Although the finer details surrounding Quantic Dream’s upcoming project titled Heavy Rain remain extremely sparse (as a teacher-player EXTREMELY interested in the educational / learning implications of this game I’ve scoured the internet, finding next to nothing beyond officially released material), the experience promises to confront players with the provocative, essential question embedded in the title of this blog entry; How far will YOU as the player go to save someone you love? However, the specific WAY in which Heavy Rain confronts players with this essential question is extremely unique. In fact, the design of Heavy Rain is so unique that I argue it challenges many of the existing, core paradigms surrounding game development as a whole.
Although narrative development has always been a variable in game design, narrative often takes a back seat to the development of other variables including intense graphical, audio, and action-oriented elements including fighting, shooting, driving, flying, sneaking, and so on. For example, observe how these intense graphical, audio, and overall action-oriented variables dominate the player’s experience in the popular Halo series:
While extremely innovative and immersive in their own context (after all, the player REALLY gets into the action of space-age fire fights as they can hear the laser shots ricocheting about!), the time, energy, and innovation spent on developing these game elements often marginalize, or arguably omit (after all, I feel as though some games offer NOTHING beyond action), the development of any sort of narrative. For example, although it’s considered one of the best “shooters” ever developed, Halo’s “story” is about as convoluted and unclear as you can possibly get.
From what I’ve learned thus far from official press and materials released by the company itself, The EXACT OPPOSITE design scheme is the foundation of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. As the player assumes 4 independent, multi-gendered identities throughout the course of the game (FBI profiler Norman Jayden, private detective Scott Shelby, architect Ethan Mars, and journalist Madison Paige) in search of a serial killer referred to as the “Origami Killer,” the player will not ACTIVELY shoot a gun, laser, or cannon; swing a sword, hatchet, or pipe; drive a car, boat, or plane; and so on to catch the killer and prevent harm to themselves and their families. As IGN gaming expert Ryan Clements writes, the player will instead “…live out the lives of its characters” (IGN). However, Clements continues, “This is not an intense, dramatic game at every passing moment - Quantic Dream's breath-taking project is much more than that. Heavy Rain puts you in the shoes of its cast and lets you live every moment of it... even the moments in-between” (IGN). In contrast to the fast-paced fighting, shooting, driving, and otherwise action elements of games such as Halo, Heavy Rain will offer what sounds like a markedly different, PURELY narrative based experience as the player creates a rich story to explore the above primary, essential question; "How far will you go to save someone you love?"
However, some clarification here might be in order. Although Heavy Rain will in a sense be the PASSIVE viewing of a cinematic narrative, the player will be in control of the narrative’s trajectory as based on the choices they make while playing as the 4 characters. However, this control scheme isn’t the same as the ACTIVE sorts of shooting, driving, and so on utilized in other games such as Halo. Clements describes this unique type of gameplay best as he continues,
“You see, Ethan Mars was a successful architect. With a beautiful wife and two healthy children, you could say that Ethan had a perfect life -- or as close to perfect as our lives can get. But one day, while out at the mall with his wife and kids, Ethan's older son Jason gets away from the group and runs onto a nearby road. Before Ethan can dive forward and push Jason out of the way, a car strikes the boy and he's killed. This horrifying scenario was born out of Cage's own frightening experience with his wife and son (where his son was lost in a mall), though fortunately Cage's family didn't have to suffer through the same fate.
The next scene in Heavy Rain takes place two years after Jason's death. Ethan is now a single parent, wearily supporting his surviving son Shaun in a broken-down house. This scene is a perfect example of something that would never normally be playable in a traditional videogame. It starts with Ethan standing outside a dreary school, rain pelting his shoulders as the now scruffy, dark-eyed father waits for Shaun to finish his classes. This scene struck me with its heart-wrenching cinematography and painstaking attention to detail. Seeing Ethan's face in the rain is one of the more powerful images I can remember from my experiences with videogames and for good reason -- Quantic Dream knows how it's done.After Ethan drives Shaun home, the player is given complete control of the father and is free to do whatever he or she wants. You can move Ethan arou
nd the house, interact with a good number of the objects in the extremely realistic home, and choose to either take care of your son or ignore him. There is no set path to take and players can decide (to an extent) how to develop Ethan and Shaun's relationship. During the demonstration, Ethan asked Shaun about school, did the laundry, tossed a ball around in the backyard (in the rain) and then prepared his son's after-school snack and dinner. Yet another fantastic touch is that, when heating up Shaun's pizza in the microwave, Ethan must wait in real-time for the microwave to finish heating the food. All the while, time is steadily passing and the house sinks into a depressing darkness.
