by Jason L Blair
Those who only view footage of Heavy Rain or whose button presses are laden with skepticism may well file away game developer Quantic Dream’s latest release as nothing more than a pretender to the Dragon’s Lair throne. Anyone who plays the PlayStation 3ñexclusive though will find little beyond superficial connection to Don Bluth’s old-school animation sewing kit. Where Dragon Lair‘s control prompts were little more than thread tying together sequences of canned animation, Heavy Rain differentiates itself with lots of innovative ways players control the characters, and the game controls the players in turn. In a postñGod of War world bursting at the seams with Quick Time Events and treasure chests vulnerable only to relentless button mashing, Heavy Rain‘s simple button prompt mechanics can be misleading. It is not a glorified DVD game nor is it strictly an interactive cut scene. It is a new breed of media that will, if you’re a willing subject, engage you harder than any video game ever has before. Yes, even BioShock.
But I’m not here to review Heavy Rain. I’m here to study it. As a student of story, I am interested in all forms (and most theories) of narrative, particularly the sticky in-between places where story attaches to character and character to observer or, in this game, participant.
Since Heavy Rain doesn’t belong to a video game genre with an established rulebook, David Cage and the team at Quantic Dream turned to the closest cousins they could find: the lessons learned from their 2005 outing Indigo Prophecy, and the movies. Heavy Rain borrows components from a lot of cinematic sources: You’ll find the discomforting grime of Seven, the devilish games of Saw, and a gumshoe straight out of the rain-slick streets of your favorite crime story. The game weaves all of these into a tale of loss, regret, and redemption, or selfishness, greed, and ultimate failure, or some odd mutt of a tale, depending on how you play.
While the story doesn’t seamlessly gel, and has some boggling plot holes (ìHow did they not see that?î), the game stands high on the strength of immersion and some very inventive narrative tricks. And its tricks are ones that game designers looking for new ways to fuse story and game would do well to learn from. Of all the ways Heavy Rain innovates, four areas stand out to me and lead to some interesting questions about my own work, not only in video game story development, but tabletop story game design as well.
Countless (Not Really) Possibilities
The marketers are pushing the idea that even the smallest decisions in Heavy Rain ripple through the game and alter your path. From what I’ve observed, that’s not entirely trueóbut I also don’t care that it’s not entirely true. I appreciate the effort, especially in a format where there is no fudging, no riffing, no going beyond where the story takes you. Behind the curtain of video games, you will always find code. Hard, unfeeling, if/then code and it won’t simply make things up on the fly. Still, I saw enough branches to glimpse the sprawling flowchart at the heart of this game and appreciate the effort that went into it.
You will make decisions though, including lots of minor ones, that will alter your experience so that the way things went down in your game will be different than my own. Far from open-ended, these decisions are picked from a fistful of options that seem to cover the bases when it comes to realistic responses to certain situations. However you navigate these choices, the story comes together to an impressive degree. It’s a remarkable feat.
The decisions you are given seem to fall under a handful of categories that I’ve classified based on the length of their reach: the binary, the scene-changing, the game-changing. The binary are minor choices such as brushing your teeth or not. Scene-changing decisions alter how a situation plays out in a single scene, with little to no effect on subsequent scenes. Then there are game-changing choices that will affect the options and situations that come up later in the game.
All these choices are held together by either choices that aren’t really choices (meaning they lead to the same end) or by game events with no pretense of choice. If you’re looking for them, you’ll see the cracks, but the way the story ties together is brilliant and I wonder how I can use the idea of countless (not really) possibilities in my own games, both those I design and those I run.
How can we offer non-illusory player choice that doesn’t make us scramble to accommodate it? How can we constrain player choice in a way that doesn’t feel limiting but logical?
Unreliable Narrators
Heavy Rain lies to you. You’re controlling characters you don’t know everything about and you’ll find out a person you’ve come to know and trust may not have deserved the gentle hand by which you guided them. And the best part, what really gets me hopping, is that you will then judge that person. You will have been them, you will have struggled on their behalf, you will have found out you were deceived, and then you will be given the gun. Do they deserve mercy? Or is there a cry for justice? Do your actions forgive what they’ve done, or condemn them?
A character’s history is often limited to the salient points on the character sheet, with their story unfolding in a single direction during play. How can we give players tools to grow the back story of characters in a manner that is not trivial?
Unexpected Prompts
While playing Heavy Rain, I found myself predicting the prompts, trying to find the patterns behind why I need to press R1 instead of waggle the controller to achieve a certain effect. There were instances I got pretty good at it but before I had a chance to get cocky the game would change up the pattern. And when I expected an X but the game gave me an O, it was an unkind affirmation that the underlying mechanic was not my friend. It was the gatekeeper. What I want is just beyond its uncaring and unfeeling prompts, and I have to earn my advance by inches. If I fail, I leave the fate of these actionsóand potentially the charactersóto the whims of the designers. Heavy Rain lacks a fail state. A character could die and the story would just keep on going. This was bigger than having to stare down a Continue screen for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t annoying, it was exhilarating. It kept me from becoming lax in my playing.
Gamers like to know what abilities their characters will be using to accomplish certain goals. That’s why they buff their fighting skill or spend points increasing their mana pool. They want to know which aspects of their character they need to alter if they want to affect the game in a particular way. They want to use certain methods to resolve situations and want their characters to be good in those areas.
In a tabletop game, is there a way to keep gamers from anticipating the resolution mechanics without marginalizing the character choices they have made, or making the rules arbitrary?
Shifting Loyalties
Perhaps Heavy Rain‘s greatest narrative strength is how control over minor actions, seemingly mundane tasks, cements the bond between player and character. By seeing characters in their downtime, their non-plot time, I fell into each character and tried to give them the best outcome possible. Their struggle became my struggle. My failure was their failure, and not in some intangible sense but in the very real world of cause and effect. I didn’t press the right buttons in the right sequence and my character paid the price. For the first time in a video game, I was invested in the well-being of the character and not solely in the accomplishment of a goal.
