David Lynch's Josh Brolin's Campo Santo's Fire Watch With Me: A Motion Picture Event

[SuperBiasedMan]

Knowing the Thumbs, I suspect that Henry is intentionally invoking a male characterisation and it may be part of his character development he is confronted with later down the line. I inferred that the trailer was meant to show Henry as being quite brash and forceful when he ignores the advice of the woman on the walkie talkie and trying to push a topic of conversation he wanted but she didn't. I would really be surprised if Campo Santo weren't consciously considering this.

[Mangela Lansbury]

My point was supposed to be about how it's kind of gross to try to retroactively bring up justifications for a decision that in nearly all cases has nothing to do with choosing the best option for the narrative and is instead just a Thing That You Do Because It's Always Like That. I'm not accusing Campo Santo of doing that (CS is one of the only studios that I can imagine actually having internal discussion about Henry being a straight white man), but it reeks of the worst sort of excuses that gamers and developers come up with.

 

"Female assassins were too hard to model."

 

"We didn't want to make a new physics model for Peach's skirt."

 

I mean, like I said, if after we've seen more it really does look like it's a straight white male playable character because the writers were straight white men and that's what they defaulted to, they deserve any criticism they get for that -- some of which will be from me. You are right to be suspicious of intent and ask questions, and I hope it turns out that the game as a text/Campo Santo answers them well enough on its/their own, for your sake and mine both.

 

What are we even talking about.

 

It's not like they picked the default five-oclock-shadow dudebro in his thirties voiced by Nolan North (no offense Nolan) as the protagonist, or made him male because they didn't know how to model a female. They could have just as easily chosen Delilah, but I imagine they wanted to tell a story about a mopey middle-aged loner forest ranger guy. And that is exactly the sort of person I would expect in a story about a fire lookout in Wyoming. If he was of another race for the sake of being diverse, it would probably break my suspension of disbelief. His race or whatever shouldn't be dictated a meta issue with games at large for the sake of 'not doing what everyone else is doing', it should be dictated by the story.

 

Just because this studio's first game isn't immediately groundbreakingly diverse doesn't mean they're frauds. And all we've seen so far is a short demo, it's not fair to judge the whole thing based on that.

 

Part of the problem is the choice of what stories to tell, and whether that story could have been told just as easily from the perspective of someone who wasn't a straight white male. Saying that someone's race is dictated by the story is a non-starter of an argument -- at some point very early on you make conscious decisions about who the story is about, and that decision could just as easily be that this person is a second generation Iranian immigrant as it is that they come from a nebulous white middle American background. It's a choice that was made by the creative team, not some Platonic truth that was plucked from the ether.

[Nachimir]

Threequel will be named WatchPaint

 

This has been done:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/534673

[TurboPubx-16]

My point was supposed to be about how it's kind of gross to try to retroactively bring up justifications for a decision that in nearly all cases has nothing to do with choosing the best option for the narrative and is instead just a Thing That You Do Because It's Always Like That. I'm not accusing Campo Santo of doing that (CS is one of the only studios that I can imagine actually having internal discussion about Henry being a straight white man), but it reeks of the worst sort of excuses that gamers and developers come up with.

 

Thank you for clarifying. Not only is this significantly different than what others were speculating what you were saying, but -

 

yes, clearly that's exactly what I said

 

fuck this, I'm out

 

Nevermind, then! 

[BobbyBesar]

Unfortunately, after very cursory googling, I could only find US Forest Service demographic info going back to 2009.

 

According to that, he should probably be black*. Although the demographic breakdown is probably different within Wyoming or wherever.

 

Edit: oops, misread the chart. Looks like its 81% white, I don't know what "index scores" are.

[TurboPubx-16]

Unfortunately, after very cursory googling, I could only find US Forest Service demographic info going back to 2009.

 

According to that, he should probably be black*. Although the demographic breakdown is probably different within Wyoming or wherever.

 

Edit: oops, misread the chart. Looks like its 81% white, I don't know what "index scores" are.

 

*Looks at can of worms all spilled out again* fuck this, I'm out

[BobbyBesar]

For the record, in my mind, this is still just "the Edward Abbey game", and as a result, I expect to be about a middle-aged white misanthrope.

[Chris]

My point was supposed to be about how it's kind of gross to try to retroactively bring up justifications for a decision that in nearly all cases has nothing to do with choosing the best option for the narrative and is instead just a Thing That You Do Because It's Always Like That. I'm not accusing Campo Santo of doing that (CS is one of the only studios that I can imagine actually having internal discussion about Henry being a straight white man), but it reeks of the worst sort of excuses that gamers and developers come up with.

