We count down to the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo with a series of features about the issues affecting the future of the games industry.
Building Better Human Emotions: David Cage
David Cage is the kind of man who can divide an industry. Undeterred by skeptics, Cage is an outspoken attention seeker, the founder and co-owner of French studio Quantic Dream, and the lead designer, writer, and director of Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain. After 30 years of game development, Cage believes the industry has reached a stage where every avenue has been explored. Levels, bosses, points, platforms, cutscenes, ammo, and inventories all have to be forgotten: a new language must be invented to let developers explore new avenues and push the industry forward. We cannot, Cage argues, let ourselves become the only medium that is "empty." The solution? Give writers, not programmers, the power to control the direction of a game.
"We can make games about love, fear, homosexuality, handicapped people, politics, and more," Cage said during his GDC 2011 panel. "We need to create more meaningful experiences; that's where the value will come from."
Cage illustrated his point with Heavy Rain. While the game certainly garnered critical acclaim, its creator believes it was an important step in the direction the industry should be taking. For one, Heavy Rain was a game for adults--its mechanics were guided by a series of subtle, complex emotions that Cage believes to be missing from most big titles.
"It [Heavy Rain] was not based on violence or physical action; it was not based on repetitive mechanics; and it was not based on the same paradigms that have been recycled throughout the industry for the past 30 years. The story of Heavy Rain is really about child abduction. That's not an easy sell. But we wanted to say something meaningful, and we wanted the audience to remember this game for a long time."
Heavy Rain sought to use narrative rather than predefined actions to drive gameplay.
The way the game did this, according to Cage, was to steer clear of the 10 basic actions that almost all video game characters tend to resort to, such as running, jumping, and shooting. By "freeing" the characters in Heavy Rain from this set of predefined actions and a general interface, the game sought to use narrative to drive gameplay. It also sought to give players the freedom to drive and create their own individual experiences based on a set of in-game actions; like Clint Hocking, Cage believes giving players more autonomy is where all games should be headed.
In his panel talk, Cage also defended Heavy Rain's portrayal of everyday mundane human actions, such as brushing teeth and drinking juice.
The move was deliberate: without these mundane actions, it would have been impossible for players to really attach themselves to the game's protagonists. This also points to the larger problem of characterization in games--Cage believes most of the time characters are simply empty shells because game designers are under the false impression that players want to project themselves onto the characters they play. However, a medium like film is successful in creating complex characters that find themselves in realistic, normal, and everyday situations, thus allowing the audience to relate directly to them and become emotionally invested in the story. In the case of video games, what should matter more, the journey or the challenge?
"In Heavy Rain, we tried to move the challenge from the controller to the mind of the player. I don't care how fast you can move your thumbs. If you fail in Heavy Rain, you need to reconsider how you deal with the situation, as opposed to most games, where if you die, you have to go back and do it all over again until you are fast enough to move on. In the context of a story-driven experience, this makes no sense. Why would you want to go back?"
