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In-Depth Play Magazine Interview: David Cage +New screens
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http://www.playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.Content&contentid=1962
David Cage, the writer and director of Heavy Rain, has a few points hed like to make: I want to discover if it is possible to create an experience based on narrative and complex emotions for an adult audience using the interactive format. I want to understand if it is possible to invent a new interactive grammar not based on the traditional game paradigms but on new vocabulary. I want to know if Im capable of writing an interactive script offering depth and meaning, and if the market is ready for that. I should have these answers and probably more when Heavy Rain will be released.
Heavy Rain is a lot of provocative talk at the moment, which is part of the impetus to not talk about it too much from my end, where speculation is begging to rear its ugly head. Cages words alone speak of the games progressive ambitions, and they mostly manage to reinforce a game structure that is more intriguing and complicated the more individual scenes are revealed. Until the Cologne trade show, I really had the feeling absolutely no one had a clue what I was talking about, says Cage.
Ive seen more of Heavy Rain than anyone outside the developers themselves, and I am happy to say I still dont know what Heavy Rain is about. This is part of its strength, part of the anticipation for those waiting for a game that offers to play by a new set of rules. Its not easy or fair to detail a game that is aiming to broadly toy with some very adult emotions through a long string of narrative events, designed to unravel according to your individual choices within the scene. Maybe that sounds like the familiar choose-your-own adventure scenario we are used to walking through in games like Mass Effect or Fallout 3, but its not. Heavy Rain isnt as much concerned with the challenge of mechanicsdetails were used to distilling as we preview a gameas it is with the challenge of dealing with the human condition in an interactive storytelling space.
In Heavy Rain, as you assume the role of four intertwining characters, you might die, or you might not; death is a rearranged concept in the game anyways. If a familiar scene of death occurs, it is not meant to be the final game over bell-toll, but a continuation of the narrative to the next scene, where the scenarios have now shifted. Cage likes to call Heavy Rains progression a rubber band, where the plot bends but you never know when or where it will snap back into place. The game plays out over 70-plus discreet scenes, and the final resolution is meant to be open-ended, as you would expect from the steps you take in your personal real-world endeavors.
The story of Heavy Rain places you into a fictional east-coast world where the Origami Killer is on the loose. You journey through this oppressive mood space in real time, interacting with clues, engaging in scenes of dialogue and exploration, determining where scenes may climax through contextual quick-time cues. Let David Cage and the images on the pageimages that have largely been provided for this feature as a mystery, with little to no contextfed the Heavy Rain arc carrying you to the games final release early next year...
play: You talk a lot about emotions. Youve been on the Heavy Rain project for a few years now, have amassed a huge development team, and are closing in on the final stretch. So how are you feeling?
David Cage: Excited, definitely! The game takes shape and we see the magic appearing day after day. It is a very interesting moment where after years of obscure and hard work we start to see the experience we had in mind emerging. I chase what I call the moments of grace, moments where something happens emotionally on the screen, and I have more surprises every day.
Art direction is absolutely key in this project, and we are now in an interesting phase where little adjustments can have an immediate and significant impact on a scene.
I also feel totally focused on the last months of the game. I know how important they are going to be to make all the final adjustments and improve the experience. Devils in the details, and it is particularly true for this type of experience.
Last but not least, I feel glad about how things are turning. I had this idea almost four years ago, and when I look back at all the hard work that has been done, from writing the concept, convincing my team, convincing a publisher like Sony, doing this insane Babylonian production and finally creating expectation worldwide about what we were doing, I feel more than happy. There is no real pressure when you work on something you strongly believe in and get positive response from your publisher and the people who saw the game so far. Whatever happens, this moment in production will remain a very pleasant one with this strange feeling of pieces of a puzzles finally coming together.
How close has the game kept to your original design vision? Are you finding any early ambitions proving a bit unfeasible now that youve come this far?
