Horizon Forbidden West: Language and Representation blog tasks

 Introduction

1) Why does Guerrilla Games have 'a serious case of bad timing'? 

Now just as it delivers an excellent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, another phenomenon arrives on its heels to suck away all the oxygen, Elden Ring. Poor Guerrilla, a team of superb developers with a serious case of bad timing. 

2) What is the narrative for the original game Horizon Zero Dawn? 

The games take place a thousand years after rampaging machines have wiped out most of humanity. Survivors have clustered into tribal communities who view relics of technology as objects of either suspicion or religious reverence. The dramas of warring clans are narrated alongside the tale of how our world came to ruin. Guerrilla struck gold with flame-haired heroine Aloy, who balances grit and tenderness as one of the most memorable new characters of its console generation.

3) How is the central character Aloy described? 

Guerrilla struck gold with flame-haired heroine Aloy, who balances grit and tenderness as one of the most memorable new characters of its console generation. 

4) What is the narrative and setting for sequel Horizon Forbidden West?

Where the first game stretched across a terraformed Colorado, Forbidden West beckons players to Nevada and California with a new threat to humanity that, naturally, only you can resolve. The previous game revolved around the mysteries of Aloy’s identity, which were neatly wrapped up by its conclusion. The new game’s story is more diffuse, yet it smartly explores themes of climate catastrophe and the hubris of big tech with a nuanced script and brilliant voice acting that includes appearances by actors Angela Bassett and Carrie-Anne Moss. Action junkies be warned: this game contains an enormous amount of dialogue, best suited to those who like their robot-slaying interpolated by lengthy, though rarely dull, disquisitions on sci-fi politics. 

5) What does the review say about animation and graphics?

Forbidden West is the first truly eye-popping flex of the PS5’s muscles, with graphics so beautiful that I have often found myself halting the adventure just to gawp at the landscape, whether dust clouds careening across the desert or forest leaves quivering in the breeze. The robot enemies are ingenious works of biomechanical clockwork, shaped like snakes, hippos, ferrets, rams and pterodactyls, with electric cables for sinew and gleaming steel for ligaments.

Most impressive are the character models. Aloy’s complex hairstyle is a marvel in its own right, and the animation of facial expressions achieves an unprecedented realism — never before have I seen a game character communicate subtext so convincingly by tightening their jaw or subtly shifting their gaze. 

6) What do we learn about the gameplay and activities in Horizon Forbidden West? 

Forbidden West’s gameplay offers robust, satisfying combat beneath its good looks. Aloy’s movement feels ultra-fluid as she deftly transitions between sliding, climbing and making use of new tools such as a grappling hook and paraglider. Each fight with a robot enemy is tense and exciting, demanding that players think like a hunter by analysing opponents’ behaviours, deploying traps and elemental attacks to gain the upper hand. Minor irritations from Zero Dawn have been resolved, allowing you to make better use of stealth and melee weapons or manage resources more easily. Any developer making a follow-up to a successful game has to work out how they can make a sequel worthwhile. Now that the novelty of robot dinosaurs has worn off, how could Guerrilla keep players engaged? The developer’s answer is to expand: in Forbidden West there is more of absolutely everything. Besides the extensive main story, there are underwater caves to plumb, salvage contracts to fulfil, towering giraffe-bots to scale, even an entire board game to master.  While some open-world games feel as if they drown players in pointless busywork, Guerrilla’s smart design and writing ensure that most activities feel consequential. Forbidden West isn’t bloated, it’s just massive.

Close textual analysis

1) How is narrative, character and setting introduced in the trailer?

-the crane shots of the different worlds with vibrant eye catching colours 

-aloy being a strong female character saving the world from the machine creatures 

-range of settings (artic, jungle dessert)

-engaging soundtrack

2) How is the game's open world / sandbox genre shown in the trailer? 

-different sound tracks depending on the world to match the vibe of it 

-cinematic 

-iconic landmarks 

-theatrical performance 

3) What representations can you find in the trailer? 

