GTA 5 Audiologists, is that talking to you?

Dedicated to the ideas in vogue in contemporary video games, our bimonthly chronicles Modes de jeu proposes to decipher the trends that shape our way of playing. Maybe we no longer notice them, but audiologists are among us. What are they ? Voice clues collected at the level of the levels, often in the form of phonographic recordings or audio archives, on which the games have become accustomed to rely to tell their stories. Doctors and philosophers in The Witness, frosting in GTA 5 , comics in South Park: The Stick of Truth, they have their strengths and weaknesses.

For a number of years, there has been a lot of talk about environmental narrative, seeing the latter as an opportunity to shape the world of games where places are a source of stories. The possibility for a decor to display the signs of its experience depends largely on technical requirements; It is not for nothing that the term "environmental narrative" developed during the previous generation of consoles, first batch HD. With its breathtaking visual reconstruction of a city-utopia plunged into the abyss, all in shadows and fallen objects, GTA 5 online cheats android  was one of the most notable games to seduce the public through this, which was then called Often naively of "cinematographic". But if in BioShock the narration is actually environmental, it is not only because it relies on a sum of plastic details. It also carries immersion through its "audiologs", recordings-witnesses that can be listened to during our vicissitudes and which tell us in an exploded way the tragic destiny of Rapture.

BioShock is not the first game to use audiologs, rather the one that launches fashion. Thus, the series of Batman Arkham, which is born in the wake, relies abundantly on these recordings to justify the devastated state of its environments. And here the audiologists are anchored in a more general bias, which is to make voices the main narrative forces of the adventure, since the Joker, the Scarecrow, the Man-Mystery and consorts never stop apostroping Our judge through loudspeakers posted everywhere. It is literally the setting that speaks. In a different genre, the Dead Space series uses audio recordings to portray its post-catastrophic scenario: the horror suffered at the scene is heard as well as the after-effects. After all, audiolog is the modern version of this great leitmotiv that covers all the survival horror classics: the diary or the log book, which is consulted as a testimony in Resident Evil and get GTA 5 hack here .

    The audiolog seems like a convincing solution: no more break between the game and the narration. Hence the massive success of this solution.

It is not difficult to understand the benefits. Certainly, Americans usually say "show, do not tell". The vision of the broken window or the decapitated corpse is probably more effective, as an evocation, than the complete account of the intrusion of the monster or summary execution. However, the audio recording as well as the logbook serves not only to explain the situation, it develops the context, it carries the "lore" whose function is to justify the coherence of the world in which we find ourselves. It is not easy to introduce lore naturally during a game: in GTA 5, we know the immersive richness of the dialogues, but there is also a lot of texts and even a codex (written and narrated) that one Can consult to learn more, as long as you do not want to advance in the game for long minutes. In the same way, if the textual documents of Resident Evil are in part used as lore, by telling us the machinations of Umbrella for example, their reading cuts us off from the space and constant tension of the survival. Consequently, the audiolog appears as a convincing solution: no more break between game and narration; Again, it's the decor that speaks, in real time. Hence the massive success of this solution. Yes, but when Resident Evil modernizes its original formula in 2017, he can stage phone conversations and challenges from loudspeakers, he favors good old documents written to audiologists. Why ?

Audiolog has greatly changed our gaming habits, let's say it. We now accept that a scientist has chosen to record his death in an isolated office, for example, because listening to the document rewards us with a better understanding of the game. But in the flow of our part, what Attitude then adopt? We have become accustomed to listening to these stories by moving in the room where the tape recorder is located; We pass the decoration with fine comb, m