I always have a weird feeling about my original design vision when I look at the final game. When I write a game design, I dont have images of the final game in my mind, I have a vision of what emotions I would like it to trigger. It is very precise and very abstract at the same time.
When the game finally comes together, I discover my game in a certain way as the result of the work of 200 people for two years, coming with their inspiration, creativity and desires.
As a result, it is most of the time very different from anything I had imagined. But it generally remains very faithful to my initial vision when it comes to the emotions it triggers, and this is the thing that matters the most to me.
I rarely found ideas that proved to be unfeasible, firstly because I try not to write anything that is impossible to create and secondly because we develop at Quantic the technology that is required to make my ideas possible. I know my team quite well, I have a good understanding of how technology works (although I am not a programmer) and we established very early on that Quantic would be design-driven rather than technology-driven. Technology is extremely important in the company (it is entirely proprietary), but it serves the goal defined by the game design, it does not drive the design.
Starting with ideas allows us to push the technology in very interesting new directions that we would maybe have ignored otherwise.
Conceptually, there are a couple of things that I experimented in the first stages of the writing process, especially around the idea of procedural storytelling. I had to step back because there were still some conceptual bricks that were missing. But I may come back to that at one point in a future project
Many artists, like it or not, have moments where they question their vision. Can you point to anything you personally struggle with in bringing Heavy Rain to where you want it?
Working on a game like Heavy Rain is for me a mix of moments of enthusiasm when a scene no one believed in finally works and of deep moments of despair facing the amount of work that remains to be done. Sometimes I feel excited about the fact we do something really different, sometimes I fear no one will like it because it is different.
I believe that this strange balance is absolutely necessary to be creative. You need to reassess every morning what you are doing and why you are doing it, challenge yourself, question yourself, hope to create something great and fear to miss something important. There is also a difficult balance to be found in listening to criticism coming from your team and from outside, and ignoring them to stay faithful to your vision even when other people cannot see it yet. If you abandon too early at the first bad comment, you will never do anything original. If you dont want to hear criticisms, you may just be totally wrong and be unable to see it.
I have many examples, especially on Heavy Rain, of things no one believed in and that I intentionally ignored because my instinct told me they would become interesting. Ethans scene we presented in Cologne was one of these scenes my team was quite dubious until the week before we presented it. There are also many cases where I was wrong and I had to listen to other peoples comments. Knowing when to persist and when to listen is something that comes with experience. I believe I am better at that now than I was ten years ago although there is still room for improvement
Sticking to an idea and finally proving to be right is my little act of creative heroism. I like these moments where you have the feeling of seeing something others cannot see yet.
With all this interest in exploring more complex, substantial emotions, Im reminded of what Miyamoto once said, that he observes the players face and wants to see them smiling as they play. What are you ultimately gunning for?
My goal is to see an emotion on players faces, whether it is happiness, disgust, fear or tears. The worst thing would be to see no expression at all. Most of all, I want players to forget that this is just a video game, I want them to feel immersed in whats going on on screen and believe for a second that this is real. If they feel what the characters feel, then my goal is reached.
Is it fair to say the fragile, uncertain nature of the human psyche fascinates you?
Definitely. Someone mentioned to me that all my games were about schizophrenia, about this idea of being someone elsefrom virtual reincarnation in Omikron to this idea of controlling four characters in Heavy Rain.
I think I see games like emotion simulators, a unique possibility to be in the shoes of someone else, to experience events and situations that will never happen to you in real life and to discover what you would do (and I guess who you really are). The more it goes, the more I am interested in characters with inner wounds, moments in their pasts that made them who they are. Super heroes are not appealing to me, because they spend their time being strong and winning over evil. I dont have anything in common with them. I want to write about characters who are fragile, vulnerable, sometimes fantastic, sometimes disappointing. In short, I want to write about human beings. This is a subject that very few video games have tried so far
What drives you to make a game like Heavy Rain?
