[GDC] Heavy Rain-maker wil meer volwassen games

Quantic Dream-baas David Cage sprak zijn frustraties over de game-industrie uit. Met zijn presentatie op GDC had hij een belangrijke boodschap voor alle aanwezige ontwikkelaars: het is de hoogste tijd dat games meer volwassen worden.

Volgens Cage is het grote publiek klaar voor meer volwassen games. Als bewijs toonde hij twee stukjes data van zijn eigen game. Heavy Rain heeft inmiddels bijna twee miljoen stuks verkocht en de game werd door 72% van de mensen die het gekocht hebben uitgespeeld. Dat cijfer is exceptioneel hoog, het gemiddelde ligt namelijk rond de 20-25%. Zelfs andere verhaalgedreven games scoren niet zo hoog, zo hadden 'maar' 50% van de spelers Mass Effect 2 uitgespeeld.

De liefhebber kan hieronder het hele relaas van Cage lezen, waarin hij ondermeer zijn kritiek uit dat games niet genoeg emotionele reikwijdte tonen.

With most games and the designs we as an industry offer, we clearly target teenagers. Most games are based on violence and/or physical actions.

What do you do in most video games? You shoot. You kill. You destroy something with violence. Or you jump on platforms, you climb, you run, you do physical actions.

These two activities are what you do in most video games out there. The consequence of all this is that video games become, most of the time, meaningless. You have a gun and you shoot at enemies to go through the level, to fight a boss... to go to the next level to fight more enemies and more bosses.

The game tells me I'm the good guy, although I'm a mass murderer - because I have to kill thousands of people in order to be that good guy. Where's the meaning in all this? Kissing the princess in the end as your reward?

There is no real meaning that is possible when the only thing the hero can do is shoot other people or jump on platforms. As a consequence, most games are emotionally limited. The kind of emotions you feel in most games are quite basic; they are about frustration, competition, anger. These are the kind of feelings games give you.

But there are many other emotions out there. You can feel empathy - and some games do that very well. But there is sadness, there is guilt - there are many more subtle emotions available that very few video games try to trigger.

In any type of experience, what matters is not so much what you do - it's how you feel. When you see a painting, you don't enjoy just standing in a museum watching the paint; what you like is how it makes you feel. When you go to the cinema, you don't just enjoy sitting in the dark and watching moving images on a screen; what you like is what you feel.

Why not, in games design, focus on what the player is feeling second-to-second? Storytelling seems to be the best way to trigger these emotions, which need to be as varied, subtle and complex as possible. Triggering only one emotion is boring. People like the emotional rollercoaster. Why should interactivity be any different from all the storytelling mediums that humanity has invented so far?

Video games are also based on the same repetitive mechanisms. What you do in a video game is basically involves ten actions. And when you press buttons in a certain order or timing - and if you are quick enough - you can go through a level and see another one. This isn't new; you always do the same thing in these games. That's another limitation.

The last problem is probably the worst. When you think about it, video games have been based on the same paradigms for 13 years. The technology has made tremendous progress in that time - it's amazing. But when you think about the concepts of games, most of the time, you can take the last game you played and compare it to a game that was released 20 years ago. They are both probably based on the same basic rules.

In Heavy Rain, we tried to answer all of these challenges. The first one was to make a game that would clearly feature adult themes and tone. The tagline for Heavy Rain is: "How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?" It's a very complex and difficult question.

Then there was the themes that we wanted to talk about - of course love, but also redemption, guilt. These kind of complex feelings.

And then there was the story - which if you take it in a cruel way, was about child abduction. When I pitched this game to publishers, I told them: "Yeah, I've made this game. It's about love, redemption guilt and child abduction." It was often not a success.

But what we wanted was to tell something meaningful. We didn't want you to be the good guy fighting the bad guy. We wanted you to be this normal guy - who could be me or you or anyone - who is confronted by specific events that totally change his life.

We hoped players would be surprised to go through many different emotions; to make an imprint in their mind. We didn't want the audience to turn on the console and say: "Yeah, that's great. Now what else?"

We wanted the audience to remember this game for a long time; to think about the characters, the situations and what they've done. We wanted these things to follow them for a while and be just a small part of their culture - like the best movies they've seen or the best books they've read. That was our objective.

We wanted to offer varied interactions for a very simple reason: I don't know how to tell a good story if my hero can only shoot and run. I don't think there is a good story to be told when that's all you can do. We needed to find a way to change that; to allow our hero to do whatever we wanted him to do. It was about freeing our characters.

Of course, the consequence of wanting to change all this is that you need to experiment with new paradigms. You need to take risks. You need to dare to fail - and dare to fail miserably, but at least fail trying. We needed to invent new rules; to see an end product in a different way.

We wanted to create a meaningful experience; to go beyond the "I'm the good guy, you're the bad guy" and create something that would resonate with the player as a human being.

You don't have to create a game for teenagers. You can create a comedy, you can create a tragedy. You can create whatever you want. You can create something for adults. And that's what's really interesting to me.