Game Natures: Firewatch and The Long Dark

hi I'm no Gervais in this video I'm going to be looking at two volumous games Firewatch which constructs its wilderness through narrative and the long dark which constructs its wilderness through mechanics and through the systems I'm going to be contrasting each games intent and where they agree it's also a high spoiler video since Firewatch is pretty much all plot and I'm going to be talking about all the block and fire watch anyway let's get started fantasy landscapes follow a predictable rhythm Tamriel theta's the Forgotten Realms the Commonwealth new Vegas these are all gorgeous varied places full of treasure and conflict they're grander than anything you'll find in real life as a backdrop to stories that are larger than life reach greater heights than what you might expect for your real self stories of saviors and villains and stories that put the player in control of shaping the destinies of kingdoms these fantasy kingdoms are usually sprawling in scope but condensed in content every nook and cranny has some reward either an item or a fight or a story in terms of scaling down the fantastic for ease of tourism it's not wrong to call them blood-soaked bullet-riddled magic singed Disneyland's of escapism and they're great that way the exploration reward balance of modern open-world titles is very satisfying refined and honed through the many RPGs and shooters and adventure titles that have explored the forum over the years Firewatch ignores quite a bit of what open-world adventure fantasies have adopted as more or less standard features collectibles side quests crafting monsters that's because fire watch is not about a fantasy landscape even one based on a real one like fallout Firewatch is about Wyoming just Wyoming the mountains and woods and trails and isolation of Wyoming that's not something I've ever seen a game try to do before there have been dozens if not hundreds of escapist fantasy realms that are much more complex much more visually and mechanically intricate than anything in fire watch the game is fine with this that intricacy and complexity and artifice is simply not helpful to expressing Wyoming we simulate these virtual worlds arrange them to be as entertaining an action-packed as possible because the real world is much less inclined to entertain us it just is as it is any adventure you have in the Wyoming wilderness in real life is when you bring with you your own expectations and needs your own equipment and supplies your own history and your own motivations you carry these things with you and the guide and inform the nature of your adventure if you grow and learn and or if you choose not to if you feel comfortable in the wild or if you do nothing but suffer out there Wyoming itself could not possibly give less of a how you do it when the landscape is beautiful it is because you are alive and feeling that way about it nothing else the reality of the western landscape is vast and savage and indifferent and that's been so compelling to so many people that writing about the landscape has been an enduring literary sub-genre for generations back not just cowboys and Indians in the Hollywood Western aesthetic but many other writings from many other perspectives nature spiritualists like John Muir and transcendently cranky Park Rangers like Edward Abbey fiction authors like Annie Proulx and Sherman Alexie and Cormac McCarthy people have been telling stories about Wyoming the real Wyoming with a lot of depth for many years Firewatch is the first time anybody's given it a serious attempt to nailed it down using the visual and interactive language of video games particularly there's two big complaints about fire watch that many people have and the first one is that it's a very poor open-world outdoorsman ship game the second is that the mystery is a bait and switch that its failure to provide fantastical resolutions to it's unrealistic suggestions constitute some kind of broken promise to the player both these criticisms are based in the idea that fire watch as a game must provide some kind of deliberate defined consumer value either an interactive elements like collectibles and mountaineering or an escapist satisfaction like if it actually indulges more paranoid the idea behind both complaints is that fire watch is providing bad value per the 20 big ones that you spent on it problem with that is that fire watch isn't really even operating as a consumer product it's a genuine work of fiction and like many works of fiction it doesn't contain what the author feels it doesn't need it's not about features it's about Henry run-down guilt-ridden over 40 Henry heading out into the wilderness to hide from his many pains fire watch only contains the things strictly relevant to what the story needs to resolve Henry's arc even the plots red herrings all serve a narrative purpose they're all about Henry in a way it's got the creative economy of a short story or a stage play Sam Shepard's true West is a good point of comparison it is also a two-character story this time about brothers and it focuses on how the emptiness of the land drives you crazy and although crazy things happen in true West it is only about the characters in the place it ends with a pile of stolen toasters in a fistfight it's great eleventh I've talked before about how game design and technical theater have a lot in common you're using a limited budget and forced perspectives to create an impression of a place and underline the themes of a story and it combines practical necessity like moving around the stage efficiently for blocking purposes with the artistic arrangement Firewatch has that feel about it it has a very limited open-world the only purpose of which is to establish