Heavy Rain director advocates taking risks
GDC Europe 2009: Quantic Dream's David Cage discusses the maturation of the industry and how to elevate games to a viable art form.
COLOGNE, Germany--While the Entertainment Software Rating Board will label any game as "mature" so long as it features a certain level of explicit content, the overall dearth of games suited for adult tastes was the topic of discussion at a GDC Europe keynote panel held today by David Cage, CEO of Paris-based developer Quantic Dream and the writer-director behind the upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavy Rain. In a session called "Creating Interactive Narrative for a Mature Audience," Cage told the audience why he believes developers continue to create games for children even as players grow more mature and how the medium can evolve as an art form down the road.
Cage began his panel by asking why the idea of emotion in games has become so popular lately. The answer, he said, is that players have now reached a point where they want more than what they've been getting. "We're not making games for kids anymore," Cage said of today's players. With 75 percent of gamers over the age of 18, the audience has matured beyond the younger demographics of the medium's infancy. Yet despite this," Cage said, "games have not changed for 20 years."
The French developer then elaborated on these comments by distinguishing between the types of emotions games are capable of producing. Traditionally, games have produced the primitive emotions caused when one's survival instinct kicks in, but few games evoke social emotions, such as empathy and shame, which are driven by human interactions. According to Cage, art is something that triggers a wide range of emotions--not just the primitive ones--and in that range is depth and meaning that leaves a lasting impact on players.
"Most games have no meaning," remarked Cage. He said they continue to appeal to primitive emotions because scaring players is quick and easy, with few games veering from the beaten path of going after young players who are eager to show they're not frightened and prove they can take risks. It's what's been done in the past and established tradition is often hard to break from, he noted. Cage said this creates a situation where games don't allow the action and story to develop equally. He likened the "broken narrative" of games to that of adult films, with long action sequences only occasionally punctuated by limited moments of storytelling. In both formats, he said, "no one cares about the story because no one's there for the story."
The answer, according to Cage, lies in a steadfast dedication to creativity. "Never let a marketing guy have a creative idea. Never," he said. When you have non-creative people given control over a game, you wind up with compromises like sticking to recent trends that fail to move the medium forward. As an idea, he suggested imagining game designers as established authors with decisions that carry weight rather than merely employees of a studio. He also suggested studios not get bogged down in the technology behind their games, offering an example of early filmmaking when directors built their own cameras for each new movie much in the way studios often build proprietary engines from scratch.
Cage suggested developers need to take more pride in their work. He praised EA for its reaction to the sex scene scandal that emerged shortly after the release of Mass Effect, when the publisher embraced the content of the game rather than bowing to sensationalist news reports. However, this was postrelease, and developers often remove content from their games under the cover of development secrecy. He said it's up to developers to embrace the rating they receive, though he was quick to point out that it would be easier for studios to do this if there was a universal rating system for games and movies. "If something is allowed in a movie, it should be allowed with the same rating in a game."
The Heavy Rain writer continued with an argument that the games industry is at a crossroads. It can go the comic book route and continue to develop for a young, niche audience with a limited market, few publishers, and a small but stable number of valuable IPs. However, it could also do what Hollywood did and expand to all audiences with movies that frequently offer depth and meaning, citing Pixar as a studio that should be viewed as a model for all developers. Pixar is a studio that understands the importance of characters and emotion, creates trends rather than follows them, and offers a form of storytelling that appeals to every demographic, he said. We should support studios that follow the Pixar model because when players invest their money in repetitive and derivative games, "you support this foolishness."
He concluded by cutting to the chase: "Buy games that take risks."
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