Horizon Forbidden West: Language and Representation

Language and Representation

Language

Introduction

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

 Just as it delivers an excellent sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, another phenomenon arrives on its heels to suck away all the oxygen, Elden Ring.

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.

3) How is the central character Aloy described? 

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?

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.

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. While the quality rarely drops, I admit to occasionally feeling exhausted at how much there was to do in the game, at how long I still had to go

Close textual analysis

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

• 'breathtakingly beautiful' - link to future of the environment
• immersive nature

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

• theatrical performance
• cinematic
• smooth, linear pattern 
• different landscapes - different sound
• other worldly sound

3) What representations can you find in the trailer? 

• Aloy - rich and interesting
• Delver - complex, smart, psychologically
• Kotalo - warrior, life upside down, champion his cheif's cause
• Tilda - manipulative, dynamic, mystery
• Carl - evolving, developing, assertive, willing to challenge Aloy
• Erend - loyal supporter

Watch the gameplay video and answer the following questions:

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

• open world
• vivid facial expressions
• sound - adventurous 
• futuristic element
• clear narration of journey
• range of different settings
• birds eye view

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

• strong, female lead
• 'no thing I can't overcome'

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

• set design - realism
• visual spectacle
• cinematic element shows scale

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‘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?

 Horizon Zero Dawn has reportedly now sold over 20 million copies.

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

There have been people (including fans of the original game) who have spent the five years since Zero Dawn’s release asking for changes. While some of those changes amounted to little more than relatively minor QOL improvements (we’ll get to those in a bit), others hoped an eventual Zero Dawn sequel might break free of its checklist-based, Ubisoft-style open-world shackles and fully embrace some of the concepts that set it apart (such as its hunting systems, unique mythology, and wonderful characters). There was an idea that Horizon Zero Dawn may be a kind of test run for the new franchise and that Forbidden West would really lean into what really makes this series stand out. 

That expectation is certainly part of the reason why some of Forbidden West’s most notable shortcomings feel as significant as they sometimes do. 

4) What do we learn about the gameplay? 

Aloy’s ability to dive underwater, glide, climb more surfaces more efficiently, utilize a hook shot and, yes, eventually fly mean that getting from one place to another no longer feels like this laborious task meant to kill time between the moments that really matter. Being able to find your way around this world in so many more ways is one of the things that helps you appreciate it that much more. 

Mind you, there are still gameplay aspects of Forbidden West that simply do not work as well as they should, and some of those problems are “borrowed” from the original game. On-the-fly inventory management is still a cumbersome process that requires you to learn to love a series of menus and hotkeys, too many platforming sequences make it too obvious where you can and can’t go (even if you choose the “minimal UI” experience), and Aloy’s expanded skill tree features a few too many filler abilities that don’t always make leveling up feel like the rewarding experience it should be. Interestingly, many of those flaws bring us back to the idea that Forbidden West sometimes feels burdened by the expectations for it to be a bigger open-world game whether or not its developers were really ready to expand the original game in a way that made it feel like significantly more than more of the same.

However, there are other, much more important aspects of Forbidden West’s open-world design that make it easy to appreciate that Guerrilla Games knew exactly what they were doing with this game. 

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

Games like Forbidden West  belong to this new breed of open-world titles that don’t necessarily revolutionize the genre but rather find ways to make the entire concept feel fresh again by using that genre’s conventions to support ambitious artistic ideas that would crumble under their own weight if they weren’t supported by such a tested structure. Forbidden West sometimes sticks to a beaten path, but it goes further than so many other games in this genre and manages to plant a new signpost that I can only hope Guerrilla Games and other developers aspire to reach and surpass in the future. 

Representations

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

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. The vague notion of “the East” can be North Africa during the colonial occupation of Algeria; it can be China before and after the Opium Wars; it can be Vietnam, Japan, Korea, or many other places, depending on U.S. militaristic interests. Examples of the West’s fearful fascination with an Orient abound.

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

A  plethora of racist tropes begin to emerge within Forbidden West’s world. There’s a stereotypical angry Black woman named Regalla, for example, who leads a rebel army and would rather die than seek peace. There’s also constant belittling between tribes, who call each other “savage” or “uncivilized” — terms loaded with racial undertones. There’s also plenty of Orientalism.

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

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.

As far as I can tell, the pagoda doesn’t actually exist in present-day Las Vegas. However, it could be named and designed after a famous restaurant in Los Angeles’ old Chinatown, which was once called the Golden Pagoda. The whole mission brings you face to face with a gratuitous smattering of imagery that you might find in an American Chinese restaurant. There is, particularly, a lot of red: a red dragon hanging from the ceiling, red lanterns, and red decorative knots. The mission concludes with a gigantic light show, and a neon dragon flying at Aloy and the three white male excavators she had previously helped.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.

The quest itself is Orientalist in nature — the excavators recover “embers” to put on strobe light shows, with the intention of making the ruins of Las Vegas into a 31st-century tourist attraction. Here, the captivating aesthetics of neon and dragons represent inspiration for the excavators, and fertile ground to start a business.

Later in the game, Aloy discovers the final resting place of Ted Faro (the first game’s main antagonist) below San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. He’s the ruler of the “pyramid,” a survival bunker that he named Thebes, and his name is Faro. It’s a bit on the nose.

The basement of the pyramid contains a multistory metallic statue of Faro, and you find out that back during the 21st-century plague that he caused, he actually tried to prolong his life and became a monster — a mummy, if you will. Egyptian mythological imagery, including an Eye of Horus, is peppered throughout the quest, reducing religiously significant images and rituals to mere aesthetic texture for the game’s villain.

That brings us to the war elephant. When Aloy first meets a rebel Tenakth faction led by Regalla (voiced by Angela Bassett), Aloy is surprised that they have the ability to override machines. She’s even more concerned when she stumbles upon the rebels riding a Tremortusk, a massive mechanical elephant.

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.

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

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. 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.

Answer the following questions:

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

 Bloomberg published a piece that exalts the arrival of Aloy of Horizon Forbidden West as a positive form of female representation in games, in the midst of an industry grappling with constant, horrific mistreatment of real-life women employees.

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

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.

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).