 

"Female assassins were too hard to model."

 

"We didn't want to make a new physics model for Peach's skirt."

I totally understand where you're coming from. But I do think the "historically accurate" fallacy, at least as I understand it, has a lot more to do with settings that are in fact NOT historical, with a thin historical veneer applied. In this case our game is actually set in Wyoming in 1989. Not a fantasyland that's like 1989 Wyoming, but actually 1989 Wyoming. Of course it's still fiction so we could make the game and the characters be anything we want, but if we were to make Henry a black man (for instance) in this part of the country at that time, that in itself would be a pretty significant decision that would, if we are taking our job seriously, significantly change the premise of the game. That would be a totally valid and worthwhile thing to make a video game about; it's not what this particular video game is about. Sean has written a game about a black man in the South who takes charge of a young mixed-race girl, and those were significant choices that I believe were justified. I don't think he can fairly be accused of a lack of thoughtfulness in this arena. Sure, there are lots of decisions like this that get made without consideration, but I would hope that ours are not assumed to be that, based on our history.

[melmer]

Woohoo

[melmer]

You know, I'm not going to watch that. I casually skipped through with no sound on and saw some stuff, spoilt a couple scenarios, SPOILERS, I'd just rather experience this stuff for the first time whilst playing it.

FULL MEDIA BLACKOUT until the PS4 release... I might have a bit of a wait in my hands... With VR support... And smeller vision

[Patrick R]

There is so much swearing in this game!

 

EDIT: Spoiler alert. Sorry Mington.

[singlespace]

Unfortunately, after very cursory googling, I could only find US Forest Service demographic info going back to 2009.

 

According to that, he should probably be black*. Although the demographic breakdown is probably different within Wyoming or wherever.

 

Edit: oops, misread the chart. Looks like its 81% white, I don't know what "index scores" are.

 

Those aren't demographics or percentages: it's just a weighted index based on aggregate scores from surveys, which means it just says that many African Americans have rated it a goodish to mediocre place of employment based on various answers on a survey. The actual questions were:

• I recommend my organization as a good place to work. (Q. 40)
• Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your job. (Q. 69)
• Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your organization. (Q. 71)

But seriously, if you didn't bother to take the time to read the page and just posted it, that pretty much means you made up your mind that you were correct before you even looked at the evidence and that's not a good thing.

[JonCole]

I totally understand where you're coming from. But I do think the "historically accurate" fallacy, at least as I understand it, has a lot more to do with settings that are in fact NOT historical, with a thin historical veneer applied. In this case our game is actually set in Wyoming in 1989. Not a fantasyland that's like 1989 Wyoming, but actually 1989 Wyoming. Of course it's still fiction so we could make the game and the characters be anything we want, but if we were to make Henry a black man (for instance) in this part of the country at that time, that in itself would be a pretty significant decision that would, if we are taking our job seriously, significantly change the premise of the game. That would be a totally valid and worthwhile thing to make a video game about; it's not what this particular video game is about. Sean has written a game about a black man in the South who takes charge of a young mixed-race girl, and those were significant choices that I believe were justified. I don't think he can fairly be accused of a lack of thoughtfulness in this arena. Sure, there are lots of decisions like this that get made without consideration, but I would hope that ours are not assumed to be that, based on our history.

 

Yeah, the whole "historical context" thing aligns with what you're saying - it's a bad excuse when it's... an excuse and not actually history. Assassin's Creed seems to be the best example because AC is proudly sci-fi alternate history, so claiming that certain things have to be a certain way because of "historical context" is a little crazy because there was no massive Templar conspiracy and no aliens trying to stop a seemingly inevitable apocalypse in real life. If you're actually presenting a historically accurate setting, you would have to contrive reasonable context for unusual design choices unlike in AC where everything is contrived so one arbitrary choice is more or less equivalent to another arbitrary choice.

[Gormongous]

Yeah, the whole "historical context" thing aligns with what you're saying - it's a bad excuse when it's... an excuse and not actually history. Assassin's Creed seems to be the best example because AC is proudly sci-fi alternate history, so claiming that certain things have to be a certain way because of "historical context" is a little crazy because there was no massive Templar conspiracy and no aliens trying to stop a seemingly inevitable apocalypse in real life. If you're actually presenting a historically accurate setting, you would have to contrive reasonable context for unusual design choices unlike in AC where everything is contrived so one arbitrary choice is more or less equivalent to another arbitrary choice.