tone and place and move the plot along there are cash boxes with notes from former lookouts and sometimes another unusual item or two but none of them are consequential their curiosities not collectibles they're all locked with a code one two three four which does sound like the kind of combination an idiot would have on their luggage but what it comes down to is that fire watch is fundamentally opposed to the idea of minigames and distractions its portrayal of Wyoming as an open-world really is just that it's outdoors when you go for a hike you don't end the hike three levels higher with pockets full of gold and a lightning dagger you end the hike with the joy of having been in the woods that's all you can reasonably expect and total biscuits video on fire watch he said that the walks through the game's limited open world are purposeless and detract from the stories experience the thing is these hikes are the explicit reason that fire watch is a game and not a movie or a play or a short story video games are a unique medium from all of those capable of providing unique experiences from more traditional artistic presentations Firewatch has the creative focus of a traditional work of fiction as well it only has the things that it wants you to pay attention to in the order it wants you to pay attention to them one of the most vocal complaints about fire watch is that it has too many plot threads that go nowhere that the ending is a huge disappointment because it ends quietly with no epilogue or sorting out of player choice it defies the expectations of open-world adventure but it fits exactly into the rhythms themes and subversions of Western American literature since when does a Sherman Alexie short story ever do a single thing that the reader wants or expects it to do with her in characters or plot or how the stories wrap up consumer satisfaction was never the goal for alexei telling the story he wanted to tell in the manner he wanted to tell it was the goal all along camposanto are doing the same with fire watch fire watch does not want to tell a videogame story with conspiracies and monsters and time-travel it wants to tell a story about Wyoming the manor it wants to tell that story is with a first-person limited open-world adventure in a short story you'll alternate between description and dialogue with movies you jump around between camera angles and perspectives with a game you get both the background environment and of the dialogue at the same time with a fixed perspective that makes what you do and how you experience the world more personal and more immediate than any passive viewing format you experience the world of fire watch exclusively through hiking that's true but think about how much the format affects the pacing and presentation though if this wasn't movie all the quiet moments would be condensed to quick cuts it was prose it would have to spend time setting the scene from nothing actively suggesting how to interpret the environment any pool in her short story people in hell just want a drink of water wrote about Wyoming quote the wild country Indigo Jags of mountain grassy plain everlasting tumbled stone like fallen cities the flaring roll of sky provokes a spiritual shuddered it is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt it is like a claw in the gut that is the wyoming the fire watch goes after but it shows you that wyoming is only a game can foot step after foot step through a watercolor world of light and mood the way the lighting in fire watch the smoke the rustles in the brush create mood and an impression of place is something that only games can do the games allow a player to explore this space at their own pace following their own curiosities and surveying their own vistas Firewatch does not have a list of features to keep the player entertained they are depending entirely on character and environment to compel the player it is a piece of traditional media using the tactile interactive forms of new media and I haven't been drawn in by a game like it in a really long time Firewatch is structured around a mystery but the core of the plot what's really going on is in the prologue Firewatch starts with an introductory sequence of interactive text mixed up with heading to the trailhead and walking up to the observation tower that fire watch is centered around as far as the map is concerned Henry your character meets his wife Julia in a Colorado bar you get to choose a series of binary options about how Henry reacts to situations that come up over the course of several years of their marriage shaping a dynamic between Henry and Julia people have complained that from a gameplay perspective the choices you make in the intro aren't returned - except for the name of the dog that you buy together there's no special ending for the choices you make no particular reward in terms of items or epilogue this is being pitched as choices not mattering in Firewatch even after you get out in the wilderness and start talking to Delilah on the radio the dialogue choices have no mechanical value they adjust no variables Firewatch isn't a game about mechanical rewards it's only really trying to tell one story which does absolutely change depending on choice the game simply doesn't show you the resolutions to these choices let's talk about the ending in the introduction when you're making all these choices and clicking some actions where you have no choice you're shaping how Henry and Julia see each other they were in love at the start how much love is Henry willing to demonstrate by the end after Julia is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's I found the interactive text portions really compelling clicking on Henry's actions choosing between two hard