Toronto Thumbs

Young At The Heart
Heavy Reign?

Thumbs newcomer Jayson Young writes about how a game like Heavy Rain might be more than just a simple ripple in a puddle. – ed.

For evangelists of the games-as-art movement, it’s no doubt been heartening to see the blockbuster sales figures and overwhelmingly positive critical response surrounding Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. Its development was a huge risk for Sony: they invested millions of dollars in a completely unproven, counterintuitive style of game. A marketplace that demands endless Gears of War clones and Modern Warfare knockoffs might foreseeably have ignored a piece of “interactive fiction” with a relentlessly depressing narrative. But Heavy Rain is a bona fide hit; arguably the most unlikely “Triple-A” title in recent memory.

Given its monumental place in the current gaming landscape, Heavy Rain and its innovations are sure to have repercussions for years to come. David Cage even spoke on a recent 1up podcast about the potential for the game’s engine to be licensed to other developers (not an inevitable move for Cage, but if he decides not to license the gameplay mechanics, they’re still destined to be mimicked thoroughly). While a few commentators have derided the game for feeling like Cutscene: the Game, I think Heavy Rain’s legacy will prove to be more important than we think. The game’s most impressive feature is the way it recontextualizes the interactivity of the medium; it presents a new way to interact with the characters onscreen while still paying homage to the lineage of games. In essence, Heavy Rain is advancing the literacy of videogames.

Non-gaming friends of mine, when asked with horrified disbelief why they don’t play games other than Restaurant City, often report that the most insurmountable barrier is their lack of familiarity with gaming controllers. “Just hit the X button,” I’ll say, and they’ll respond with a woefully uninformed “Which one is the X?”

Those of us who have grown up “in the know” often forget that there is a certain literacy associated with gaming. While I was learning my ABCs, I was also learning the ins and outs of a d-pad and the A and B buttons (along with those trusty punctuation points, the Start and Select buttons). Later, when I was beginning to appreciate the narrative points-of-view and complex grammar structures, I was also becoming acquainted with analog sticks and shoulder buttons galore. You could say I’m—we’re—“fluent” in controller use, able to coordinate stick twiddles and button presses without a second thought. There has been a definite linear progression to the way the average game is controlled, with slight variations across genres and platforms. But to someone who (sadly?) grew up without a controller in their hands, asking them to jump right into something like God of War is like asking an illiterate person to enjoy Joyce’s Ulysses.

Perhaps in an effort to address this disconnect, Cage and the developers of Heavy Rain have radically reconsidered the way we make our onscreen selves do things. PaRappa may have taught gamers that button presses could correspond to a rhythm, but it’s a bit of a leap in logic to divorce that gameplay structure from a music-based game. To an extent, that’s just what Heavy Rain has done. As a result, Heavy Rain feels like a middle ground between traditional controller inputs and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Wii-style motion controls. But unlike the Wii—or the even more physically-involving Natal—Heavy Rain still leaves the control entirely in the player’s hands. While some have theorized that Heavy Rain might have been well-suited to Playstation Move controls, the use of the player’s entire body would have made the game a physical experience, as opposed to the psychological one that it was intended to be. The controls are intuitive enough that the controller eventually seems to melt away, allowing the player to focus on the narrative and its harrowing demands.

Ultimately, by forcing the audience to reconsider its relationship to the controller, Quantic Dream has made a decisive step away from the typical game experience. So Heavy Rain really does seem more like a visually-realized novel than a “game”: it requires an emotional investment comparable to a detective novel; in order for the game’s sequences to “make sense” or have resonance with the player, she must accept the author’s (in this case, David Cage) intention. And yet, despite its distinctly “non-gamey” feel, Heavy Rain is still firmly rooted in its videogame lineage. While changing a baby’s diaper or shaving may seem trivial by videogame standards (and prime examples for omission according to the game’s detractors), avoiding capture by police officers or navigating electrically-charged fences are quintessential gaming experiences, echoing the NES era and even earlier times. Heavy Rain’s brilliant—and most noteworthy—contribution to the evolution of videogame culture is its ability to offer the incredibly mundane as well as the viscerally exciting using the exact same control scheme.

So where will we go from here? Well, partially at least, we’ll all dabble to varying degrees in motion-controlled experiences, which will hopefully amount to more than just swinging swords and dodging flying projectiles. But Natal and PlayStation Move are huge corporate gestures that demand similarly huge gestures from their audiences (at least until the technology sees further refinements). While broad strokes are fine for baseball sims and first-person battles, can motion controllers also let us feel the subtler movements? Strange as it may sound, Heavy Rain proved that frying an egg or searching through desk drawers can be an intriguing experience; it wasn’t about the physical sensations in these cases. Rather, it helped gamers realize that the minutiae of everyday life can, given the right context, be as thrilling as racking up headshots. Contrary to most of the lessons of videogame history, thrills don’t have to come in huge, explosive packages.

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