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.)
The Response to Heavy Rain So Far
Michael Abbott’s initial response to Heavy Rain captured almost every aspect of the game that made me cringe: dramatic tension fails to build, it confuses game-directed “input prompts” with player agency, marionetting the protagonist ultimately destroys one’s affective connection to him, and an inconsistent/arbitrary control system that serves only to breed learned helplessness and frustration.
I think Michael puts it best when he writes, “The game is at odds with itself from beginning to end. It persistently reminds me that neither I nor my avatar possess consequential autonomy. In Heavy Rain, the game itself controls the game, and that doesn’t feel much like interactive drama to me.” (my emphasis)
The Problem
The question of “realism” in games is something we’ve been contending with for years. A couple of years ago the discussion was all about photorealism in Mass Effect and the new Star Wars films, and if it adds any value to a narrative or is just downright creepy and distracting (note: I snobbily avoid using the “uncanny” valley nonsense, just because most of the people who use that term have never read or understood Freud – and Heidegger’s – powerful notion of ‘the uncanny’). I argued that photorealistic games fail to “grab” us precisely because they try to systematically represent a character’s face or bodily movements… and no amount of technological advancement will yield a believable computer-generated character. Instead, I motioned for a return to the heavy artistic stylization of characters by artists like Jim Hensen, who made “Kermit the Frog” and “Oscar the Grouch” far more believable than a digitized Jabba the Hutt.
In Heavy Rain we’re facing the same problem. Although few people have pointed it out (as most of us are now desensitized to photorealism), the visual metaphor for the game is the same as all other 3D FPS games today: attempt to represent human physiognomy and movement as “realistically” as possible using highly technological means. Because David Cage wants us to believe that we’re directing a film with “live” actors, the characters appear to move like people, appear to frown like people, and appear to cry like people.
Appear to. Ay, there’s the rub. The attempt to make each character appear real is at odds with the complex storytelling goals of the game. When a game attempts to “simulate” rather than “express” an experience, it loses its ability to artistically exaggerate or highlight some aspects of the experience over others. Let me clear that up with an example…
If I’m trying to tell you a story about something that happened in my psychology class last week (ie. a student who disrupted a lecture by talking loudly), I should only relate details about the situation that are relevant to expressing the kind of experience it was. Maybe I was already having a bad day before I got to class – I stubbed my toe on my way to the bathroom, and one of the cats shit in my shoes, and during the lecture I kept tripping over words. All of a sudden it becomes believable that I lost my temper with a student who was talking in class, and royally embarrassed both of us.
But what if I started the story by introducing extraneous (yet true and representative!) details about the color and cut of the pants I was wearing, the way I did my hair that morning, and the temperature of the classroom that day, you’ll likely say to me: Yeah, yeah, I get it! – but what does that have to do with the story? In other words, you can’t simulate an experience – you can only express one through a story.
That’s what games like Heavy Rain end up getting tripped up with. All of the extraneous details of the scene – the perfectly rendered eyelashes, the flaring irises, the reflection of tears on cheeks – all become the focus of every scene and distract the player from understanding the aspects of the story that really matter.
Not only that – but Heavy Rain tries to go one step further – it does not only want realistic visuals, but realistic kinesthetics. Instead of having the player direct the character at emotionally important moments crucial to the development of the story, 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.
The total experience, for me (and perhaps others?) is a game that resists itself at every turn: it wants me to participate in the unfolding of a story, only by forcing upon me irrelevant details and banalities that do little to express a coherent vision of a world. Heavy Rain is something like a schizophrenic-neurotic mom – she wants me to tell all my friends her jumbled paranoid fantasies. She hovers over me the whole time, and when I get some seemingly meaningless detail wrong she threatens to strangle me. Love you too, mom.
The Solution?
I had originally intended to write a love story to the numerous edutainment titles of the 1990s that simultaneously bored and impressed my 13 year old mind. Instead, I realized that many educational games succeeded at the one thing that Heavy Rain does not: letting me help direct the action on the screen, as if I’m a participant in the story.
Most games today only concern themselves with entertaining or immersing the player in a fantasy world, and that’s a difficult enough job. But think about the tremendously difficult task the average edutainment title has – it has to both entertain and educate five to ten year old kids about some infinitely boring subject that only adults care about. Like 19th-Century Man’o'War ships, for instance!
Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! takes Biesty’s incredibly well-illustrated book and turn it into an interactive experience. The ship is cut into cross-sections that can be navigated using an UP/DOWN/FORE/AFT control scheme. Each cross-section has meticulously detailed illustrations that draw my eye toward the “story” being told in each pane; if I click on hotspots in the scene a little narrative plays out. It’s as close as a game has ever come to an interactive pop-up book. Like Heavy Rain, you’re on the hunt for someone – instead of a psycho killer, you’re looking for a grungy little stowaway that is hiding in several places on the ship.
The difference in the control mechanism between Heavy Rain and Stowaway is night and day. Where the former tries to simulate motion by forcing the player into complex marionetting, the latter takes a traditional up-down-left-right scheme and works wonders.
In Stowaway!, I get the sense that when I click “down”, I really am moving up to a lower section of the ship, even though I am not visually shown the transition between decks. How can a game that does not physically show me moving throughout the ship give me a sense of movement? Stephen Biesty accomplishes a feat of artistic consistency that any comic book artist could hope for: when I’m standing on the orlop deck watching the deckmates go about their business, I look at the mast and think, “Hey, that mast goes way down into the ship!” My imagination makes the transition between each deck of the ship for me; Biesty completes the image by showing me the next section of the mast, just as my imagination hoped. Stowaway! gives me a sense of agency by allowing me to help imagine parts of the scene for myself. Sure, there are plenty of illustrated details on each deck, but none of those details are extraneous to the kind of story being told about the brutality of an 18th century English Man-of-War.
Biesty accomplishes this by exaggerating all the right things: all of his characters and scenes are carefully illustrated to express a sense of humor and the deep gravity of war. The surgeon’s assistant carelessly tosses a limb into a bloody bucket, and I simultaneously cringe and laugh at the sillyness/seriousness of amputation. The surgeon’s amputation feels more real to me than any murder scene in Heavy Rain, because Stowaway! boils the experience down to its essential elements.
Imagining Makes it Real
That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of how talented voice acting can turn a boring and hackneyed character into a lovable rogue. Without stylization that highlights certain features of the character/scene over others, and allows the player to complete the rest of the image, your game will be profoundly tedious at best – and totally unbelievable at worst.
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From Seiryuki:
I agree. When I first saw the boy from The Last Guardian I felt upset that his graphics wasn’t as realistic as his surroundings. But then I thought that it is better this way. I’m playing as him in this realistic fantasy world, but his hollow/glowing visuals draw him away from the scene making me feel as though I’m playing as a character but I’m really that character. I can’t see him [properly] yet it’s a 3rd-person perspective, not 1st-person.
Hope I explained it well enough.
From chris:
Hi Seiryuki,
Great insight with The Last Guardian! I had not considered how “simple” the characters in the Fumito Ueda games are, compared to the lush and complex surroundings in the game. In many ways this reminds me of Miyazaki films like My Neighbour Totoro and Castle in the Sky – characters are intentionally illustrated in a simple fashion in order to bring focus to them on the screen. Moreover, The Last Guardian/Ico/Shadow of the Colossus all focus on making very believable/human character movement by animating their walking and running in an artistic manner. The boy in The Last Guardian really does walk and run like a boy, compared to most games that use very expensive and complex motion-capture systems to simulate movement. Ueda is himself an animator, and I suspect recognizes the importance of expressing movement over “representing” it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
From Rainier:
You offer some nice insights to the Heavy Rain problematic, thanks for that!
From chris:
Thanks for the feedback Rainier – would like to know your thoughts on the game some time!
From Jeff:
I need a SPOILER!!!
I played this game years ago!! I found the Stowaway, all ten times. After I found him, he and I ended in a secret room! He ran into the room, and then the lights would go out in the room, some crashing and banging would happen, and then the lights would come on, and I COULDNT FIND HIM!!!! 
!!!!
Was that the correct end of the game? I clicked on EVERY single part of that room after the lights had gone back on, and couldnt find anything!! HELLLLP!
From guttertalk:
The truth is that we do not encounter reality unmediated. In a sense, we live in an abstraction all the time. The quest for “realism” is misguided because the quest should be for a meaningful experience, which is filtered and mediated in a purposeful way.
Whether or not “Calvin and Hobbes” is real is a banal question, one not worth asking. The fact is that we connect with it in a way that is not real yet still terribly meaningful. Yet, I think that some game developers are too focused on experience as the real rather than as the meaningful. Part of that stems from an obsession on immersion in gaming. Yet, identification is more important than immersion and doesn’t require as much overhead and extraneous detail.