options deliberately kinetically advancing Henry through years of messy difficult unpredictable life ties the player to him you don't choose the big things like divorce or anything like that you just steer Henry's temperament in the quiet everyday moments that roll along while the huge and difficult things resolved glacially in the background the game pitches itself as an adult game all teams but the most adult thing about it is how it treats the passage of time things don't happen spectacularly or immediately you see Henry's past is an accumulation of little moments in time you see as present as a stream of images and interactions hiking through the Wyoming mountains and his future you can only plan foreign guests by the time the game ends you know there is no conspiracy you never meet Delilah and all there is to do is make your plans for the next thing say goodbye over the radio and go home I've seen a lot of people say that this is the most disappointing ending they've ever seen in a piece of media that the point of the game must therefore be that life is just disappointment and also go yourself in any other medium but video games Firewatch is ending would be pretty conventional and straightforward but games are perceived need mechanical responses to choice to make people feel like it matters Firewatch does actually have response to mechanical choice it's just done with no fanfare or gamification on the morning of the last day henry's wedding ring is sitting on the desk do you take it the very last scene has the lila helping henry figure out what he should do about julia do you talk to Delilah about resolving your past or do you ask her why she wouldn't stay to meet you last shot before the credits is of Henry's hand in my game he wore the wedding ring what about your Henry the prologue establishes how deep Henry and Julia are connected and your time in Wyoming is enough time for Henry to put a value on that connection there is no epilogue because you are supposed to know by the end of the game who Henry is and what I'll do if guided him to a decision you've shaped his personality that point of decision is the climax then Henry has to go home and live it and they don't show that part the Henry I knew in the game had grown tired of running away from his pain and was finally going off to confront it I thought that was a hugely satisfying ending it's not saying life is disappointment because possibly the player is disappointed that the game was not a traditional mystery Firewatch is one pivotal vivid season in Henry's life where everything is changing and nothing is certain that's the plot that Firewatch resolves so well with it's quiet conversational ending how often in real life are things neatly tied up after k after a chaotic season of your life but when you look back there's always a moment or a conversation you can point to as a major part of how the became now for Henry it's that brief moment of goodbye at Delilah's desk that moment is going to shape him for a long time for Delilah it was the moment of hello look out asked her if she could confirm that there was some kid living in the two forks Tower the biggest subplot of the game the main plot being about Henry's marriage is the mystery of who's listening in on Henry and Delilah's conversations on the first day is Henry the fire lockout three important plot threads are introduced one is through conversations with Delilah about the former occupants of the two forks Lookout Ned and Brian Goodwin Ned was an army vet with PTSD and drugged his kid out here into the middle of the Wyoming wilderness to try and spark some fire in the kid about traditional manly pursuits like rock climbing Ryan though was a nerdy kid tabletop RPG player and in fact you find a map that Brian drew in the two forks office when you first arrived of a fantasy version of the forest with fantasy versions of important landmarks including the bunker that he find on the very last day of the game the second plot thread comes from these drunk teenage girls who are shooting off fireworks and skinny-dipping you yell at them to knock off the fireworks and they call you a pervert in a sad old man out in the woods and that's the thing Henry is a sad old man out in the woods the sequence is interesting because of how to use his naked teens not to titillate but to underline the gulf of life experience between people who are so young is to be literally carefree and a man hauling around years of guilt and regret ineffectually trying to act as caretaker of a place that defies being cared for you have no real power over the teens no meaningful authority to get them to stop disrespecting the park but did he pick up all their beer cans I did that's the way a person ought to act in the woods I figured and so I acted that way in the game I felt like Henry would act that way just because the game gives no achievement for beer cans collected doesn't it still matter that the player can characterize Henry that way isn't that some measure of power than Henry hands the girls don't care at all for the park or for Henry's attempts of authority the next day a power line is cut and the girls disappear their camp having been ransacked they leave a note behind blaming Henry blaming you later you learn the girls are missing and Delilah lied about having seen them if the police get involved the both of you are in pretty deep as you learn this on the precipice of a canyon at sunset the land is infinite and beautiful but feels constricting for the moment to go home means too many inconvenient questions it seems doubtful how you'll get out of these woods at all if you're blamed for the teens death so Henry starts wondering who or what might be responsible which brings us to the third plot thread