If you half-listen to the story, it seems like it's reinforcing tropes that I disagree with, Yohalem added. What I didn't expect was the people who half-listen. It's a fantasy that we've seen in pop culture cinema. "When you're with Citra in front of the warriors, that's Jason's fantasy, you know the white guy from LA has sex with this beautiful woman, it's very gratuitous, and it's in front of the whole tribe. This is most notable in a scene used in a trailer in which Jason has sex with a scantily clad shaman princess named Citra in front of a crowd before declaring "I will lead you to glory! On the surface it's the sort of goofy thing we'd expect from Evil Dead's Ash, but Yohalem explained that this was exaggerated to accentuate that this is a fantasy. The exaggeration of that trope is what happens in Far Cry 3. To take that to its extreme, exaggerating those tropes is how you reveal them. You come to New York, you colonise New York.
I started with that, and it's like, 'Here's what pop culture thinks about traveling to a new place,' and the funny thing is, that's an exaggeration of most games, they just don't expose it. It's set on an island in the South Pacific, so immediately the thing that comes to mind is the white colonial trope, the Avatar trope. So his view of what's going on on this island is his own view, and you happen to be looking through his eyes, so you're seeing his view, Yohalem explained. It's a first-person game, and Jason is a 25-year old white guy from Los Angeles. "If you half-listen to the story, it seems like it's reinforcing tropes that I disagree with." Jeffrey Yohalem, Far Cry 3 writer, Ubisoft Many found the story of a 25 year old white American rescuing an oppressed native tribe on a third world island to be uncomfortable to say the least, but Yohalem suggested this was only a surface level thing and that Jason is an unreliable narrator and may not be the savior dudebro he's portrayed as. You analyse them like you would any other text and they let you know what's going on, Yohalem said. The Alice in Wonderland quotes are there to clue people in. It's like a scavenger hunt where people aren't collecting the first clue.įor example, Yohalem noted the game opens with an epigraph from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that read, In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again." This was meant to mirror protagonist Jason Brody's surreal journey. What makes me sad is that people don't engage with playing the riddle, trying to solve the riddle. The story is itself something that can be solved, like a riddle, he said in an interview with Penny Arcade Report. Yet Yohalem postulated players are missing the point and only looking at the game at face value. Far Cry 3's questionable writing has often been criticised after writer Jeffrey Yohalem stated the game would be about "subverting video game clichés," when in fact the game seemed to be filled with regular old video game clichés.