Thanks for giving me a chance to re-think some of this. I know that I am going to sound like I am re-hashing the whole article in this comment, because well, I am!

The wallet example is excellent – I agree with you that it carries implications (just as the mast does) about the rest of the world that the characters live in. We seem to agree that world building somehow involves including minutiae that point to a larger (imaginary) world that exist around.

But is world building enough? I mean, if communicating experiences were only about building a world, then we might spend our whole lives just trying to encapsulate the experience of drinking a can of Coke (that pop is sugary, we live in a world of consumer items that are owned by multinational companies, that the ingredients come from raw sugars or corn that are refined many thousands of kilometers away, etc). I’m not saying that it’s invalid to start that way, but more that in general telling a story involves selecting the right minutiae from an infinite well of details that make our world tick. The storyteller’s style of picking what to represent, what to leave out, is what gives the story a personal spin.. it says to the listener “the little details of that story, and the tone they were expressed in, tells me what that person’s experience was”. I guess what I’m getting at is that there seems to be so little aesthetic choice involved in Heavy Rain that the details overwhelm me. This is not a complaint about Heavy Rain specifically – but more a problem with the kind of world building that focuses too much on “representational realism” over “emotional or expressive realism”. So in some ways, communicating an experience to a player seems to involve more exclusion than inclusion on the artist’s part. I guess that we probably don’t disagree on that point much, but I get the feeling that I didn’t communicate it properly in the article.

ps: Funny that you bring Shenmue up – that’s a game that has eluded me so far (I still don’t have a Dreamcast for some reason!), but the consensus among most writers is that it is ‘the right way to do realism’.

Thanks for the eloquent response,
- Chris

You found having to take out a wallet to be incongruous to the story, a distraction, but this doesn’t take into consideration the imaginative space that is created when representing a wallet with increased realism.

For instance, you are right to point out that the ships mast insists that there are lower decks. Comparatively, the wallet insists that there are ATM’s, banks and bank managers (a stock market! a leather industry! rawhide!). However, these are entities that are never fully represented in game and rather, simply exist in the imaginary space of the game. This small item plants a seed and allows the imagination to grow and fill in the world around it. Heavy rain attempts this very poorly [and so your right to complain is perfectly justified]. Shenmue achieved it superbly, almost by mistake.

Furthermore, such minutiae provide a tapestry for all of the other elements to play out upon. A believable world, filled with minutiae can breed believability in the characters that inhabit it. It’s like the Truman Show where the players are Truman. The developers (the men in the moon) need to allude to a wider world beyond the set; they need to make the player believe that the game world [the set] is part of a wider reality. Minutiae can do this. A wallet does this.

Also, we never see Shelby’s toothbrush but because equally incidental objects are shown with increased detail, it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to visualise Shelby having a toothbrush. Such an item not only implies that people have teeth but that they are also bombarded with sugars and germs, just like our real world set of teeth.

As such, this toothbrush and its implications bring the game world inline with our own. Such minutiae grounds the story in a more believable reality, one that is palpable and only several degrees away from our own. This closeness then further invites us to also bring our real-world selves [our emotions, our thoughts] into the fray.

Of course, such trivial items may not affect the validity of the narrative, but it may affect the validity of the world that is holding the narrative.

I felt a similar way about Heavy Rain… but only after having played multiple times. I think it’s interesting that Quantic Dream actually recommends against playing it more than once, and now I see why–it feels like you’re making more choices and impact on the story than you are each time. For example, when you rescue Shaun, if you manage to, I’ve tried it and you can just sit there for like ten minutes without fishing him out and nothing happens. Sure, just about everybody is going to save him, but those that don’t want to for whatever reason are invariably railroaded onto the path the game wants you to go on.