from the first day the mysterious figure with the flashlight who vandalizes your tower the man recording every word of conversation between you and Delilah from Henry's perspective everything is falling apart around him can I trust Delilah is Delilah even real one night you hear Julia over the walkie talkie Delilah says you were speaking to her the whole time half-asleep lost in a dream is she right someone is definitely out there though watching the danger is real as the mystery progresses it seems as if there is a government research station somewhere in the forest there is later you find out that the station is just a wildlife observation station the tracking devices are for deer and there are pictures of deer next to the clipboard of observations that Henry assumes has to do with him and Delilah there are reports about the two of them but these were added by the third party the man with the flashlight in a fit of paranoia Delilah suggests burning the camp I chose not to but the flashlight guy burnt it anyway to pin something on Henry and Delilah to drive them away and to stop them from looking any closer the thing he's hiding is in a locked cave with a sinister name cave four or five - but the only thing down there is Bryan Goodwin's mangled skeleton still where it lay after a fall he took walled Ned was just trying to teach him to climb rocks Ned never achieved the body and he never went home he didn't want to answer for what happened and simply stayed in the woods hiding in the place that Bryan marked as the iron fortress on his map right next to where the teens camped but I didn't kill the teens it turns out they were simply arrested without identification after they stole a tractor and were lost in the shuffle of county jails for some reason many players feel like crazy guy hides in the woods rather than answer questions is less realistic a resolution to the mystery then government behavior experiment gone mad in video game narratives the fantastic is the norm so what does that make the normal here's the thing the back country of America is fold to the brim of desperate misanthropes who do not want to be found sometimes the misanthropes are Park Rangers like Edward Abbey wrote desert solitaire about his time in arches nat'l monument Abby hates damn near every single thing about civilization and conversation and the pre cleanness of his disposition and that of the landscape come into a kind of beautiful harmony over the course of the book henry's like that he reaches out for connection more than a bee but for both they came to the wilderness because they were weary of being seen which really does make it all the more unsettling that Henry is so rarely truly alone in his tower in another park ranger memoir the more recent nature noir Jordan Fisher Smith comes to the American river canyons an area condemned to be destroyed by the Auburn dam being built further downstream he was one of three Rangers responsible for law enforcement over literally hundreds of square miles of theoretically empty country Fisher Smith has to deal with murderers hiding in caves desperate armed men who still illegally pan for gold in the era of cellphones and picking up the pieces after bridge suicides Henry is a lot like Fisher Smith given authority over a wild and dangerous place that he can neither control nor save peopled exclusively by those who do not want to be found and Ned is not so different from Henry either he's just become trapped by his mistakes by a shame trapped by his paranoia first of all the realism of Ned is the crazy guy messing with Delilah and Henry from the background that Firewatch gives you Ned is an army vet and as the former lookout for the two forks tower he does know the frequencies of the radios he's been doing nothing for the past three years but reading mystery novels hiking and wallowing in regret if nature noir is reflective of what the wilderness law-enforcement experience is like then none of this is particularly outside the realm of possibility late in the game Henry pins all the notes maps and drawings he's found to the walls of the lookout with little index cards containing typewritten notes on possible connections between them as soon as Henry started doing this I knew he was on the wrong track is making a beautiful mind collage out here in the Wyoming wilderness and this clearly is not supposed to be a puzzle of the player can put together it is a red flag that Henry is losing it out here with nothing but the knowledge that Julia is both gone forever and still part of his life Ned has Pete TSD from his time in the army but Henry is not doing so hot himself even when he first sets foot on the trailheads Ned deliberately uses all of these paranoid suggestions and miss directions like typing up the fake reports and slipping them in the deer station binder and Henry who is after his time with Julia comfortable with delusion runs wild with it this is where the division between Henry and the player becomes important as a player you can side with delilah who plays the Scully to Henry's Mulder Delilah is drawn into the mystery because of Henry's investment in it she's skeptical of the details he wants to believe specifically he wants to believe that there is something out here larger than the pain he carries but there isn't Ned and Henry our peers in regret but Ned's guilt is far larger and he can never really leave when you the player thought Henry and Delilah would be held responsible for the deaths of the teenagers didn't you feel completely over and trapped even though what happened was a total accident that's the purpose of that whole plot thread to build sympathy with Ned how he must have felt when Bryon's when Bryan's accident happened he didn't tell anyone Bryan