I want to discover if it is possible to create an experience based on narrative and complex emotions for an adult audience using the interactive format. I want to understand if it is possible to invent a new interactive grammar not based on the traditional game paradigms but on a new vocabulary. I want to know if I am capable of writing an interactive script offering depth and meaning, and if the market is ready for that. I should have these answers and probably more when Heavy Rain will be released
One of the more important things Heavy Rain promises me is that you are making a game for adults. Why is it so hard for games to reach for higher ground and pull away from the typical childs play? And what exactly is adult [to you]?
Creating an adult experience is about changing the content and the form of video games. Changing the form means trying to create an experience that is not based on shooting/jumping/driving loops but on new types of interfaces allowing a wider range of contextual actions. It also means creating an experience where the challenge is not on the controller but rather in the mind of the player. Changing the content means writing about more complex themes triggering more complex emotions. Most games are about heroes confronted with a villain, the heroes fights hard, kills zillions of enemies but finally kills the villain and saves the world. The emotions triggered on the way are mainly stress, excitement, anger, frustration, competition.
Working for an adult audience requires to tell more complex stories using believable characters and a wider palette of emotions including empathy or sadness. The main difficulty you face as a creator is to dare evoking subjects that are not traditional video game themes. It sounds bizarre to say that, but try to think of a game talking about rape, homosexuality, euthanasia, anorexia, physical handicap, or even how it feels to cheat on your wife or not to have the courage to face your responsibilities. All these subjects are very complex and sensitive, some amazing books or movies have been made about them. Thinking of a video game about these is somehow shocking. Why? Just because games are perceived as toys for kids, and kids should not be involved in these matters. But if you consider interactivity like a creative platform like theatre, poetry or literature, it suddenly breaks the barrier and there is no reason why you could not interact in a story based on one of these themes to understand what it feels like. It is not about having fun, it is about being someone else, having to face new situations. Ultimately, I believe it can truly help people to understand better each other.
Heavy Rain is just the first step in this new direction. It explores what it really means to love someone. It is going to be a very shocking game for some, not because it will be vulgar or gory, but because it dares to explore areas where very few games have before. I see myself as an author working on a creative platform. Whatever serves my story is acceptable for me with no limit. I refuse to consider that doing or showing something is not right for a game if it would be logical to do in a movie or a book. I respect this medium and I believe that it is time to get rid of preconceived ideas and show there is much more to do with interactivity than what we have done so far.
You say you are not interested in making toys. I know some high profile game makers who argue games really shouldnt be, arent capable of being, more than toys.
When cinema appeared, many people thought it would never be more than a nice attraction for kids in fairs. Who could imagine in these old days that some masterpieces would come from projecting images on a big screen of watching a train entering a station or a horse running?
I have a lot of respect for my colleagues doing great games with no other ambition than providing fun to teenagers. There have been a great market for these products and there will continue to be in the future.
But saying that interactivity cannot be more than toys is a total absurdity. It is like saying that cinema will never be more than this old movie where we see a train entering a station.
Interactivity is a medium. It has no specific nature by itself. It is what people will make of it. If only toy makers use it, they will create toys. If authors work on it, they will create masterpieces. I plead for more authors and fewer toymakers because I believe interactivity needs inspiration, meaning, ambition, courage, and of course emotion.
Every story is essentially a character on a quest. Games at their core are about quests. Is it natural that we tell stories with games, at least in some capacity?
I dont believe cinema and games mean the same thing with the word quest. In a movie (or in literature), a quest is basically a narrative arc that the hero will go through that will deeply change him. The character is different at the end than at the beginning, and the story tells how his experience changed him and made him someone different in a way or another.
In games, a quest is usually something to do involving battles, puzzles or inventory, that character asks you to accomplish, although you dont really understand why, in order to give you a reward that will lead you to your next quest. The emotional arc is usually very limited, characters evolution too. It all comes down to accomplishing something physical to get a reward to progress to the level.