I’m reminded of the story of Olivier and Hoffman: Hoffman arrives on the set of Marathon Man without having slept as part of his “method acting” preparation for the scene, and Olivier says, “It’s called acting, dear boy.” We don’t need realism to tell a good story.
From chris:
@Jeff – Honestly, I’ve never finished the game.
I’d love to know how it ends myself.. but I’ve only ever found 8/10 or 9/10 of the stowaway’s hiding places.
@guttertalk – We seem to agree in principle on the problem we’re facing today in games. The Calvin & Hobbes example is exactly what I see everyday; people are happy to ask ‘is this real enough for me?’ but are never willing to ask ‘is this meaningful to me?’. Identification – to me – happens through affective (feelingful) dialogue and memorable characters – that’s a quickly disappearing art. I might suggest Christine Sarah Love’s “Digital: A Love Story” as a great example of a simple game that pulls off meaningful identification with a minimalistic interface.
Shamefully, I have never seen Marathon Man. But I appreciate the sentiment of the story.. in fact, this is a wonderful of how representationalism works its way into acting! I can imagine Hoffman’s face as he’s listening to the towering god Olivier.
Of course, an actor like Daniel Day-Lewis pulls off method acting (I’m thinking of ‘There Will be Blood’) with amazing subtlety, in my opinion. What I’m suggesting is that the method doesn’t matter at all (after all, it’s just a technique!), but the total aesthetic outcome is what the player interacts with. Whether it’s method acting or classic shakespearean stage acting, the audience has to be drawn into the character’s world; the quality of the performance itself (rather than each actor’s particular dramatic technique) is what matters to the audience. I think we’re probably in agreement on that point, but I’m leaving it open in case we’re not
[To clarify one thing - I am tempted to quibble over language (ie. I think that anything meaningful is experienced as 'real' to us) but that won't get us much of anywhere. The fact is that simulation is no replacement for good storytelling!]
Thanks for the thoughtful response – I appreciate that my articles can lean towards glibness.
From guttertalk:
Chris, I think in a lot of creative areas, people frequently don’t ask “How real is this?” More often than not, I think of the pursuit of realism more of a goal for some artists. For example, writers like Frank Norris inundated us with heavily detailed novels that frankly have become more novelties than meaningful stories. But Norris had this philosophy that drove an aesthetic in his work. I appreciate that goal, but it strikes me as self-indulgent.
Immersion seems more of a gaming goal than in other forms. Some movies have strived for it: I remember when “Saving Private Ryan” came out and everyone talked about real the beach attack was and how people said they felt like they were there. Many valued the movie simply for that realism, not as much for the story or characters. 3D movies pursue a kind of immersion, but it’s a spectacle that doesn’t really bring the audience into a more meaningful relationship with the movie. (Granted, sometimes the ability to experience something can be meaningful.)
I’ve seen comments about how gaming gives people an opportunity for immersion that they cannot get with other media. While probably true, the question is does that mean games should constantly pursue that differentiation? IMO, control is a more meaningful differentiation for games than immersion–to control what a character does, looks like, and behaves, to control a story.
I wholly agree with you about identification, its importance and how it’s achieved. Writing about comic books, Scott McCloud discussed realistic and abstract styles. His point that relates to identification is that realism has the effect of objectifying and emphasizing other and a particularity. Abstract styles allow for a kind of universal association because it forces us to fill the details and allows readers to associate the subject with him/herself.
In a sense, then, games that emphasize realistic details have a harder time creating a game that gamers can identify with. It might be counter-intuitive to some, that an emphasis on realism makes immersion and identification more difficult to experience.
Okay, back to the world of non-working batch files and testing. Thanks for the excellent post, Chris.
From Igor Hardy:
Very good points, and could be related to the history of art. I think the perception of “what the better kind of realism is” is very subjective. Ancient Greeks painted human sculptures with colors representing bodily fluids. They used perfect proportions for architecture, but then took correction for them to look even more perfect from distant viewing points. It’s creating something in a way that is truest to the specific craft versus just wanting to make it appear attractive and convincing.
As you mentioned Star Wars, interestingly enough the recent CGI animated series uses a lot of the same models of vehicles and environments as the prequels, but made characters appear like they are carved of wood. It results a much more seamless an convincing visual experience with just a small portion of the work required for the feature films.