was out here would have been fired for it and Delilah was complicit in keeping his secret he was caught trapped by his own lies his own failures and the crushing emptiness of the Wyoming backcountry like Henry and Delilah Ned came to the wilderness so as not to be seen so as not to have to explain himself to anyone not only was his son dead but returning to civilization mentor reckoning for his whole litany of pains and failures so he never went back Ned kept running kept hiding kept driving Henry's to feel as scared and paranoid as him so that Henry would never notice that Ned was there Ned is who Henry could be if he let the weight of his pain consume him entirely there is no conspiracy no murdered teenagers and the fact of that frees Henry allows him to choose a different path from Ned the resolution of the mystery is not intended to be disappointing it's intended to be a relief in unburdening of both legal responsibilities and emotional fatalism that makes leaving the burning forest possible for Henry then there's the tragedy of Bryan Goodwin and Delilah's friendship with him if Delilah had put her job ahead of her desire to have friends on the other end of the walkie-talkie Bryan would have been reported to the park supervisor and Brian would have been sent home without fanfare three years ago when their lives would have all gone on instead Brian wound up at the bottom of a ravine with his skull crushed in and med lives life of permanent self-imposed exile from civilization and responsibilities both all of that hinged on one moment in time when Delilah had to choose between two things there is a boy or there isn't a boy in the tower to say over the radio the thing that you the player do all game long the small conversational choices you make over the squawk of the walkie-talkie the kind of binary choice he made in the introduction to the game was the root of Delilah's greatest regret in this way the mystery component of Firewatch really isn't much about Henry you're the one to put in the footwork but this is the Lila's story you're uncovering and for the people hoping Henry and Delilah would be together in a romantic way at the end of the game this is why she wouldn't with Henry Delilah doesn't want to be witnessed by someone who knows her guilt any more than Ned does she and Henry are close friends but ultimately they know too much about each other by the end of the summer have been too close to the raw regrets and frenzied panics of one another to truly move past it at the end of Firewatch both Henry and Delilah must move on to something new that's not something they would be able to accomplish together and they both sense that Delilah particularly has a lot on her plate with Ryan's death Brian's death is a particular kind of wilderness tragedy the innocent who suffers for their refusal to see the world for the harshness it contains Timothy Treadwell the subject of Werner Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man was a figure like that he trusted that he was a likable guy and that bears real live grizzly bears would agree that he was fun to be around and for many more years than you'd expect that willful innocence was actually rewarded summer after summer is a naive solace in the wild country with the Bears until one time he and his girlfriend were eaten alive by bears that were strangers to them or consider Christopher McCandless the subject of Jon Krakauer's book into the wild McCandless lived 119 days in the Alaskan wilderness with little more than the conviction that it was spiritually noble to do so until he died of food poisoning cold and alone in the back of a rusted-out bus Brian Goodwin tackled the wilderness through enthusiastic escapism transforming the wilderness from an uncaring expansive rock country into a fantasy world with adventures something Brian felt like he could control and participate in his father kept forcing him to confront the harder realities nature Ryan hid Ned's climbing Pitons in the hope that he wouldn't have to go climbing anymore Ned though Hall de Brian by the scruff of his neck out of the world of escape from two works into the indifference of Wyoming Brian didn't survive the transition Ryan's death isn't just Ned's fault it's a result of the tiny human failings of Brian Ned and Delilah all wrapped up together the things they came to the wilderness to hide conspiring to band together and manifest in the worst possible way this is the mystery that Henry solves and Firewatch whether this is disappointing depends pretty much on whether you were expecting escape from two works or if you were expecting Wyoming Firewatch is a wilderness game that doesn't make a game out of the wilderness using its characters store in human elements to create a work of traditional Western fiction that uses the first-person perspective the pacing of first-person games and the artistic possibilities of the Unity game engine to illustrate and not to drive the work but let's look at a game that does the opposite the long dark would be quick to point out that it is not about the American West but about the Canadian north however the way the game portrays the land is perfectly in keeping with traditions about the west and wilderness fiction Alaska fiction is almost a sub sub-genre but if environmental literature in general has respect for the indifference of landscape Canadian and Alaskan environmental literature has a respect for his lethality above all else what true frontier there still is in North America is mostly in the north of Canada even though huge tracts of the United States are undeveloped or underdeveloped we've got nature pretty well surrounded and on the run in most places Canada trickles away into a mysterious frozen void of mountains and