That said, I think the game does a great job of presenting whatever narrative ends up happening in a way that seems logical and consistent with your choices (for almost everyone), which in most cases is because of the narrative context and emotions the player projects onto the characters, not because of wild branching paths. I think this is actually a strength. For example, on my first playthrough, I completed all the trials except for shooting the drug dealer guy. This made the imagined context for the scene where I chose not to shoot him quite a bit different from if someone had, say, missed some of the trials before that. In both cases, Ethan’s motivation for the choice to shoot him is that he wants to find his son, but in the case where he’s missed a few, he might decide that getting one more part of the address is pointless; whereas the decision might be taken less lightly if this would be the first time he backs out after losing a finger. Like a book, an identical or very similar objective scene is presented, but the subjective context is provided by each person, especially if different people read different versions of previous chapters.

No more spoilers.

Stowaway! is in my favourite. If you can find a copy of that, and install “DosBox”, you’ll have a blast.

Do you have any for book & software title recommendations? (old or new)
Especially ones that capture narrative & illustration, like the “Incredible Cross-Sections – Stowaway!”

thanks
Rudy

I like the idea that the character’s limbs take on a significance that changes throughout the game. There is definite potential in that idea, but it doesn’t *quite* feel realized for me. I suspect that Heavy Rain is going to stick with me for a few years as one of my “I need to play this again and get it right some time” games.

And, thanks for the encouragement – it’s been a bit rough getting back on the saddle after a year of indolence

Also, while I agree interactive banality confounds the emotions we are supposed to have with interactive action sequences, I also think there are scenes in which it helps to establish these characters as normal. I also think there could be significance in conveying through abstract symbols that the same limbs we use to open a fridge could also be used to save a life. Maybe not the same actions, sure, but you get the idea.

None of this is to say Heavy Rain pulled off the task. But there is something in this game’s inputs that are valuable, even in the mundane parts. Understanding what we can learn from it though is hard. I commend you for trying.

Keep up the good work by the way. I really dug your “when is a game a game” post too. If anyone ever asks me that ridiculous question again, I’ll probably just link them to you.

@James – Wow, I had never come across that article before! That is pretty much the same argument that I’m making: a good artist knows what to accentuate/exaggerate and what to drop completely. In many ways this article says in a much clearer way what I only could hint at. “Realism” is a problem that we’ve been dealing with for centuries in art (re: the earlier discussion of trompe l’oeil paintings) – but a (mind if I coin a new art term?) “technological realism” aesthetic is something that only appeared about 20 years ago. I remember the exact moment that I saw a first attempt at technological realism in a video game – it was a game released in 1993 (the same year as Jurassic Park)… Ground Zero: Texas on the Sega CD (Mega CD). There was no attempt at animation – it was simply CGI seamlessly integrated with live actors for the purpose of technological realism. Sewer Shark, which had been released a few months earlier, only had CG in its infancy and was so comic-bookish in its acting that I didn’t consider it “real”. But Ground Zero: Texas was meant to be serious and believable, and (shot like a first person documentary) it was meant to be a reality without any attempt at exaggeration.

Now, there already had been plenty of precedent for this in television – I’m thinking of Star Trek: The Next Generation) – but even in that show the goal was a kind of narrative realism that the visual technology was there to support. Ground Zero: Texas (and, in my opinion, the film Jurassic Park) were purely moving toward technological realism for its own sake. Does that make any sense in the context of Steven Poole’s article?

Many thanks for your thoughts,

- Chris

http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/edge-101/

(One of Steven Poole’s columns from Edge magazine.)

In particular:

One definition of visual aesthetics, after all, might be that it is the art of knowing what to leave out. In the rush for realism in computer graphics, however, it is all too common to throw everything in, and leave the spectator navigating a visual field of hyperspecific effects – excitable lighting, rivets on everything – and unable to see the wood for the trees. Squaresoft’s notoriously expensive CGI-generated Final Fantasy film is a case in point. Watching it, one becomes fascinated by the extraordinarily lifelike movement of a strand of digital hair, for example, or the reflective qualities of an eyeball, in a way that becomes highly distracting.

