Before my move to Europe a few years ago, I spent more than twenty-five years living in Seattle.
It wasn’t a terribly common setting for movies and TV shows, but it popped up every now and then, with a trendy burst between the mid 90s and the early 2000s. Most of the time, the city was just background, with no real attempt to engage with its specifics or allow the city’s unique qualities to inform the storytelling. Stuff like Frasier and Grey’s Anatomy could take place anywhere; the Seattle setting was just “generic city with occasional establishing-shot landmarks.” If they occasionally get something about the city “wrong,” it doesn’t really matter.
A movie like Sleepless in Seattle is funnier to locals, because it spends a lot of time in the city, and shows the characters in a number of different locations. When our heroes set off in the small motorboat in Lake Union, and then arrive on Alki Beach, Seattle audiences howled with laughter.
This has been on my mind recently because I finished Last of Us Part 2 a few weeks ago. I won’t get into spoilers, but major elements of the story are set in Seattle, and you as the player get to explore the city’s geography pretty extensively. And within a few minutes, it’s clear that the game designers have no meaningful experience with the city; they picked it as a location, made a few scouting visits to capture basic layouts and a few superficial details, and then made up the rest.
And it’s almost all wrong.
I’m not talking about simple divergences in layout, like the odd way the freeway goes through downtown or the fact that the Koolhaas library is flipped around to face the other direction. I see those things as changes, as conscious compromises between physical geography and the needs of gameplay. I would compare, for example, a racing game that mirrors a real city in condensed form, like Nice in Forza Horizon 2; I don’t expect every street and every building to be in the right place, because gameplay comes first.
Rather, in Last of Us 2, the errors I found most amusing were much more subtle, the kind of cultural oversights that nobody would notice if they weren’t a genuine local.
Stuff like:
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As you wander through the post-apocalyptic streets, you of course pass multitudes of abandoned, broken-down cars. The problem is, the vehicle models don’t match the Seattle profile. The game shows a lot of American-styled sedans and small vans and pickups, and if you’re not from there, you don’t give it a second thought. But Seattleites know the streets are full of weather-appropriate imports like Subarus and Volvos, plus new-money luxury sedans, plus SUVs and big pickup trucks. This is a perfect example of something the game gets wrong not because it needs to serve the gameplay but because it legitimately doesn’t know any better, yet if you’re a local you notice it right away.
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While in Seattle, you get to visit the waterfront aquarium for a bit. The game puts it in the right place and reflects the interior architecture reasonably well, but then you walk through a marine-mammal performance auditorium, where visitors get to watch seals and such doing tricks. The real aquarium doesn’t have one of these, but the game designers clearly added it because it’s an interesting location. What they don’t realize, though, is that, culturally, Seattle would never tolerate such a venue. As a longtime local, when I walked into the seating area and realized what I was looking at, it was a huge “clang” moment for me.
Now, just to be clear, I’m not ragging on the game, not at all. It’s not like these kinds of errors “ruined” it for me. In fact, it was my favorite gaming experience in years, and I’m itching to replay it. I do recognize that not everyone shares my opinion, and that the game has been pretty divisive. I want to be clear that these are simply observations within the experience, and not a critique of the thing itself, and I’m hoping to prevent a tangential hijack where people dump on the game generally. That’s not at all what this is about.
Because, honestly, I find it more interesting when a work of fiction — a movie, a TV show, a book, or, in this case, a video game — makes mistakes like this, missing the mark on portraying your home city because it makes incorrect assumptions due to a lack of familiarity… and yet the work of fiction succeeds for you anyway. That’s the really fascinating thing for me, that I can spend so much time in this alternate-universe version of a city I know well, seeing evidence everywhere that the creators weren’t from there and didn’t have a deep-tissue understanding of it, and nevertheless I can forgive their missteps and oversights and enjoy the experience anyway. Like, in Last of Us 2, the big late-game setpiece where you’re crossing bridges between skyscrapers makes absolutely no sense from a story-justification standpoint, but the gameplay experience is so beautifully done, so visceral, that I am willing to ignore how nonsensical the bridges are as “shortcuts” given the physical layout of the real city.
So I thought I’d start a thread on the topic. I don’t really care much about the big simple mistakes, like how the Empire State Building shouldn’t be visible at the far end of a street in ID4 since it’s not in the center of an interrupting block. I’m much more interested in the small, subtle things, the stuff you’d notice only if you’re a local, like (say) if a movie shows a Chicago native putting ketchup on a hot dog, or if a novel set in Los Angeles mentions the main character has only one pair of sunglasses, without this being a specific character note in either case. And I’m really interested if the movie/book/etc makes this kind of error, and yet you enjoy it anyway.
Note: I know my central example is a video game, but the topic is about fiction in general with possible examples all over the creative landscape, so I thought Cafe Society would be the most appropriate home for the discussion.