snow long dark is a survival simulation that takes that mysterious and hostile environment and then cranks it up a bit to make the players situation truly dire the long dark is not bound by realism while it's grounded in reality and doesn't contain anything truly supernatural what it presents is an escapist fantasy of triumph over the harshest nature can throw at you one of the first big chapter books they had you read when I was in elementary school was Gary pulsons hatchet also a survival fantasy Brian its main characters it is soft and young his plane crashes in the backwoods and by the time he exits the wilderness has begun to master the woods and master himself the difficulty settings of the long dark changed the tone of your adventure quite a bit how quickly starved how aggressive the dangerous animals are how easy it is to repair clothes and build fires on the lowest setting you get a hatchet experience requiring craft and ingenuity but giving you the space to look after yourself as you need to it's too easy the middle difficulty is a little more Jack London where the violence and blood and hunger come into focus more where it is not simply that the land is murderously cruel it's that everything within it is as well in it you're always dying hunger thirst disease wolf attacks bear attacks wasting your last book of matches ineffectually trying to ignite a broken up chair all the fatal failures you can experience are much more likely and that's the right speed for the long dark constantly rubbing elbows with your own mortality the highest difficulty is like the movie the revenant ten minutes again incompletely worked by a bear at the beginning only to call half dead through a frozen hell for my laughter aching miserable Nile survival on the highest difficulty requires luck and skill in equal measure and every single fire along with every single night's sleep is a triumph over the overwhelming odds that you will die either a meal or a popsicle long dark does not view time like fire watt does in fact it really does not care for time at all besides as a measure of your ability to endure you have no character you'll have no past you'll have no future you only have the beautiful struggle of the immediate this immediacy is what games excel at their greatest artistic strength is a medium requiring active participation on the players part games especially first-person games put you in the moment also because of that immediacy though there's a drive to condense the action and condense the adventure to adjust the mechanics in a way that speeds up the pacing the long dark has the look in the feel of realism but it's a tweaked and supercharged take on realistic themes instead of something approaching the flesh-and-blood experience the long dark is a pure game relying on its mechanical systems for tone pacing and to drive player interaction it ends up creating some incredible unscripted moments though for example on one of my first few tries I found myself somewhere that was warm but where I was starving to death I glimpsed something further down the railroad tracks earlier and I knew I would surely die if I spent the night in the cabin I walked out into a blizzard in the middle of the night to look for food I led a flare and at the edge of the flares light were the green eyes of wolves I kept throwing the flare at them if they got too close and made my way down the tracks this way a starving man being shadowed by starving beasts with only a sphere of fizzing bright light separating the two or when I was trying to light a fire in an ice fishing hut in the hopes of surviving a blizzard or venturing out after recovering from food poisoning and finding the Sun bright in the savage world of the long dark look and full of possibility and adventure the way you're constantly dying of cold exhaustion thirst and hunger drives the rhythms of play you can establish a base camp and live off the land or you can continuously trudge from place to place scavenging from what civilization has left behind and taking what you need this is unfortunately the weakest part of the game the long dark is about the wilderness but it's also out of the classic video game compulsion to search every drawer locker and wastebasket it plays a lot like a slow contemplatively fallout 4 item collection crafting and spending time breaking down objects in the environment makes up a sizeable chunk of the game there are monsters to hunt in the form of highly aggressive wolves and bears as well as prey animals like deer and rabbits there are corpses to loot and weapons to fire and the wilderness is deliberately post-apocalyptic colder and harsher than real life with everyone dead and no way out even though you're passing through wilderness spaces they don't share the chaos of the wilderness they're cleverly engineered playgrounds of survival optimized for rewarding sandbox play none of these are bad things it's just that none of these are new things either and while the long dark is a beautiful and engaging title with a charmingly Canadian perspective it still plays close to the rhythms of many mainstream games like dying light or Fallout 4 or even minecraft of course the long dark is currently an early access title and will have a story added to it later on I think that'll be a key addition an actual reason to move through the environment beyond curiosity and as a post-apocalyptic story building on top of a wilderness survival fantasy it's got an easier time of it than fire watch as far as rewarding player expectations are concerned even if the player doesn't like this story and the direction that the story goes they're still the moments created by the dynamic game system the unpredictable pattern nitin days sated in starving predator