-western vibe 

-binary oppositions of the machines and tribes 

-props theory of charcter roles, aloy playing the hero etc)

1) How does the game use media language to communicate ideas about narrative and genre?

-lively facial expressions

- non diegetic sound that is engaging and matches the vibe of the world 

- a wide range of settings 

-crane shots 

-takes audience on a journey 

2) What representations of people, places or groups can you find in the gameplay video?

-inspiring voiceover 

-strong female leader 

-hero, aloy 

3) What audience pleasures are suggested by this gameplay trailer?

-cinematic pleasures 

-escapism

Narrative and genre

1) Read the opening to the article. How can we apply Steve Neale's genre theory to Horizon Forbidden West?

 Forbidden West still feels surprisingly similar to Zero Dawn in many ways. That revelation has inspired some to call Forbidden West “formulaic” and even suggest that it’s not the game we should have gotten after all this time. Whether or not you believe that’s the case is obviously up to you, but the conversation about Forbidden West‘s familiarity offers a fascinating chance to look at what we really mean when we accuse a game of sticking to a formula and when there are times when that adherence to what came before is a necessary part of the evolution of gaming that often says little about the quality of an experience.

2) How many copies did the Horizon Zero Dawn sell and why did this influence the design of the sequel?

Well, considering that Horizon Zero Dawn has reportedly now sold over 20 million copies, it’s not like this series really needed to change all that much to reach a significantly wider audience. Given the current shortage of next-gen consoles and development complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s also not like Guerrilla Games was in a position to make this a true PS5 exclusive built from the ground up to take advantage of that hardware.

3) How does the article criticise the story in Horizon Forbidden West? 

The problem is that Forbidden West spends a bit too much time letting a small army of side characters spout what sometimes feels like an endless amount of exposition. There are fantastic side characters and sidequests in this game, but Forbidden West’s reliance on extended dialog sequences starts to wear you down relatively early into this massive adventure. There are times when you’ll find yourself wishing that Guerrilla Games had simply recognized how impressive the world they created was and found ways to let that world and the characters in it do the heavy living rather than those extended dialog sequences that seem determined to tell you absolutely everything. Besides, the answers are rarely as good as the questions

4) What do we learn about the gameplay? 

Much like Zero Dawn, Forbidden West’s greatest narrative strengths are the quality of its world and mythology. Some of the best storytelling moments in the game happen when you take a little time to look around and really think about how and why this somewhat primitive world was built upon the ashes of a high-tech “advanced” society. To its credit, the game also does a pretty good job of expanding both our understanding of the world that was and our appreciation of the world that is via sequences that often blend the two concepts and use them to enhance each other. 

5) What is the article's overall summary of the game?

The game’s occasional struggles to stretch this franchise’s best qualities across a larger world were sometimes substantial enough to make me wonder what a version of this game unburdened by the “icon-based” expectations or modern open-world design (or one that embraced a minimalist approach) would have looked like. 

Before you try too hard to separate Horizon from the familiarity of its open-world design, though, it’s important to take a little time to appreciate a few of the many ways that this game does clearly respect and learn from its predecessors’ most notable missteps. 

Representations

1) How does Horizon Forbidden West use narrative to create a fully diverse cast of characters?

theThe 31st-century world of Horizon Forbidden West is supposed to be post-racial. After human civilization was fully wiped out by a plague of self-replicating machines, a terraforming AI named GAIA rebuilt life on Earth, with the genetic diversity of humanity, but without the history and societal structures that underpinned racism in the 21st century. It’s a clever narrative move to let the developers pack the game with people of all skin colors, a fact that has been routinely lauded as progressive by some critics and gamers.

2) What is orientalism? 

Orientalism is a type of racism in which “the West” — generally understood as Europe and North America — projects savagery and beauty onto “the East,” or the Orient. This allows Western imagination to see “Eastern” cultures and people as both alluring and a threat to Western civilization. The Orient is flexible and moves depending on European and American obsessions and war efforts; its definition really depends on who’s asking, and when they’re asking.

3) How does the article suggest orientalism applies to Horizon Forbidden West? 