The entire scene is filled with an almost agonizing amount of tension and depression; players are immediately plunged into the aftermath of Ethan's life-changing experience and it's really quite profound. My absolute favorite moment of the demonstration was when Ethan makes his way upstairs into his bedroom and away from the nostalgic sound of Shaun's cartoons. While in his bedroom, players can choose to sit down at the edge of the bed, alone, and watch as Ethan folds his hands and remains motionless. You can almost see the sorrow hidden behind his face. The scene is complemented by melancholic music that plays gently in the background, which really drives home the emotional nail.Yes, interactions in Heavy Rain are mainly simply directional queues and button presses, but players are given control of how they want to approach the scene and everything in the game is done to propel the narrative forward while delivering a nearly unprecedented amount of emotion. For a few moments, I felt like Ethan Mars.
And it hurt.”
As Clements points out, the raw emotion communicated in this particular cinematic scene is literally not possible to construct given traditional, action-oriented game design paradigms. Although Heavy Rain does rely on the traditional paradigm of intense graphical development, these life-like images are used to further drive the much more non-traditional development of an emotionally powerful, extremely complex, narrative. Furthermore, although YOU as the player might view any of the 4 characters you assume fight, shoot, speak, and so on, YOU'RE not controlling the fine points of these interactions. Instead, the game relies on context sensitive “directional queues and button presses” to literally MOVE the narrative forward in the direction YOU as the player choose (Hayes, IGN). To illustrate this extremely unique gameplay mechanic, observe the bellow clip of a player manipulating Detective Shelby’s character:
And another example while playing as FBI Profiler Norman Jayden:
As you can see, by pressing various buttons on the controller during the unique contexts of these sequences (witnessing a convenience store robbery and getting jumped in a garage), the player can choose which particular types of actions Detective Shelby and Norman Jayden can take in response. For example, within these particular contexts, the player can press the X button to try to sympathize with and calm with the man robbing the store. Or, the player can press the O button to dodge a dangerous attack. By pressing the particular combinations illustrated in this video, the players were able to disarm and fend off their attackers. However, it is well within the possibility that an entirely different outcome could occur, including the deaths of Shelby and Jayden! In addition to the shaking text emphasizing the fear experienced by your character (and probably YOU while you’re playing!), as well as the unbelievable voice acting and crisp facial visuals, the emotional quality of this scene is very tense. However, as Clements states earlier, not all of the game play is comprised of intense moments such as this. For example, you will have to make the seemingly minor decision of playing with your son (depending on which character you “are") OR ignoring him. In the larger world of the game, each of these actions will then “add” up in unique, interconnected ways to literally MOVE the narrative along as based on the player's unique choices.
Across the embedded short clips, it is very clear that Quantic Dream fulfilled its goal to create an EXTREMELY non-traditional gaming experience “that engages players emotionally, explores the potential of interactive storytelling and creates new formats for adult audiences” (Haynes, IGN).
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Now, on to how this unique gaming experience relates to this week’s reading. NOTE: Although this might feel like a cumbersome way to organize this post, I wanted to make sure that you had a very clear understanding of WHY and HOW Heavy Rain is so unique before diving into another intense discussion about its resulting teaching and learning implications for student-players!
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In his article titled “What video games can teach us about making students want to learn,” James Paul Gee states that “…good video games offer players strong identities.” Across the course of Heavy Rain, players will assume what appear to be not one, but FOUR unique, independent, intricately developed human identities who will presumably possess markedly different personalities, world views, skills, and expertise. As student-players solve the game’s main problem (presumably finding the “Origami Killer”) across these fo
ur identities, they will personally experience a fact of life - individuals solve problems in different, creative ways, often based on their unique skill sets, expertise, and overall abilities. From an educational standpoint, not only does such an exercise in taking on multiple perspectives break down adolescent egocentrism, but it also encourages problem solving in a more networked sort of way; a skill and overall literacy that is no doubt important to consider in our increasingly networked Web2.0 world. For example, as student-players utilize each character’s unique expertise across various contexts to bring the “Origami Killer” to justice (e.g., the FBI agent’s methodical deconstruction of crime scenes and the journalist’s more holistic research and coverage of the “Origami Killer’s” victims), they are encouraged to adopt multiple perspectives themselves, OR search out someone else with the necessary expertise that can help them, when facing future real-world problems. In short, while inhabiting these different identities and skill sets, student-players will see that the knowledge needed to find the “Origami Killer” in the game world is likewise “distributed among a set of real people and their smart tools” when used to solve problems in the real world!Gee continues to state that good video games “…encourage players to think in terms of relationships, not isolated events or facts,” as well as allow “… players to be producers, not just consumers.” As student-players literally “create” a unique, non-linear gaming experience as based on the decisions they make, they will experience a level of connectedness often absent in not only the classroom, but other games that they have played. For example, from the decision of killing someone, to the decision of not spending time with your child, student-players will quickly realize that their actions in the game world have DRAMATIC, often unforeseen consequences on how the narrative unfolds. As a result, student-players will be FORCED to slow down their thinking and take the time to critically consider how variables such as context, the perspective of the particular character they're playing, what they’ve already decided to do, what they may decide to do next, and so on may influence the creation of the remainder of the game world; an overall skill which has its obvious real world parallels. In other words, student-players will no longer be able to blast the good or bad guy just for the fun of it; at least if they care about their overall gaming experience!