This is a very old scheme and I cannot help but jump on my couch each time I see that in a game. Ive played games for twenty years and I have accomplished thousands of quests in my gamers life, probably traveling by foot many more miles than I have in my real life. I think I have now a clear idea of the concept and I am eager for new narrative structures that will go beyond this old scheme.
A major problem I see with the way we try and tell stories with games is that plot structure always breaks down once you take control of a character and create your own actions. In a sense two authors are competing to tell their own tale and have their own control. The fairly rigid, written story that the writer placed in the game seems to always struggle to connect with what the player is feeling and doing in his active space.
I disagree. There are ways to create a story that are not fixed and rigid but rather that are told in a narrative space where the player can be free. Boundaries can be almost invisible if the story is designed the right way. With Indigo, I made this interesting experience demoing the Diner scene, the first scene of the game: after Lucas Kane killed a stranger in the restrooms of a diner in a state of trance, I asked the audience what they wanted to do now. Some wanted to hide the body, others wanted to hide the knife, to leave the place or to hide all evidences. Many tried to find something that was not possible, but honestly no one managed to find something Lucas Kane could not do. All the technique was about creating a tight context for choices and dealing with all the possible decisions the character may want to do. This is just one of the techniques that can be used to create a narrative space for the player that allows to tell a good story while leaving controls of the narrative in the hands of the player.
We have developed and improved these techniques in Heavy Rain to merge storytelling and interactivity in a new way. I am convinced there are many other ways of doing this and I am impatient to move on my next project to explore new areas.
What is at the core to you that makes a game a game?
I dont try to make a video game. I believe there are enough people out there making fantastic video games, they dont need one more.
What I mean by video games is interactive experiences usually based on violence and repetitive patterns. My work is about getting rid of game play mechanics as such and replacing them with contextual actions allowing to tell a story. To give you a concrete example, the ARI sequence we showed in the scene MAD JACK is quite unique in the game. It is not one of twenty scenes where you will need to go on a crime scene, use your ARI device to find clues before the bad guy arrives and you fight him once in the mud, once in the sand, once in the grass, once in the snow It is a specific mechanic used contextually in very few scenes to tell a specific part of the story. This is a very different approach.
I am sorry if I sound a little bit cynical about video game mechanics, but this industry is stuck in patterns as if there were no other ways of making interactive experiences. For me, it is like a novelist writing entire books based on the same scene just changing the environment. There is a life outside game patterns. It is time to discover it.
How do you maintain a risk-reward quotient in a game thats heavily cinematic based? Or is that traditional gameplay device we might think of not a concern to you?
Risk-Reward relates to the notion that a game should be a challenge, something that as the player I may succeed in or fail. I see Heavy Rain as a journey rather than a challenge, an experience where the player will never be stuck but will rather define his path and see how his actions have consequences. It may sound very abstract describing it, but it is possible to create an experience based on a journey and not on a challenge, and I dont believe it would be a less exciting or interesting experience.
How do you avoid a gameplay beat destroying a story beat, or vice versa? So often you are forced to watch a story play out, then you jump into a string of action, an incessant shootout or whatever the case may be. Then you jerk into the next unrelated, unbelievable moment when youre supposed to take that character seriously as a real person with real emotions.
The way video games are structured generates this type of situation. If you have defined that your gameplay is about shooting at enemies, you will need to provide many levels with different environments and different enemies. You can offer some variations, but fundamentally, the player will do the same thing through these levels. Then you will need some kind of story to link all your levels together, justify that you start in the jungle, go in the snowy mountains, killing millions of enemies on your way. Technically, storytelling is just a tool to link levels together. In this context, it cannot make miracles, because no story can justify this absurd set up.
The first thing to do if you want to change this situation is NOT to define your initial gameplay as an action loop. Instead of starting with what can my character do? start with who is he? Dont start your game design with my character can shoot, jump on walls, crouch, hide, but rather with my character is confronted with this situation and will have to find a solution.
Instead of starting with the means and trying to find the goal, you start with the goal and then define the means. What you discover is that the means have to be numerous and diverse, which leads you to different decisions regarding interfaces and design in general.