Orientalism is embedded at the core of Forbidden West’s narrative of exploring exotic lands. Protagonist Aloy’s Orient is the “Forbidden West” itself: the present-day southwestern U.S. and California, filled as they are with foreign tribes, religions, and customs. In this morass, Aloy is both an explorer and a (white) savior. Only she understands what is at stake in the world, and she has to spend time in the petty politics of a bunch of tribes in order to convince them that the problems she’s facing are more severe than theirs.

Orientalism is also strewn throughout Forbidden West’s world-building. Take the “Golden Pagoda” that Aloy discovers in “The Sea of Sands” quest in the main campaign. When she’s rebuilding GAIA’s system, she must recover several sub-AIs that have fled and hidden across the Western U.S. Aloy explores the ruins of the Las Vegas Strip, complete with the remnants of the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, and, strangely, a pagoda.

4) Who is the player encouraged to identify with in the game and how does this influence how representations are constructed?  

The elephant is a surprisingly pervasive symbol of the Orient, and the taming of elephants for use in war is common in European and American fantasies about the Orient. Peoples in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia did sometimes employ elephants in combat, but in the context of British colonialism, the West saw the use of elephants in war and in religious ceremonies as savage and irrational, and imported elephants for British curiosity about colonial India.I’m not suggesting that Guerrilla Games made these aesthetic choices with malice; I’m arguing that the choices end up being impactful regardless, both in what they convey to the player, and how the resultant symbolism fits in with our world. When I played Horizon Forbidden West, the game asked me to identify with Aloy and support her mission to save the planet.

5) Finally, what did the writer of the article (an Asian American) feel when playing the game?

But to progress in the game, I ended up role-playing different kinds of cultural violence, including Orientalism, which founds and fuels a lot of the racism I experience as an Asian American. Even though Aloy’s world is supposedly post-racial, its developers still repeat Orientalist tropes in their design choices, which paint Asian cultures, and therefore people, as perpetually foreign, mysterious, and threatening.

Focusing on Aloy and the representation of women in videogames, read this Forbes feature on the topic. Answer the following questions:

1) What is the debate regarding Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West? 

The issue is…very complicated. It’s true that Guerilla Games went out of its way to make Aloy a more “normal” heroine, not looking like “a Victoria Secret model.” And yet this has sparked a debate about whether Aloy is actually “hot” or not, which I find is sort of missing the point entirely. It reminds me of that now-somewhat-cringey “Is Hilary Swank hot?” Office episode, and really isn’t the conversation we should be having in the first place.This doesn’t spring out of nowhere, however. Aloy has been flamed by sexist gamers for being made “too ugly” in Horizon Forbidden West, which is a debate mainly centered around a single freeze frame from a trailer where she’s making a weird face. This resulted in a famously cursed “yassification” image of Aloy as the “correct” way to do the character. And yet again, this is coming up once more as a result of this article, a debate about what Aloy (who looks perfectly great in every Horizon shot that’s been released) “should” look like.

2) What examples are provided of other female characters and representations in videogames?

Lara Croft, star of Tomb Raider, has been the poster child for this entire issue in gaming, and again, shows that this is a complicated issue. While it’s true that Croft’s original design was sexualized in a way to appeal to young men, it’s also true that she’s a part of gaming history and a great female protagonist in her own right. For many male players, whether they found her attractive or not, she represented the first time they were playing as a woman in a game without being hidden in a massive suit of armor (the article also ignores Samus Aran). For many women, Lara Croft remains an icon and again, it was a big deal to have a character like her leading her own game when she debuted.

3) What are the issues facing the videogame industry in terms of gender?  

The industry has massive, massive problems with retaining women employees and treating them well within gamedev. And there have indeed been female characters created entirely within a male gaze. But the presentation here, that Aloy is the gold standard, both discounts decades of beloved women in games and simultaneously demonizes “attractiveness” in characters that everyone, even women (often especially women) love in their games. And this debate is not doing anything to solve the real issues these companies face (PlayStation itself is currently facing gender discrimination claims, which the article doesn’t mention).