As a whole, in fact, Final Fantasy stands as something of an exemplary folly in the quasi-art of “realistic” graphics. Not only have the mouths of the actors speaking the lines been digitised and mapped onto their avatars, but every human movement, for however anonymous a gun-toting grunt, has been motion-captured from real humans in ping-pong-ball suits. You get people to do all this – and then you throw the people away. The end result has only a sort of eerie impressiveness, like watching a play performed by ghosts. Why try so hard to replicate natural human movement, when live-action cinema does it so well? The style of “hand-drawn” animation in computer graphics has hardly gone out of fashion since Lara Croft’s first appearance. It would have been more interesting for Squaresoft to have gone down the path trodden by Shrek, whose savage parody of Disney sentiment puts computer animation to purely fabulous uses.

So glad to hear from you. I was worried that the article’s relative age would allow you to understandably miss my reply.

Glad to see we have some agreement. Those major moments engaged me in ways I’m still kinda reeling from. One split second decision early on with a certain religious enthusiast made me feel like the cop who assumes a wallet is a gun. Kinda made me rethink my supposed pacifism, at least in situations like that, which, I hope, I never experience in real life.

I do still have some points of contention with your argument that “the player is required to puppeteer every banal minutiae of everyday life, from pulling out a wallet to checking a watch. None of these micro-actions express anything important about the character’s personality or her/his plight. As a result, I cannot distinguish between what’s important and what’s window-dressing.”

Like I said above, besides the fact that most of these interactions are not required, they do connect us to the character. I have a sneaking suspicion that when I drink some coffee with Jayden it actually helps him battle the addiction, and I’m quite certain that avoiding taking any drinks as Shelby is the best approach. I even tried to show caring for Ethan by having him wash up a bit and look out over the motel railing in between trials, just to keep some sanity. Did that matter? Probably not, but I enjoyed my ability to bring some pensiveness and consideration to the characters if I so chose.

As an aspiring philosophy major, I really enjoy your perspective and approach. Thanks for your compliments and keep up the good work!

Crap. I don’t know how this is possible, but my last reply to you got stuck in wordpress’s spam filter. Eegh.

Heck, while I’m here I can expand on my reply: Talking about realism may be an abstraction in some ways, but my phenomenological approach is an attempt at bridging what-I-experience-as-real with what the game presents to me. And finally, I think that your last line should be posted on every game review ever made: “It’s not perfect, but that fallibility should not condemn the worthy and powerful effect.” That is a truth.

Thanks again.
- Chris

You picked out the one aspect of Heavy Rain that I completely missed the target on. I too found some of the scenes emotionally gripping, and that did much to restore the intimacy lost with the attempted visual realism. The violence is genuinely terrifying at moments, and I think much of it is owed to the stylized camera work – the scene tilts and literally gets out of hand, as I struggle with my combatant. At that point I am no longer paying attention to the imperfect graphical details, but rather on trying to *stay alive*. This seems to be David Cage at his best – he managed to do that a few times in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy and much more of it in Heavy Rain. Now, if the *whole* game was founded upon that vision – rather than just select parts – I’d be a very happy man.

Thanks for bringing that much needed aspect of Heavy Rain up, andrew. Maybe my next playthrough will be more rewarding, given what you’ve said.

At the same time, though, I think you may be missing some of the impact that Heavy Rain has within this very concept. Yes, there are scenes where you can grab a cup of coffee or shave very carefully or bake an omelet, but, most are discretionary. You can choose whether or not to experience them. That stowaway game is not so much about choice as it is finding the correct path. Heavy Rain is distinctly about choice.

And that choice is not reserved for menial, non-forced tasks. The most horrifying scenes in Heavy Rain are entirely avoidable if you so choose. Your task to find your son becomes more difficult if you refuse to undergo these tasks, but you can absolutely choose not to. If you choose to participate, this game makes acts of violence, for me anyway, far more meaningful and unnerving than anything I’ve seen in a theatre or read in a book. It makes firing a gun meaningful, and, to do so, it must follow the schematic it follows.

When compassion and love can be so experienced as well, and they can, I think focusing on the abstractions of realism loses the point here. Death, love, and pain become more affecting because the visual fidelity to the reality of our human experience is so close. It’s not perfect, but that fallibility should not condemn the worthy and powerful effect.