia (it's a real thing) could make a great story for a shooter game. A historical game about the Civil War would also work well; it's been done before, but not recently--and not very well. A neo-noir story like Winter's Bone could provide a fascinating game set in the Appalachian hills, or something more action-oriented along the lines of Justified would make for a hell of a story about renegade cops and corrupt families. A survival game about a journey across the post-Katrina coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi practically writes itself.
The rolling hills of Appalachia, the long coastline, the deep woods of the Natchez Trace, the stain of human bondage that pervades the still standing plantations, and the small towns that dot the region all contain untapped potential for video game settings and stories. In an industry saturated with urban steel jungles, I can't help but feel tired of Empire City, Liberty City, Steelport, Los Angeles, Manhattan and countless others. The American South has numerous locales, a rich, troubled history, and countless stories to draw from for a potential video game. For it to happen, though, someone needs to take a chance below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Cheers y'all,
--David
Other genres are also well-suited for Southern settings. A survival horror game set in an old, haunted plantation would work well in the Southern Gothic tradition. The drug trade with the Dixie Mafia (it's a real thing) could make a great story for a shooter game. A historical game about the Civil War would also work well; it's been done before, but not recently--and not very well. A neo-noir story like Winter's Bone could provide a fascinating game set in the Appalachian hills, or something more action-oriented along the lines of Justified would make for a hell of a story about renegade cops and corrupt families. A survival game about a journey across the post-Katrina coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi practically writes itself.
The rolling hills of Appalachia, the long coastline, the deep woods of the Natchez Trace, the stain of human bondage that pervades the still standing plantations, and the small towns that dot the region all contain untapped potential for video game settings and stories. In an industry saturated with urban steel jungles, I can't help but feel tired of Empire City, Liberty City, Steelport, Los Angeles, Manhattan and countless others. The American South has numerous locales, a rich, troubled history, and countless stories to draw from for a potential video game. For it to happen, though, someone needs to take a chance below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Cheers y'all,
--David
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