- RECON828
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- Fabled Heroic Member
Posted by: teh Chaz
Well Pulp Fiction and Eraserhead are great so there.No argument there.
Anyway
It's a pretty hard word to pin down, I don't exactly have an in depth understanding of it myself. I think it's better to define some common styles associated with postmodernism.
One general tendency that is often seen in postmodern works of art is to manipulate the general form of the medium in unconventional ways. For example, creating a storyline but presenting it in a non-linear form by jumping from place to place, perspective to perspective, time period to time period or perhaps eschewing a plot altogether and instead focusing on other things such as characters and description. Perhaps presenting the medium in unconventional ways, e.g. Pulp Fiction devotes a huge amount of screentime to continuous conversations and monologues revealing the way the characters see life and their sense of humour, among other things, whilst the story is presented in what are pretty small scale events instead of any overarching plot.
Another way of messing with the form of the medium is shown by Infinite Jest, it forces the story into non linearity by making the reader go to the back of the book to read the compulsory end-notes that expand on points raised in the main text as they appear. In that same book and Gravity's Rainbow there is lots of very technical and in depth text about various subjects including tennis, drugs and mathematics in Infinite Jest and Jazz Music, missile manufacture and maths again in Gravity's Rainbow.
The Third Policeman is a strange case because the writer plainly admitted in a letter that the story was mainly a framing for some unusual concepts he wanted to play around with in writing.
A postmodern game, I think, would need to openly experiment with the qualities that define a game. Some things, off the top of my head, could be not having the player control the main character or even control the enemies, having the story unfold in a non linear fashion, possibly rid itself of the general protagonist-antagonist plot form and try something more unconventional.
Basically it's a pretty wide term that covers a lot of unconventional art.
I see what you're getting at. I don't really see the point in a theme unless it's relevant to what the artist is trying to convey, though, so I'd never hope for a post modernist game without any other desire about it.
Does that make Grand Theft Auto IV a post-modernist game? Or at least TBoGT? Because in that you play as Luis Lopez, when really the main character of the story is Ghey Tony.