Heavy Rain's Cage on the case for normality
The most heartening part of 1up's new interview with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain director David Cage isn't the part where he notes that they've entirely reworked the quick-time-event mechanics or the fact that the taxidermist scene shown off so far was created solely for demonstration and hasn't given away any of the story itself.
It's that he makes the case that Rain will be more about the banal complexities of real life, compared to Indigo's 'fantastic' final third:
We tend to believe in our industry that we need to tell simplistic or spectacular stories, where the hero saves the world, destroys evil, or has supernatural powers. This is because the videogame, as a medium, has been too immature to tell complex and subtle stories. I made this mistake myself at the end of [Indigo Prophecy], where I felt my story needed something spectacular because all I had so far was normal people leading a normal life. I realized that the "normal" part was the one that worked the best, and that it wasn't necessary to save the world to tell something exciting anymore. Heavy Rain will be about normal people in real life, and I believe it'll be much more emotionally involving, as gamers will easily relate to the situations and characters. This is a new approach. In Heavy Rain, you won't be a superhero or a gangster. You'll just be someone real.
That's something we would happily like to see far more of.
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Daemon
#1 – 5:53 PM December 2, 2008
Normal people doing normal things? Why play the game? Just go out side and do something in your own normal life.
Anonymous Anonymous
#2 – 6:17 PM December 2, 2008
Did you see a black car on the day the snow turned into rain? Do you know where I can find some sailors? Seriously, Mr. Cage, how about not acting like you invented the regular guy realistically portrayed in 3d genre and admit that you are making Shenmue 3?
alexlitel
#3 – 8:03 PM December 2, 2008
When I played through Indigo Prophecy, I honestly thought it was a satire in multi-layered Suda style, lampooning modern corporate culture, stereotypes in media, the sheer ridiculousness of game plots, paranoia, intentional un-interactivity, et cetera.
Later I learned the game was supposed to be serious, but I refuse to accept this.
I wonder what sport Heavy Rain will feature…
Scypher
#4 – 9:45 PM December 2, 2008
Yeah, man! Like, the other day I was reading this novel about everyday people living their lives, and I was really relating to the characters, you know? But then I realized how dumb it was to experience another person's finely tuned fictional narrative, so I thought, fuck reading!
But what else to do with my time? I figured I'd watch some TV, maybe catch my favorite sitcom about normal people. Wait, what? Normal people? I threw my remote out the window and shouted, fuck TV!
So I totally how you feel, Daemon my man. Let's fight the good fight.
Anonymous Anonymous
#5 – 9:29 AM December 3, 2008
Normality is a term in chemistry. The word you should be using is normalcy.
mooch
#6 – 1:02 AM December 4, 2008
I dunno if I buy it. The essence of telling a good story is archetypes: heroes, villains, and most importantly, extraordinary moments of change or transformation. That's not to say that these archetypes need to be adhered to rigidly. In fact, stretching and blurring the boundaries between them is usually a pretty productive thing to do, since it makes the player think. But still, they need to be there.
Because otherwise all you have is an elaborate mimicry of mundane life. And I can't imagine that saying much at all.
Anonymous Anonymous
#7 – 5:31 PM December 4, 2008
@Mooch
What? No, archetypes don't a good story make. I hate that everything boils down to good or bad or good-then-bad or bad-then-good. That's crap. Bioware keeps making games where your two choices are give everyone flowers or set everything on fire, and not everything is like that. Real life is full of unlabeled nuances, nothing is clear cut. Why does any medium (up to and including videogames) have to invent the protagonist-antagonist relationship? Antagonist is just a matter of perspective.
This sort of story would be completely acceptable in any other medium (Ghost World, Garden State, Jimmy Corrigan, ten million books, etc., etc.), what makes producing something as a videogame suddenly immune to introspective on the nature of everyday life? Why does everything have to be a juvenile power fantasy?
Tucan Napalm
#8 – 5:19 AM December 6, 2008
I can not understand why people would have a problem with this. In cinema, sure you've got your big budget popcorn movies, but then you've also got a hundred times as many small budget indie productions that are funnily enough about normal life, normal situations. And it's those movies that get the most critical success.
Normal doesn't mean you'll be just making coffee and going to work (although that is the sort of gameplay that made The Sims the best selling PC game is history...), it means you'll be dealing with the sort of problems that are life affecting to you, but hold little significance for the rest of the world. In their demo sequence they showed a clip of you coming home to find a man in your house who tries to attack you. Okay, the neighbors next door probably wouldn't care that much about it, but for you it's pretty horrifying, like it would be in real life.
Normal just means 'it can happen in reality'. It doesn't make the scenario's any less intense or fun to deal with. Any game that's about saving the world could have been written by an 8 year old, and it's good to see that writers are finally growing up (even if their audience are somewhat reluctant to do likewise).