The right approach not to sacrifice story to gameplay or vice versa is to think about both at the same time. Each scene should be contextual, and offer a strong proposition for storytelling AND gameplay. One should always support the other.
Interactivity has been defined so far by the fact of destroying something or killing someone, but there are many other ways of interacting that are just as interesting if not more. The objective of creative people in this industry in the coming years should be to discover new ways of interacting and how it can create new types of experiences. We explore one area with Heavy Rain, but there are many others in very different directions, like Flowers for example.
There are arguments that its time to stop emulating filmmaking and go deeper into making better and more interesting mechanic-driven games. Are maybe both arguments valid, and it comes down to what kind of experience youre trying to create for the player?
Some people are naХve enough to believe that games can invent themselves from scratch. When cinema was invented, it borrowed most of its initial visual grammar from photography and painting, before adding its own vocabulary and affirming its own identity. When photography was invented, it borrowed its visual grammar from painting. When games were invented, most of their visual grammar came from B-movies. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as we add to what we borrowed. I dont have any problem using visual rules validated by a century of cinema, as I believe it works well in most cases. But as I work on a different medium that is interactive in nature, I need new words in my vocabulary that I try to invent every day. I dont really invent new visual rules for cinema, I work on the interactive language to see how it can be used to tell interactive stories.
And what are some of the mistakes that games continue to make, perhaps sticking too rigidly to a template that needs to be reexamined?
The current set of rules most game designers follow today were defined twenty years ago. Some of them are very simple: offer the player a challenge, give him a reward if he succeeds, if he fails make him do it again until he succeeds and gets a reward. Go the next level. Offer the player a challenge, give him a reward, etc.
Another interesting example is about ramping: with the first coin-ups, games became more and more difficult because the owner of the arcade machine wanted the player to put more and more coins in. So the rule was start easy so the player gets addicted, become progressively more and more difficult so the player puts more and more coins because he does not want to lose his progress in the game.
These rules are still used today, although they dont make sense anymore. We have used these great rules as long and as much as possible, but I dont believe we can do much more with them now. We make the same games for twenty years, based on mechanics, patterns, challenges, game over sequences, and ramping. If we want to create new types of experiences, we will need to free ourselves from the old grammar and invent a new one, a more open-ended one, a more creative one, a more ambitious one.
When I watched a few scenes play out in Heavy Rain, I was intrigued by how you manage to generate tension and anticipation. The knowledge that I can die and the game goes on, that Im not getting caught up in the typical death/game over scenario, seems to resonate in unexpected ways.
Your actions have consequences, thats the motto of the game. Instead of saying you will lose something if one of your character dies, we prefer to say you tell a different version of the story where you will see different things than if your character was alive. Death is not a penalty, it becomes a part of the story that you contributed to write. What I like about this is that it gives some weight to your acts in the game. It is like killing, which is something so common in games that you dont even mention it. In Heavy Rain, we hope to create situations where killing someone will become a very difficult moral decision to make, where it wont be about killing a bunch of pixels to move to the next, but where it will be about taking the difficult decision to take the life of a human being.
Giving weight to players decisionsI think this is my ultimate goal with Heavy Rain.
Does it get a little frustrating trying to explain a game that, in your head, is so far removed from the norm that it really must be played? Id imagine too you have to take this somewhat delicately and not create too many unrealistic or misguided expectations.
You cannot imagine how frustrating it can be. Until the Cologne trade show, I really had the feeling absolutely no one had a clue of what I was talking about. I faced a similar situation with Indigo, until the day the game was released and people could connect my speech to the game. I am sure the same thing will happen with Heavy Rain. Not creating unrealistic expectations about the game is also very important for me. I dont pretend to offer a procedural story where everything is possible or an open world where if you kill the father, the son will find you to get revenge. What Heavy Rain aims to be is a well written and visually stunning journey creating a strong sense of emotional involvement within discrete narrative boundaries (wow, thats a long and boring sentence ). In short, we aim to create a unique emotional journey, characters and situations that you will remember for a long time. This is my promise to players.
