Playing Further

Heavy Rain ushering new era of interactivity?

Welcome to what I hope to be a series of columns exploring different aspects of videogames, I want it to be an ongoing discourse with you guys and want to bounce each column off the comments from the preceding week. This level of interactivity seems appropriate for a commentary on videogames and I hope you will help me achieve it. If not, then I’ll just sit here and talk to myself and I’m sure that’ll be nearly as fun as no-one will point out the fact I don’t know what I’m talking about.

To kick off I recently read an interview in this month’s EDGE with David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream and director of their upcoming PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain. Cage is known as someone who wishes to drive videogames into much more mature space, both in terms of narrative and theme. He is obviously heavily influenced by other media including literature and cinema and he is driving to have videogames respected creatively as much as any other media. But should videogames aspire to be anything more than what they have always been, great fun and a source of competition?

Looking at the output of the industry, heavy on sequels and constricting itself to a handful of mainly prescriptive genres, the majority of the gaming audience isn’t ready or willing to have their preconceptions blown apart by radical thinking. Modern Warfare 2 will undoubtedly be the best-selling game of the year (pricing issues aside) yet it is very much an iteration rather than a revolution. It terms of drama and narrative it equals a bad Bruckheimer film. But where it’s predecessor’s appeal lay was not in it’s explosions or dramatic set pieces, but in your own personal experiences, whether it be sitting on your sofa mocking your friends over a mic, or trying to take on the hordes of enemies as you run full pelt ahead of your squad as you know you shouldn’t (whilst yelling LEROY!) and somehow surviving.

There are many things that could be called drama when playing a game, and most of them occur off the screen, as you interact with the game in your own personal way. The best of which you wish to share with others. Rock Band isn’t all about the high score and the notes sliding down the screen, it’s about getting friends together to look ridiculous posturing with silly little plastic instruments and not caring.

The highlight for me in GTA4 wasn’t the great graphics, improved vehicles or shooting, it was caring enough about the characters to be conflicted when a decision came regarding their fate. I didn’t just make an arbitrary decision, I considered who I liked the most, not who may be the most beneficial but who I wanted to spend more time with. This was a far cry from arbitrary good/evil decisions that many current and upcoming games tout as a sophisticated morality system.

I could go on describing instances when I have been affected by games in a way that would never have been possible if I were watching a film or reading a book, just as those mediums have unique advantages over the others. We as gamers need to be proud of what we have that other media can only dream of, the chance to interact with the world the designers have created and in turn craft our own experiences from the tool set they have provided.

It seems Cage is attempting to do both with Heavy Rain, by having an engaging and well crafted narrative, supported with convincing performances and art, as well as allowing the player to shape this world through their actions and take many different routes through the story, even going so far as to have a possible ending where all the playable characters die.

I’ll be keeping a close eye to see if his cinematic aspirations combined with the latest methods in true gaming interactivity can produce something wholly innovative that will have you talking long after the system has turned off.