 

I really don't want my comment to reflect on Firewatch, which I'm sure has the most consideration put into all these decisions, but I do think historical accuracy as a top-level goal is bunk and a creator just needs to make decisions that work for the story they want to tell, however "real" they mean it to be in the end. Otherwise they're just chasing a chimera, and not even a particularly interesting or worthwhile one. Even well-written TV shows with authentic historical settings have instances that even entry-level specialists find distractingly inaccurate (I'm thinking of Deadwood trying for period swearing but opting not to use it because everyone sounded like Yosemite Sam, or Mad Men using modern business lingo because period lingo sounds folksy and imprecise). There's just no way to catch everything, please everyone, and do good work, so I really don't get when anyone spends much time at all dwelling about the historical accuracy of a work independent from the narrative and mechanical choices that inform it. If they do dwell on it, what they usually mean anyway by "accuracy" is "details conforming to the average person's impression of how it must have been," which is a weirdly specific yet underwhelming ambition for a story to have.

 

Assassin's Creed is particularly baffling to me because it's terrible history and terrible storytelling, so when the developers talk in interviews, it's like they're having it both ways, with one hand washing the other. They had to mess with historical details seemingly at random for reasons of story, and they had to make the writing odd, abortive, and overblown for reasons of history. If the story you're telling doesn't work with the historical setting you want, that's fine, but change the setting (or at least part of it), not your story. I don't think the decision to include genre elements makes a bit of difference in terms of how a good writer handles historical detail.

 

 

EDIT: I'm still not happy with this post, but hopefully it's better than the much-more-insufferable first draft, which focused mostly on how the past is already fictionalized into narrative by means of history, so the functional difference between the historical settings of (for instance) Gone Home (as history) and Harry Potter (as alternate history) is vanishingly small, beyond what directly relates to the plots of each.

[Apelsin]

Yeah, the quest for historical accuracy in some games is misguided since historical accuracy is not really what those games are about. A common example of this are all fantasy games set in worlds inspired by medieval Europe. These games are not generally about medieval societal structures and politics although this is what often is modeled and is defended by stating "That's just how it was in those days", referring to a time and place that never actually existed. In those cases it just indicates a certain degree of laziness, from the developers for not taking the time to try something different and from the fans for not questioning those choices.

 

The use of language in Mad Men and Deadwood strikes me as an example where the creators actually have figured out what part of the setting that the work is actually about and then removing other period details that either just distracts or even detracts from that. The characterization of Don Draper as a suave and cool marketing bloke is more important than the use of period terms. Overall I think period language is one of the things creators could almost skip entirely as, usually, the way people spoke are not really what stories are about. Language is just the vehicle for stories and it's better that it actually reaches the audience rather than breaking down somewhere along the road because you used some archaic way of speaking that people don't really understand anymore or find "unnatural". 

 

Not sure if I actually added anything here, but writing stuff is fun.

[Gormongous]

The use of language in Mad Men and Deadwood strikes me as an example where the creators actually have figured out what part of the setting that the work is actually about and then removing other period details that either just distracts or even detracts from that. The characterization of Don Draper as a suave and cool marketing bloke is more important than the use of period terms. Overall I think period language is one of the things creators could almost skip entirely as, usually, the way people spoke are not really what stories are about. Language is just the vehicle for stories and it's better that it actually reaches the audience rather than breaking down somewhere along the road because you used some archaic way of speaking that people don't really understand anymore or find "unnatural".

 

Yeah, I think that fictional works, even (and especially) historical fiction, demand a certain degree of intensity and hyperreality, which in turn demands that the creator discard whatever factual elements distract from the historical "truth" that the creator intends to highlight with their choice of setting. It's an in-depth process that must take a lot of work, because you have to know what there is to know what to leave out. I remember (someone talking about) Hilary Mantel talking about making her own card catalog of Thomas Cromwell's actions and writings from day to day? 

[osmosisch]

I think regardless of the discussion in general terms, we can all agree that we have great faith that Campo Santo gives these things the consideration they deserve

[melmer]

I notice Henry has all four of his limbs

Fucking ableists

[JonCole]

I think there's a difference between historical accuracy as a somewhat unattainable complete goal and what's going on here. Historical accuracy as it pertains to games set in periods tens or hundreds of years in the past seems just as pointless as is suggested by a couple of you. Considering a completely accurate depiction seems impossible and some aspects like language would actually make a game harder to understand, it makes less sense to endeavor to capture that chimera.

 

But historical context in more recent games has a lot more value in setting a place with more convenience and allowing the player to fill in story/context using memory. I mean, Gone Home was a great example of this - the context was fairly contemporary, so I could relate to the setting and recognize things in the environment that were familiar and thus more inherently appealing and attractive.