and prey those moments belong to the player regardless of the developers narrative intentions I think that may be at the root of why so many people are frustrated with fire watches design it is all about the narrative what Campo Santo chose to tell in the order they chose to tell it it gives no power to the player to tell their own stories outside of the framework provided my Henry might be different from yours in terms of character but mechanically speaking we both play the same game the long dark provides mechanical freedom on a scale Firewatch never made an attempt at fire watch is mechanically linear despite having a semi open world it is however emotionally dynamic providing a sense of human continuity extended out before and after the events of the game changing based on choice the long dark is emotionally linear all you have is the push-pull of struggle and triumph but it's a mechanically dynamic and open game Henry just has to spend a couple months in the woods in the summer your character in the long dark can survive 200 days or more in a land that's trying to kill you as a permanent winter deepens and deepens the only real end to the long dark in absence of a story is death each of these games have opposite thematic intentions and expressions but their appreciation for the wild and the wild is a canvas on which a person can write large their suffering and examine it up close is the same comparing Firewatch from the long dark is a lot like comparing wilde at the movie with Reese Witherspoon and the revenant with a DiCaprio one is a character-driven journey about sifting through the ashes of a life that you thought you had control of while running away in the woods eventually both the trail and the self come into greater focus and clarity the revenant is a motive driven environment piece about how tightly one can cling to life in the face of overwhelming careless brutality in each the wilderness is the needle that the characters past through the eye of it changes them each makes them a pure version of themselves than they were before grappling with the vastness the emptiness the hardship of the land hardship from both within and without can give a person a new mastery of life Firewatch demonstrates that with narrative the long dark demonstrates that with mechanics both are rooted in the long tradition of building miss fiction where the kind of player centric stories video games usually tell aren't really done a fantasy game world presents the player with something they can conquer a world where there is such a thing as 100% completion games about wilderness if they're serious about wilderness defy that the lure of the outdoors is not about empowerment but disempowerment in perspective you don't mean anything at all to the mountains but embracing the struggle with the environment can help focus a person's sense of themselves a game is not obligated to provide a player with escapism escapism is just the dominant form storytelling in videogames but there are many others that try to do something different Firewatch isn't trying to be as I've seen it referred to Oscar bait neither is the long dark they are simply trying to expand a tradition where the player and the reader are not given any special deference there's another quote from the introduction of people in Hell just want a drink of water that applies as much or more to the world of the long dark than that of fire watch I want to end on it because as much as I've tried to make a distinction between the intent of a traditional fantasy game that's rooted in the scape ism and a traditional wilderness story I really can't do it better than Annie Proulx she wrote fences cattle roads refineries mines gravel pits traffic lights refuted celebration of athletic figure tree on the bridge overpass crust of blood and the Walmart loading dock the Sun faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral other cultures have camped here for a while and disappeared only earth and sky matter only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light you begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that thanks for watching this video and all the videos I do are supported entirely through donations through the web site patreon currently have a lot of people who are supporting me but I'd like to thank by name that people who are currently at the $10 a month or over level people like Cassie Christian Zacharias and soy chic Pat hey max well-read Dennis Clark Jake Brennan Kevin DeBolt Niles D McDonald Igor Bebek coumarin Jean Justin Hughes Dean Harmon Jared Meyer Ivan Marin off Brad car Colin Lara's Ingvar Anderson Rhett llamo Martin Karsten Noah Duggan's b-tree Aaron all Bock Wesley M Philip Mathur I cannot fly Alexander leister Michael at well Boris Nielsen David Frye Cameron Jackson Warren Dewey Josh Farkas Rendon boat Alex Salado Daniel lower Heiser the carrion Joe Hewson angel headed hipster Cameron Aidan an ak-47 comfy had rung hey Baldrick Carlson Nick Cole Hamilton Dalton Sylar Ken young nobody Andrew Steele Morton scanning gallic David Reed D David gale breath Josh sills and goostin Emira egg will are Ryan goons Brad Wallace Connor blow Spyro Sedaris Neil's back from ER a max of roads Paul cocker Todd Martin Steven Patrick Sasha aya how do you pronounce that name that's when I'm not sure Jake neighs your repentance Karl blazing Alexander heavens Matthew Rob Clarke and Dylan Sibley Tim Marsh Devin Fitzpatrick quite zero Matthews in der andreas Larson Ervin here's another one Stephen pray nil Joshua VV Harley McAvoy Oliver Henry Caen jobel Kimmo - Chris larkey Jeffrey Newton Stephen mark Sigmund corrode Preston on Nathan Campbell and many more I really do appreciate it thank you very very much and thanks for watching

