Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer

Joystiq gave us their hands-on impression of a Heavy Rain demo/bonus level playthrough yesterday, and as I read it I kept having to stop myself from screaming again and again in pure excitement. Read it now.

Everything I remember from Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit that excited me about games as a storytelling/interactive medium is brought back and hyperextended by David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream and mastermind behind both Indigo Prophecy (known as Farenheit in Europe) and the new title Heavy Rain for the PS3 (also known as Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer).

Because most every hit on my website for the past few days seemed to have been somehow related to Heavy Rain (people continue to read my old Heavy Rain article despite the fact that I have written like, sixty others) I decided to continue reporting on every scrap of information I can get–simply because Heavy Rain really is pushing the boundary on games as a medium that should appeal to more than just kids and teenagers. David Cage has an interview up on Gamasutra in which he talks about a number of things, including his belief that games are really marketed far too much towards teenagers, a reflection of how the industry started: teenagers making games for other teenagers. Even a seriously gritty, mature work such as MadWorld seems to be a fest of all the things that a teenager would find cool, from badasses to blood to chainsaws. There’s also this video interview with David Cage to pore over in which he mentions much of the same thing.

And for now, that’s everything. I’ll continue keeping my eyes out for all information I can, including screens, videos and more, especially since I seem to be such a valuable resource according to search engines.

Thanks a lot for your reading, and I hope my providing concise information is of some use to you interested people!

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This is in reply to Costikyan’s “I Have No Words & I Must Design”, in particular his assertion that “Stories are linear. Games are not.” I recently was asked to agree or disagree with this statement, and went haywire and wrote this next rail.

I hate hearing the words “Games don’t need story.” It bothers me. It worries me. I worry that people have lost sight of seeking a more exploratory world of games, a more experimental experience. But I can respect their opinion–they’ve chosen Form over Purpose, if you’ve read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. They want to find a refined way to create a game that will appeal to the viewer.
However, I’ve long since leapt that fence and raced to the heart of what I consider games: experiences. People developed games through evolution, Will Wright has said. It’s important for our growth and development. It’s a form of *experience*, in which our actions and the “management of our resources” affect our trajectory towards our goal. But our goal could be something far greater, far more profound than simply “Achieving victory”. “Owning all the property.” “Defeating the final boss.” By seeing games in this light, I almost feel like we’re trying to make games more shallow than they are or could be. More dry. More boring. See, if it’s just about capturing the flag, what’s the point? If all you need to do is get to the finish line before everyone else, why do it? There has to be more to designing a game, and I think by exploring the ways we tell stories through gameplay is the key. After all, people create their own stories when playing any game–they don’t just observe the rules of play, they observe the EVENTS of play–the rules simply become the reality, the medium for that story to take place.

Think of a game like the Indigo Prophecy (Farenheit in the UK). It had an amazing story which steadily became a Wachowski Brothers fest as the game continued, thanks to an unfortunate lack of funding for the tale that was supposed to be a sequel. In any case, the way the story was told was entirely through gameplay–through a set of rules that players began to learn and obeyed throughout the experience. The final goal of the game? To uncover the secret behind the murder your main protagonist appears to have committed. It’s a survival game, in a sense–the point is to survive to the end. But even if it’s such a simplistic formula, without that story the game would collapse onto itself. The gameplay is strong and interesting and experimental, but it’s simply not enough to convey the experience–it’s the story that drives that.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at a very story-absent game. Let’s take Pong. Any version–you can go from Pong to Top Spin 2 to Rockstar’s Table Tennis. The game has very little story to it. You rise to the top and all, but, really, the plot can be thrown aside and what would be left is the barebones game mechanic of bouncing a ball back and forth. But what is it that drives the player to invest in that? Is it the cheering fans, the hot asphalt? The original Pong didn’t have that level of realism. Is it the simplistic power of moving a rack and knocking a ball back across the net at the other player? Table Tennis was a great deal more complicated than that, and requires a good bit of hard work to master.
In essence? It’s the spirit of that competition that embodies the challenge and elicits the player’s emotion. We search for so-called “meaningful play” in design, but what many fail to realize is that every time a player is invested, they are alluding to yet another human story.

We shouldn’t be trying to create “meaningful play”. We should be trying to make play players can attach meaning to themselves.

The point I’m trying to make is, games create stories. People create stories–we’re a story-driven race; it’s why we spend such a great deal of time researching and conserving our hi-story. Our memory is comprised of stories and events, and those experiences dictate how and what we have learned over the course of our lives. Humans and stories are inseparable–and games are simply the setup of hypothetical, experimental universes for more stories to be created. Costikian said it himself, and I don’t know why he doesn’t recognize it: “Games provide a set of rules; but the players use them to create their own consequences.” Those consequences are being remembered and learned as stories.

I see ludology as a tool, not an ideal. Creating fun gameplay is essential to a game’s success, yes. But it’s finding a way to capture the spirit of play in the player that I find the true art. It’s why many MMOs fail where World of Warcraft reigns king. It’s why people keep buying Final Fantasy again and again and again. It’s why you keep asking your friends to play Monopoly with you–the universe created by the game is that breeding ground for all players to create their own stories. It doesn’t matter what the mechanics are, as long as they work for that specific event you want to recreate.

It’s why many people disliked Assassin’s Creed. Playing it, you’d want to recreate the story of an assassin. But the gameplay simply doesn’t lend for the creation of that experience. The game isn’t UN-FUN, per se. It just doesn’t lend for someone to believe they’re an assassin in most cases.