 

I don't really know where I'm going with this, aside from the fact where historical context is less valuable as it turns into actual History with a capital H.

[mikemariano]

What kind of crafting system does this game have?  How many trees and rocks do you have to break apart in order to create tools?  Can you craft gunpowder and combine it with the wood to make the fireworks?

[mikemariano]

What kind of crafting system does this game have?  How many trees and rocks do you have to break apart in order to create tools?  Can you craft gunpowder and combine it with the wood to make the fireworks?

 

I guess what I'm really asking is does someone want to recreate Firewatch on the Idle Thumbs Minecraft server?

[Chris]

I really don't want my comment to reflect on Firewatch, which I'm sure has the most consideration put into all these decisions, but I do think historical accuracy as a top-level goal is bunk and a creator just needs to make decisions that work for the story they want to tell, however "real" they mean it to be in the end. Otherwise they're just chasing a chimera, and not even a particularly interesting or worthwhile one.

Of course this is true, but noting that something makes historical sense in context of a good faith effort to couch something in a believable period is not the same thing as saying that everything MUST hew to a normalized average of all historical factors. In our case, Henry is who he is for a lot of reasons that I'm not going to talk about halfway through development on a web forum; I'm simply saying that it to me does not seem at all unreasonable that a game set in 1989 Wyoming is about a white dude. All that aside, to be honest, it's kind of frustrating to address this stuff at all because in my opinion the work should simply speak for itself once it's actually out and none of this should matter because if we do our job right the characters in this story will be honest and will ring true based on what's in the text.

[Gormongous]

I think there's a difference between historical accuracy as a somewhat unattainable complete goal and what's going on here. Historical accuracy as it pertains to games set in periods tens or hundreds of years in the past seems just as pointless as is suggested by a couple of you. Considering a completely accurate depiction seems impossible and some aspects like language would actually make a game harder to understand, it makes less sense to endeavor to capture that chimera.

 

But historical context in more recent games has a lot more value in setting a place with more convenience and allowing the player to fill in story/context using memory. I mean, Gone Home was a great example of this - the context was fairly contemporary, so I could relate to the setting and recognize things in the environment that were familiar and thus more inherently appealing and attractive.

 

I don't really know where I'm going with this, aside from the fact where historical context is less valuable as it turns into actual History with a capital H.

 

I didn't mean for my post to sound like I was saying that perfect historical accuracy is impossible so any effort towards it is pointless. I more just meant to say that historical accuracy as a central goal or justification for a creative decision feels empty to me because it's always limited and therefore defined by other more relevant and important decisions, like a creator's willingness to do the work or the demands of the narrative. Whether it's genre or mainstream fiction, it still feels to me like describing the position of a chair in a room by saying everywhere the chair isn't.

 

Of course this is true, but noting that something makes historical sense in context of a good faith effort to couch something in a believable period is not the same thing as saying that everything MUST hew to a normalized average of all historical factors. In our case, Henry is who he is for a lot of reasons that I'm not going to talk about halfway through development on a web forum; I'm simply saying that it to me does not seem at all unreasonable that a game set in 1989 Wyoming is about a white dude. All that aside, to be honest, it's kind of frustrating to address this stuff at all because in my opinion the work should simply speak for itself once it's actually out and none of this should matter because if we do our job right the characters in this story will be honest and will ring true based on what's in the text.

 

Yeah, this is definitely my last comment on this, but I do get what you're saying. It must be frustrating to have this conversation going without direct input from people actually in the know. I just wanted to point out that it's two very different things to say "We're making a game about the experience of a white dude in Wyoming in 1989" and "We're making a game about the experience of a white dude because it's Wyoming in 1989." I'm glad the former statement is more the case here, as if there were ever any doubt.

[SilentBtAmazing]

Sorry to change the topic a little, but fwiw I didn't find the trailer very appealing and actually thought "this game is probably not for me" because the segments shown were a little more scripted and I don't like the TF2 style hands personally.

And then the playthrough video totally won me over and I loved every part shown.

Figured that was odd enough to share.

[Gormongous]

Sorry to change the topic a little, but fwiw I didn't find the trailer very appealing and actually thought "this game is probably not for me" because the segments shown were a little more scripted and I don't like the TF2 style hands personally.

And then the playthrough video totally won me over and I loved every part shown.

Figured that was odd enough to share.

 

No, please change the topic. What about the playthrough differed from the trailer? They were of a piece to me.