But because I was so invested in each character, I would turn on myself when one character would confront another. Now that I’m on the other side, controlling the mouse instead of the cat, all bets are off. Nailing the suspect to the wall was five minutes ago. In the here and now, that suspect’s gotta protect himself and he’ll do anything to make a clean getaway. All’s fair in love and shifting narrative viewpoints.
How do we go about making investment in all characters equally rewarding? What do we gain from doing so? What do we lose?
Final Act
Aside from being an incredibly moving story, Heavy Rain brought to mind some important questions about how stories in video games can be told outside the typical action-cutscene-action model, or even the emerging level design-as-story tool paradigm. It questioned the assumptions video games have been coasting on for so long. On top of that, it made me consider how to incorporate those things in tabletop design. It did what I desire of anything I watch, read, or hear; it inspired me.
Good stuff, Jason. For me — who likely will never get to play this game — the thing that got my attention, that made me wonder if it would work, was the mundane action. I thought (hoped?) it would do as you say: invest the player into the reality of the characters and the world. I use little mundane cues in RPGs all the time to try and get players attached to their characters, thinking of them as more than action-taking avatars, but it’s a relatively rare technique in video games.
How well do you think it worked here?
I think it works as well as the player will allow. I let myself get into the fiction and take the pace I felt gave the story room to breathe. For me, it was welcome and helped cement my investment in each character on top of the animation, voice work, dialogue, etc.
Some folks will skip the voluntary mundane stuff and lament the mandatory mundane stuff (which really only happens in the first act) and will probably come away more annoyed than satisfied.
This is probably mirrored in tabletop play. I’ve gamed with folks who want to jump from encounter to encounter. I’ve also gamed with folks who were there to play a part and were hesitant to roll dice instead of act through the conflict.
Have you had to balance those two types? I’m curious as to what tricks you used, if so.
Of all the questions this post poses, I think the ones that I’m most intrigued by personally are:
How can we offer non-illusory player choice that doesn’t make us scramble to accommodate it? How can we constrain player choice in a way that doesn’t feel limiting but logical?
I’ve been thinking about these sorts of issues for quite some time now, particularly in the context procedural narrative generation. I’m far from the only one, of course, and I understand research in this area continues apace. Its an incredibly exciting field, and one I’d dearly love to break into.
In answer to the first question, I think the ultimate answer is “you can’t” – but I don’t think this should be seen as the barrier to progress it appears to be on the face of things. To do so is to balk in the face of limitations that may well be illusory themselves.
The extent of a players agency in a game/game environment is inexorably tied to the constraints that bound it – that’s a fundamental. By definition, ‘non-illusory’ choice has a qualitative and/or quantifiable impact on the circumstances that follow. Failing to accommodate such choices is what makes them illusory.
If this is the case, then the question is not so much “How do we offer players non-illusory choice…” as “How hard must we scramble in order to accommodate it?”
I believe that humans (in fact, all forms of life) are biologically/psychologically tooled to form appropriate expectations. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is the fact that every single one of our ancestors formed enough correct expectations to survive to maturity and procreate that has allowed us to exist. As a result of our inate aptitude for forming expectations, we habitually create meaning from coincidence.
For example, the coincidence of a script, a crew, a set and some actors serves to create the illusion that the events of a film or tv show (a) are happening before us (b) exist in a reality of their own (with varying degrees of similarity to ours) (c) occur in the order we perceive them in (or are prompted to perceive them in, Lost is a fantastic example here) (d) have a logical thread/causal sequence that we interpret as narrative.
Whether the coincidence in question is ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ is largely a moot point. The important thing to note is whenever one combines meaningful/evokative words, images, sounds – the mind of an audience member will attempt to find meaning, even where that meaning is incidental rather than deliberate.
So, how does a detour into the nature of meaning itself help the story-driven game designer?
I find it difficult to order my thoughts on this, but I’ll try to sum them up.
At its most basic, a story is what happened to who (or what). A situated story includes where and when. More engaging stories delve into the how and why of things.
Stripping story down to its bare bones allows us to pick up the pieces and scrutinise the function of each part. In order to broaden the scope of player agency in narrative, we need to create systems able to reason in these terms, and to do so on-the-fly, as the player makes their choices.
In traditional table-top RPGs, the GM is that system. They are equipped with all the tools and understanding required to decide how a player’s actions effect future events on the basis of past/simultaneous ones, and can readily respond to spontaneous player choices – sometimes accomodating/amalgamating them, sometimes ‘course-correcting’ to steer players back toward the narrative path, other times dismissing them as irrelevant.
In computer games, the ideal IMO is a universal semantic framework in which one can define the ‘meaning’ of things in any game world one could conceive. This could be done using ontologies – comprehensive definitions of individuals (people, objects, places, ‘things’), their relations/properties, semantic class hierarchies (what ‘type’ of things they are) and rules. These are things that – as any RPG player knows – are rigourously codified in core rules, player guides, bestiaries, source books etc. The 64 Million Dollar question is this: how can we work these sorts of things into procedural/decision making processes (i.e. code)?
This is clearly far from trivial, technically. However, from the work I’ve seen and some of the directions in which current research is headed, I’m confident that, in principle at least, this is not as far-fetched an idea as it might sound. How it could work in practice is what I’m trying to get my head around now, and I’m always looking to get feedback from those with experience of programming, game design, writing and other relevant fields, and to hear their ideas on these issues.
As always, I have great deal more to say on this, but I’ll have to save the rest for my new tumblog (link above). Will keep you all posted.