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 83,254

Rating: 4.9314456 out of 5

Keywords: Firewatch, The Long Dark, Review, Critique, Analysis

Id: 8Jiq56G-d5g

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Aquadon28]

Great analysis of Firewatch. I agree with the resolution of the mystery because its one that is grounded in reality. Noah's analysis helped me see it in a new light, in how it fits thematically with the rest of the plot. While I still would have liked to see more resolution with the relationship between Delilah and Henry, the decision to wear the wedding ring was something I didn't think about. In real life wearing the ring is important to show the commitment in a relationship, but in a movie or video game it is all too easy to glance over the decision to wear it as arbitrary aesthetic.

 

One of my favorite moments in Firewatch was the clipboard by the lake scene because in how it created tension. Before that scene all of the dialogue between Delilah and Henry is private and the player knowing that the conversations are private chooses dialogue suited for that intimacy. The real tension in that scene is not so much that someone is listening to Delilah and Henry, rather it's the violation the player feels in seeing that the dialogue that they chose was being observed by a third party. In a passive media the tension creates suspense, here the tension creates unease creepiness about the scene. I thought that was really interesting because I don't really ever see that.

[u/658Pablo]

Masterfully articulated. :) I completely agree with your views about Firewatch. I found it more akin to a lovely, dense, independent film rather than the more classically mainstream piece of entertainment I think many of us were expecting (weather we knew it or not). Personally I loved every kooky, self-searching moment of it. It feels genuinely fresh in the subtle manner it plays with how you/Henry view your place in the wilderness, why you are there, and what kind of future may exist beyond it.

[u/n_body]

Firewatch is definitely one of the most consistently beautiful games I've played. I felt that throughout my playthrough I was always taking screenshots for potential wallpapers.

[u/SirRuto]

I really love Firewatch. It reminded me of backpacking in Desolation Wilderness in California. Just a fantastic love letter to the natural world.