With the recent release of Heavy Rain, I’ve had interactive storytelling on my mind again. I was excited about the game, and for months it was one of the justifications I had for buying a PS3 in the first place (second place to The Last Guardian). But after playing the demo and hearing many detailed reports from friends I trust, I’m left a little stumped with David Cage’s latest attempt at making storytelling a truly interactive experience. After all, David Cage’s personal blog makes the following goals central to the player’s experience of Heavy Rain:
- An evolving thriller in which you shape the story
- Mature content, reflecting a realistic world setting that explores powerful themes
- Stunning graphics, animation and technology support an emotionally driven experience
- Accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface
In this article I don’t want to harp on David Cage or Quantic Dream. The kinds of goals he has for his games are right up my alley, and if the games fails to satisfy those goals, it would be rather asinine of me to point fingers at him or his studio. Instead, I’d like to think about what we mean by an “interactive narrative” and why we are being led further and further away from a truly interactive storytelling experience, especially in games that attempt to simulate one. So let me be clear: this isn’t a review or a critique of Heavy Rain, but of the general kind of problems we face today in making interactive stories.
As a foil to Heavy Rain, I take a very simple and effective “edutainment” title from my back-catalogue of 1990s edutainment titles, and show that Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! (whew) manages to produce a far more immersive and interactive narrative experience using a gameplay approach that is simpler and totally straightforward. (And I’ll make it spoiler-free if that matters for you, I hope.)
Into my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.
Jamie Love posted a 
After Sarinee, the old curator and creator of Home of the Underdogs (a site devoted to posting ye olde abandoned games) lost HoTU due to a mixture of disinterest and her web host dying, a few folks from the community decided to lend a hand and get it back up to speed. There are several ongoing revitalization projects, but the one that has caught my attention the most is 
Hi again folks. What were meant to be a handful of articles posted over a couple of weeks became a couple of articles posted over a few months! Due to teaching responsibilities last year I had to take an unscheduled hiatus from writing.
After years and years of development, beginning its life as 
This is a short response to 
Although I recognize that the readership here is international, I do owe some amount of recognition for Canadian writers, gamers, and fellow agent provocateurs. That being said, Carrington Vanston has continually impressed me with his 1 MHz Apple ][ podcast. I’m equally impressed by some of his writing on video games. Critical yet fair, the insights he has into video games always provide me with the kinds of creative inspiration necessary to think deeper about gaming.
It has been a long time since I had something worth posting here, so I hope I don’t disappoint with what I think is an utterly fascinating story. Yesterday,
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