Im not going to ask you: How long of a game is Heavy Rain? But I would like you to respond to my thoughts that games are often too long today, and are poorly paced and are increasingly creating stretches that feel like a chore.
I cannot agree more. There is this strange notion that more is better. A 120-minute movie is definitely better than a 90 minute one. A book with 200 pages is better than a book with only 180. A 40-hour-long game is thus better than a 10-hour one. Games are expensive and a young audience wants more for their money. An older audience rather expects a better experience than a longer one. This trend also relates to a change in the way we enjoy entertainment. Apart from students, few adult gamers can spend 40 hours playing one game, finding the time and not getting bored at some point. Movies are usually 90 minutes, so are soundtracks, TV shows are 50 minutes long weekly. Games are about 10 hours long.
Given the quality most next gen titles are targeting, creating 10 hours is already a significant challenge. Beyond this limit, it becomes almost impossible to maintain pacing and narrative in a consistent way.
I personally prefer eight hours holding my breath than 40 hours going from level to level fighting enemies.
Working for an adult audience, I dont feel this is an issue. Heavy Rain will offer a high replayability value for people who will want to see everything, but that was definitely not my goal designing the game and I dont think it will be that important for Heavy Rains players.
Why is it so hard for gamemakers to get away from physical threat as an immersion device? I have this fantasy that in Heavy Rain, I may go a good hour without being in imminent danger, just going on a journey of discovery, finding clues, exploring this communicative space.
The need for physical threat comes from the old days of video games where the situations and emotions we could depict were so basic that we needed to evoke very visual things and offer very obvious trade-offs.
With Heavy Rain, I was myself surprised to discover how it becomes possible to make interactive everydays life moments and make them very interesting to play. We now reach a point where killing or dying is not the only situation that can be told through interactivity. In Heavy Rain, I like the scene where you take care of your son, where you have to deal with other characters, or make moral choices. Most of them do not involve your life but have consequences on the story or just on who you want your character to behave. It really opens new possibilities.
Would it be a wrong notion to expect a level designer or gameplay designer to have a more intimate understanding of the mechanics behind storytelling?
I spent ten years trying to teach game designers how to tell a story and I miserably failed. Now I am going to spend the next ten years to try to teach game design to storytellers with I hope- more success Game design is just a set of rules you have to play with. Being a writer is about being sensitive, observing the world around you and being able to translate it in a way that will trigger emotion for the audience. I believe one is easier to learn than the other.
As every game mostly emulates every game before it, are we artificially creating this idea in the collective gamer community of what is supposed to be compelling?
There is a common idea in our industry that a good game should be fun. I think that this definition is very limited. I believe a good game should be sad, fascinating, funny, shocking, thought-provoking. Skateboarding is fun. Interactivity should be much more than that.
I like when a gamemaker calls himself an inventor. You are working within an ever-changing canvas. What lessons will you take away from Heavy Rain?
I call myself an author rather than an inventor. Author does not imply that I am talented, but just that I am sincere trying to share with others things that matter to me, believing that they may just spend a pleasant moment or maybe even keep something in them of this experience.
I dont know yet what I will take away from Heavy Rain. I had a real pleasure spending these years living and breathing with these characters, a strange mix of real human beings and their virtual clones. It is the first personal story I wrote for a video game, the first story that I feel really connected to. All I hope is that players will feel emotionally involved in this experience and have a unique moment playing Heavy Rain. Beyond Quantic Dream and Sony, I believe this game will be important for our industry whatever happens. If we succeed, we will open a new way for the future. If we fail, it will take a while before anyone else will try to create an emotional-narrative-driven experience for an adult audience. That would really be a shame, because I know there is something there...
mehr bilder hier:
http://www.playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.Content&contentid=1962
ich finds wunderschön