Although I am clearly positioning Heavy Rain’s potential power to immerse players into the game world via EXTREME character identification as a positive aspect of the game, the author of “Genderplay: Successes and Failures in Character Designs for Video Games” raises an interesting question; given the purpose and context of a game, what is the “right” level of identification vs. alienation developers should aim for?
“When designing characters, it's important to keep in mind the tension between
identification and alienation, because the player is both actor and spectator. This is a good tension, it drives a lot of gameplay and innovation. Without identification, you create a game which has little emotional impact, little drama… How many boys would have played Tomb Raider if they really felt that they were somehow taking on a feminine role? Or what if a kid identified too strongly with the protagonist in GTA3?”
Although ¾ of the characters in Heavy Rain are masculine figures inhabiting masculine societal roles (e.g., FBI agent, detective, architect), one of the four characters is a female figure; Madison Paige, the journalist. Therefore, it sounds entirely realistic that the student-player, whether male or female, will to some extent be required to view the game world through a more feminine lens. Although I’m not entirely sure where the following video fits into the context of the larger narrative, the bellow clip appears to support such an assumption as the player guides Madison through some relatively feminine activities:
Upon release of this game, I’m very, VERY interested to see male responses to guiding a female character through the feminine activities of applying make-up, and “prettying” up her body as much as possible to do God knows what. My point being, just as the author of the "girl gaming" blog post was “jarred” out immersive gaming experiences based on the hyper sexualization of female characters, it will be interesting to see how males react to playing a female in such a feminine scene. Will playing such a scene similarly “jar” males out of the experience because of a potential lack of being able to identify with a feminine character? Will they be unwilling to play such a scene for fear of taking on such a feminine role? Will it simply be too much?!? OR, will it be another positive, educational exercise in perspective taking, potentially helping to illuminate the female condition? This is a hard question to ponder seeing as how I’m not sure of the overall context in which this scene fits. For example, if Ma
dison is making herself pretty prior to committing some sort of prostitution or sex act to advance the narrative, I don’t feel as though this scene would fulfill a positive, educational purpose. In other words, if the creators of the game designed Madison around pervasive sexist ideologies which represent women in a negative light, I would not want my student-player, male or female, to identify with such a scene. But, if the creators of the game challenged certain pervasive sexist ideologies via Madison's character, I might think differently.Overall, Heavy Rain is a very, VERY different type of game than the Labyrinth mathematical learning tool discussed by Scott Osterweil. But, I would argue that they both aim to teach and direct their player to some sort of enduring understanding condensed down into an essential question. In Labyrinth's case, the essential question may be something like "How can principles of math be used to interpret our realities?" In Heavy Rain's case, the essential question is "How far will you go to save someone you love?" Both do not have a clear answer, and both require inquire.
Although I would argue (at least from what it sounds like so far) that Heavy Rain and the sort of provocative essential question it asks has many, many educational implications (e.g., exercising visual literacies, teaching understanding THROUGH narrative, perspective taking, networked thinking / problem solving strategies, and so on), I don’t feel as though it is a type of game that many will find appropriate for students, inside of the classroom or out. But, that isn’t necessarily my point; bringing this ridiculous game into the classroom, that is. My overall point is this… As a younger teacher-player who is likewise interested in and very passionate about not only PLAYING this type of technology but STUDYING it, I have an advantage in the field. I know what kids are playing (I visit all of the game stat sites as any typical 7th grade gamer!), I know what kids are saying about what they’re playing (I visit the same forums they do), and as I’ve demonstrated in this post, I’ve taken the extra step to give some extra thought to the potential benefits of narrative-based games as yet another means of understanding.
If Heavy Rain is a success, perhaps designers will work on some sort of classroom equivalent similar to Labyrinth. In the mean time, I advocate bringing more narrative-based activities into the classroom as a way to understand via activities such as...
-Writing multi-modal narratives
-Critically reading multi-modal narratives
-Writing a class letter to game developers telling them what their game "taught" students and HOW / WHY.
-Writing a class letter to game developers telling them what types of narratives students would like to see produced in games, as well as what students hope to learn from such narratives.
-And much more! What does everyone else think?
IMAGES USED
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http://www.vgchartz.com/games/pics/2236732aaa.jpg
http://nixiepixel.com/blog/media/blogs/a/screenshot/heavy-rain-screenshot-madison.jpg
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