From chris:
@guttertalk and @Igor – since you’re both making great, related points…
I spent the day thinking about it, and I can also see the move toward “realism” in art, but it really depends upon the kind of realism we’re talking about. In particular, I’m thinking of the “trompe l’oeil” paintings of the 15th and 16th century. I appreciate them as a form of attempting visual perfection of a kind, but they are a very particular form of painting that relies heavily upon the discovery of “perspectival” painting prior to that time. I guess what I’m saying is that the trompe l’oeil manages to provide a perfect representation (with a trick of the eye) of the world, but it gets me no closer to really experiencing something new. Instead I tend to gawk at it few a minutes minutes and go “wow! cool!” and then walk away forgetting it. That’s typically what I have with video games that “immerse” me for a little while – I say “wow, that was cool” and then never think about it again. When a game draws that kind of response from me, I know it’s just another (exciting) consumer product.
I’ve been watching the “Clone Wars” animated series lately, and it is very, very good. You are absolutely correct about the change of visual style – it is more relaxed and stylized, and I find it outright convincing. But not the convincing illusion of the trompe l’oeil – it’s a convincing world with characters that I actually care about.
Thanks again for the very thoughtful responses. I wasn’t sure if my article even made sense to anyone else.
From andrew:
I think the point you’re making about realism is profound. It’s still an “ism,” a simulation, and thus still abstraction. And, as you said, the more real something appears, the more we will try to find every seem, every inconsistency. Cartoons like Calvin and Hobbes or even more stylized video games like the vibrant and mildly cartoonish Uncharted, I think, manage to evoke connection and feeling without making you feel like you could walk into that world.
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.
From chris:
@andrew
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.
From chris:
Andrew,
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
From andrew:
Chris,
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!
From James Slater:
Reading your post brought this to mind:
http://stevenpoole.net/trigger-happy/edge-101/
(One of Steven Poole’s columns from Edge magazine.)
In particular:
From James Slater:
Oh, and I know the above is nearly a decade old; I suppose it’s…interesting that we are facing the same basic problem all these years later.
From chris:
@andrew – Sometimes it takes me a day or two to reply, but I always do
The “split-second” decisions are the perfect holdover from Fahrenheit – they encourage an emotional, gutteral, response that you only find in FPS games. In regards to your second point: You bring up something really important with the micro-actions that I should have given more thought to… the imagination plays a major role in the enjoyment of Heavy Rain. I *really* have to dig my heels into the character and use every micro-action as an opportunity to identify with her/him, and the only way to do it is by imagining myself into her/his life – I think to myself, “Geez, he looks tense. Maybe he needs a few minutes to breath and relax over the railing.” That kind of play-style is right up my alley, and I admittedly didn’t do much of that in Heavy Rain. There was something so distracting with the thumbstick actions that I never found myself able to assume the role of my characters. That sounds more like my failing than the game’s, however.
@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
From Jorge Albor:
Excellent post. Sorry for coming to it so late, but I just now finished Heavy Rain. I’ve been browsing through the existing critiques and I like this approach to Heavy Rain’s interactive banality. It is hard to wrap my head around solutions though. Imagination is great and all, but is it realistic for a project like Heavy Rain to leave the majority of content up to the player’s imagination?
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.
From chris:
Thanks for the feedback Jorge! Ultimately I agree with andrew that the imagination has to play a role, but I too find my imagination a bit “stretched” at moments, like it has nothing to grab onto in Heavy Rain.
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
From Rudy:
Hi Chris
You insightful article has prompted me to search for storytelling edutainment titles.
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
From chris:
Thank you Rudy!
My suggestion would be any of the Dorling Kindersley Multimedia edutainment titles, like ‘The Way Things Work’. I’d also recommend Knowledge Adventure games like “Undersea Adventure” and “Dinosaur Adventure”. They are less driven but narrative, but are definitely exploration based.
Stowaway! is in my favourite. If you can find a copy of that, and install “DosBox”, you’ll have a blast.
From Nick:
Wow, I just had a major nostalgia moment as I scrolled down and saw those illustrations. I remember reading that cross-section book from my grade school days like crazy. Didn’t know there was an application to go with it, going to have to see if I can find it online.
From UnclGhost:
Spoilers for Heavy Rain follow.
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.
From Dale Rowe:
While I certainly agree with the shape and direction of your argument, I think there is still something to be said about representing minutiae in games.
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.
From chris:
@Dale -
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