So I just played Virginia. I owe the experience to the great gaming website Killscreen(https://killscreen.com/articles/virginia-vague-jumble-ideas/) ... which wrote a rather scathing review of it. Something about this review gave me pause though. The author traces the game's cinematic heritage, from X-Files to Twin Peaks and then going as far back as the silent films of the 1920’s. In theSo I just played Virginia. I owe the experience to the great gaming website Killscreen(https://killscreen.com/articles/virginia-vague-jumble-ideas/) ... which wrote a rather scathing review of it. Something about this review gave me pause though. The author traces the game's cinematic heritage, from X-Files to Twin Peaks and then going as far back as the silent films of the 1920’s. In the end it concludes that the game fails to live up to it’s heritage, saying “the game dives into an irreparable gulf between the way a film camera unrelentingly directs your gaze and the way a first-person videogame camera yields to player control, and all its mistakes begin to snowball from there.”
The critique picks up steam from there and while it admits "There are admirable attempts here at dealing with sexism, racial prejudice, and even gaslighting" it is essentially hostile. It’s primary complaint is that the narrative fails to give the player sufficient autonomy going so far as to say “But there is no reason, not one, that the player needs to be afforded control in any of Virginia’s scenes—except as a sop to interactivity in a game that otherwise evinces no interest in player control whatsoever.” At the same time it complains that the interactivity the game does provide, which is to say the ability to navigate the space of the scenes and interact with them in minimal ways is ruins its the cinematic aspirations saying “The clarity of meaning that can arise from a well-timed cut is almost entirely lost on the roving camera of a first-person videogame”.
All these contradictions and strong emotional responses from a source that is usually thoughtful and collected intrigued me... Behind the protests of the author I heard the all too familiar ‘But it’s not even a game’ that I have heard from more traditional game media outlets when they were faced with games like Dear Esther or Gone Home. Normally Killscreen is more self aware and interested in that kind of storytelling in games, so why had Virginia offended it’s sensibilities so much? It all gave me the sense that if I should investigate I might well find a game worth playing, and so I did.
So, Virginia...
The short of it is that I think in this case Killscreen missed the point almost entirely. They are right about many of the game's merits and some of it’s flaws, I won’t argue that it’s a perfect work of art. But it is a work of art and the reviewer’s assertion that there is not even one reason that the player needs to be given control gets directly to the heart of it, because there is indeed one very important reason. The thing that sets Virginia apart from other games or from movies is that you are not either passively watching the experience of characters as in cinema or playing through a game yourself. You are moving through the story AS the character.
On the title screen of the game the text below the title reads “Press x to take a trip”, not press x to play the game, this is the first clue as to what is about to happen here.
The limitations on your actions in Virginia are not the result of lazy developers, they are the expression of the choices of the character. Choices that are sometimes limited by the personality of the character, sometimes limited by their race or gender. When you have no choice but to open your purse and open a tube of lipstick and put it on before you can leave the room it is because that is the experience of the character. Welcome to her world.
The constant cinematic cuts mean that you are not walking down a corridor because it is between you and the next cut scene you are walking down it because the developers wanted you to have that experience. Rather than just venting the frustration and discomfort that it causes ask why the developers included it and what your response says about the character and about you as a player.
The first person perspective is critical to this attempt to embody the player in the body of the main character. It is subtly and well done and I believe has powerful impact in many scenes. From the first time you look down and see the color of your skin and shape of your body to the juxtaposition of perspective between the scene where you receive your badge to the later scene of an imagined future where you are giving a badge to a new female agent on that same stage.
The narrative itself is very challenging. It is filled with both flashbacks, imagined futures, dreams and in the case of the last minutes of the game an intense acid trip, yes we see what you did with the wording of the instructions on the title screen, how very clever of you.
Does the game make sense and present a tidy comprehensible story? Not so much. Is it something new and important, something that we will look back on as foundational to our art form in 50 years... probably.… Expand
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