Give that some thought before you begin writing numbers down, ludologists.

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I’m back from GDX, which was somewhat disappointing but yet very inspiring. It’s helped me decide on a lot of things about my future, and what I choose to pursue. But on to other interesting things, because I’m not as important.

The other day Shadow of the Colossus came up again. I love SotC. It’s a beautiful game. Most people agree with me. But then there’s some people who keep prying, nagging, demanding justification as to why it is good. So let’s recap here.

Music, great. Visuals, great. Gameplay –repetitive but refreshing, with the grip system and holding on to dear life from flailing stone beasts’ backs, driving a sword into their weak spots–so yeah, it’s great. Replay value,–I’m still playing it over and over because it’s so short and sweet–great. Story.

Here is where the controversy comes, and what most bothers me. Shadow of the Colossus is done by the absolutely incomparable Ico team, masters of weaving story and lore into gameplay. Every time I sit down to delve into SotC, I feel awed by the grandeur of the universe before me, and mesmerized by the stalking giants though which conquering I may be vindicated. In my eyes, Shadow of the Colossus has a tremendous amount of story. But people keep bringing up to me, what is the theme? What’s the premise? What’s the catch? Why is this story being told?

If you’d stop nattering, I’d tell you.

There’s plenty of themes in Shadow. I’ll get into them later, but they’re there. There’s a premise, too. Someone goes around and kills large stone giants. Simple, right? Themes don’t make a story, however.

The thing about a game is that, unlike a book or a movie or any other experience in which the director guides the viewer by the hand through their mystical, otherworldy vision, in games it’s usually the player taking rein and whipping the director to go faster, to turn, to stop. This makes it an entirely different kind of sensation, and by definition a true experience as opposed to a bystanding observation of the events taking place. In Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico shed light on something amazing by setting the game up for the player to fill every hole. Nothing about the protagonist’s past is explained, and even the murky details that arise are guesswork at best. But the actions that the protagonist executes throughout the actual body of the game are as clear, concise and blaringly obvious–he goes from one rock titan to the next and brings each down. The scale of each of those actions puts the experience the player actually engages in (as opposed to backstory, which the player will only hear about in the game) on a massive pedestal, and highlights it as most important. So important, in fact, that it’s the premise of the entire game.

Basically, Team Ico wanted the player to make a story him or her self, in order to explain these phenomenally epic events. Whwther the player considers the protagonist a valiant knight, sacrificing him for his princess, or whether he thinks of the hero as a remorseful assassin, regretting his kill when it is too late and doing everything he can to receive pardon once more, or even as a dedicated, fierce lover, fighting to bring back his only with tooth and claw, the action is still the same. In other forms of storytelling, action is usually caused by the elements of the story. In Shadow of the Colossus, the story is sprouted from the action.

This is the magnificent thing about games. We try so very hard to make games that follow a set storyline like a movie, trying to lead the player from event to event and finally to the end, where we culminate the whole tale and explain our cleverness in setting things up the way they are. I, as a writer, am guilty of that, and so are most other game writers (do not lie). We love our story. It’s our baby. We want the player to discover it, and learn to appreciate it.

But what we forget is that, through play, we make our own stories. I remember countless of imaginary characters my friends and I would invent and adopt in roleplay, running around in empty soccer fields and calling out attacks, chasing each other, trying to escape the nonexistent hordes behind us with nothing but our fighting skill and nerve. That was what play was for me, story. Clearly, it’s resulted in me loving to write and read stories–but I have to remember the player wants that indulging ability to create their own universe, too. It’s the reason games like Morrowind, Oblivion, SPORE, World of Warcraft and Shadow of the Colossus appeal so much to me–they don’t force me into a story, they just give me a universe and invite me to go play. Granted, sometimes it’s not as free as one might think–you can’t avoid the Oblivion main quest forever, World of Warcraft is boring and absurdly slow if you’re not doing quests and there’s nothing to do in Shadow of the Colossus other than run around like a dolt in an empty environment and take down stone giants. But we’re getting there–someday we may make an entirely free universe, where anything is possible within the rules of the world, and people will be free to truly “roleplay”.

Then again, we tried that with Second Life in a way, and it didn’t work out all that well. Maybe we still need more time.

To conclude with Shadow of the Colossus, it’s a game that’s designed with the player’s story in mind, with themes supporting the player’s interpretation of his or her own actions. In the end, the real theme is Sacrifice. You, as a player, give up your six hours to crush these creatures for reasons of your choosing, losing bits of yourself along the way, becoming corrupted, tainted and yet pushing on, even to the point of losing your horse, Arrow–the only other living creature with any sort of unique identity to it in this forgotten world, and the only named character you know, leaving you completely and utterly alone to face the price of your Sacrifice. And in the end, you are cripplingly betrayed, and all seems to have been for nothing.

…But then your sacrifice gives birth to hope.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you were fighting for. They were your reasons. It was your fight. The game was just a means to achieve it. And that’s what makes a game so much different, and so uniquely beautiful. The fact that the story was strong, well thought out, on purpose–down to dropping you in an abandoned, empty world with nothing but stone giants to remind you of how alone and unsupported you are in your great sacrifice–only a game can do something this amazing.

Only in playing do we truly experience. Watching is never enough. Don’t make a player watch.

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