Max’s Brazilian Wax

Max Payne 3 so far: The main character’s identity removed. The location, look and feel changed. The gameplay mechanics altered. The original voice actor, James McCaffrey, replaced. Multiplayer added. Max Payne 3, Rockstar promises, has “…Max as we’ve never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever” 1)Rockstar Press Release, March 23, 2009

Changed, changed, changed utterly. Let us go back in time for a moment, back to the year 2003, and seek to recall the scenes that made the most sense, made the most out of its thematic elements in the second instalment, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: What about the part where Max escapes his sealed apartment block with the aid of some of its colourful inhabitants – or the lock-up bust, with Mona contained at the police station? Or the very beginning of the game, with Max waking up in the hospital, when you come face to face with the doctors and nurses?

More than any other publisher, Rockstar’s games depend on a real sense of place and culture. 2)Game Informer, July 2009, p38

These fleeting yet important stretches of human-scale interaction in Max Payne 2, with unnecessary bystanders, extraneous casualties, even enemies – fully rounded or not – made the series feel that much more real, more tangible. My concern, at this juncture, is not at all that Max Payne 3 will be a poor quality game, but that it will fail to properly exhibit the internal, halcyon, subdued side of the “film noir” experience:

Bouts of solitary soul-searching. Moments of truth. Moments of half-truth. Gaps in the fabric of reality (not caused by drugs, sigh). Painful silence. Convincing lies. Introspection. Love. The loss of love.

Since leaving the NYPD and New York itself behind, Max has drifted from bad to worse. Double-crossed and a long way from home, Max is now trapped in a city full of violence and bloodshed, using his weapons and instincts in a desperate search for the truth and a way out. 3)Rockstar Press Release, March 23, 2009

In the much-talked Game Informer article, Jeronimo Barrera explains Rockstar’s motives: “But noir is a style… It’s looking at a world in a bleak way. … That’s what we’re doing. It’s more contemporary.” 4)Game Informer, July 2009, p40. Indeed, are not the Brazilian favelas currently some of the bleakest, most fiendishly (in)human locations to live in, completely controlled by drug lords and gangs, by manipulation and violence?

Can Rockstar not offer Max a modicum of solace, of humanity? After all, Max Payne’s downward spiral was never like that of Nico Bellic’s, for example; In Grand Theft Auto IV, nobody is truly on the good side. Nico’s morals were that of a criminal, based on power relationships alone; Max was a man of integrity in betrayal. The difference in-between these lines is larger than (a) life.

In the earlier Paynes, good and evil were always blurred, but never so unclear as to dissemble the distinction; Max, still a member of society, certainly never knew for sure who had good intentions, who sought to bring evil, or who was in constant motion in-between the two. Of utmost importance was the fact that Max simply did not know. Against this backdrop, looking at the latest batch of screenshots (see above), for instance, nearly all of the favelas’ bandits seem to be veiled in masks or hoods, as markers of their simplified enmity and their class and primary function as antagonists, also further dehumanizing and demonizing them by stripping them of their facial features.

Compare this scenario with that of Max Payne 2’s first playable level: When entering an industrial warehouse, we meet a whistling, solitary cleaner clad in overalls – ready and willing to help you with your ongoing investigation: A drastic difference in-between the marking and defining of character class. Here, I can’t help but think of thechineseroom’s Korsakovia, which attempts to answer the question, “what happens if you turn off the visual representation of agents, the normal cues players use to predict behaviour and motive?” 5)http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/

While Max Payne may have been an extremely competent and visceral third-person action game, its true charms, for me, lay in character inter-action, not action alone. The little we have seen of Max Payne 3 so far has offered no apparent rationale for the game to be titled Max Payne 3; The game that I have seen, so far, could have been Kane & Lynch 2, or Hitman 5. It could have been Just Cause 3. It could have even been Uncharted 2 or Resident Evil 5, like Joystiq’s Randy Nelson implies. Barrera, as if in agreement, told Game Informer, “…but Max has moved on.” 6)Game Informer, July 2009, p43 Popmatters’ G. Christopher Williams, too, infers in his article that

…having complicated characters that can age may indicate that video game narratives could be growing up a bit themselves.

But does moving on, giving up and growing old mean growing up? And more importantly, are we ready to do the same?

References   [ + ]

1, 3. Rockstar Press Release, March 23, 2009
2. Game Informer, July 2009, p38
4. Game Informer, July 2009, p40
5. http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/
6. Game Informer, July 2009, p43

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