Rated M for Real Maturity

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Last year, I wrote about my largest disappointment with the Nintendo Wii: that while it has made great strides toward bringing video gaming into the mainstream, the resulting games have placed narrative complexity and thematic maturity as low priorities. This year, Sony took a gamble on Heavy Rain, a mature, complex thriller that considers story, character development, and adult themes more important than action and titillation. It is mature in that it deals with adult issues and situations without gratuitous vulgarity and sexuality. It is the first M-rated game that I have played which is mature both for the fact that it is inappropriate for children and for the way that it honestly wrestles with difficult, adult problems.

Heavy Rain is a thriller. The story follows the lives of four individuals who each have an interest in tracking down the Origami Killer, a serial murderer. A father, an FBI agent, a private investigator, and a journalist are all working against the clock to rescue the latest kidnapping victim before they die. The story is interesting, if somewhat cliché, and some of the motivations and story hooks are less compelling than others. All told, the plot is serviceable, but not the most impressive thing about the game.

What really blows me away about Heavy Rain is its ability to explore complex emotions and difficult decisions. Over the course of the game, I felt a number of emotions a game has never made me feel before: guilt, gratefulness, hopelessness, and hope regained. I felt concerned about a stranger’s baby. I have no children in reality, but in the game I felt prepared to do anything to save my son. And there was no sign of a simple, black and white moral choice anywhere in the game. Every moral conflict was a complicated one. Every difficult choice felt desperate.

The other major success of the game is its accessibility. Typically, games with mature content and thematic elements are designed with a hardcore video game audience in mind. But the controls for Heavy Rain are easy to learn, and the difficulty settings are based around how familiar the player is with the PlayStation 3 controller.

Heavy Rain has the most impressive quicktime events I have ever played in a game. The action can be chaotic, but it is usually clear what button the player is supposed to push. Best of all, an error in button pushing or joystick moving doesn’t result in an instant failure and the need to restart. Each missed cue results in some small error on the part of the character on the screen; just like in reality, a person can make a few mistakes and still succeed overall. It lends each action sequence an air of legitimacy, and the characters remain human.

One of the other major features that sets Heavy Rain apart is the fact that there is no such thing as a game over screen: every failure remains. Character death is possible, but the story continues without them. Every in-game possibility leads to its own ending. This is a bold move for video games, which typically rely on a lot of replaying and frustration around difficult sections. Unless the player goes out of their way to replay a section of Heavy Rain, they will never need to do so.

Heavy Rain has its fair share of flaws. Sometimes the on-screen options are frustrating in their limitations, leaving very little room for player freedom of choice. The characters are a little too stuck in their ways of thinking, which can be frustrating to the player who thinks of a better solution. And, strangely for a game so focused on story and character interaction, the writing and acting can be weak at times. Oddly, the weaknesses in the acting come mostly from the voice work; the digital characters created for Heavy Rain are the most convincingly real human beings ever seen in a video game. But none of the game's flaws counteract the fact that Heavy Rain is a leap forward for maturity in video games.

It is my sincere hope that Heavy Rain will show consumers and game designers how much more potential there is in the video game medium than they saw before. Heavy Rain is an eye-opening experience; it shows that dramatic, compelling gameplay can be found in everyday experiences and emotions, and that we don’t need to play superhuman characters to triumph in the face of adversity. Heavy Rain is a triumph, in that it opens up to a wider audience without sacrificing its ambitions or the complexity of its themes. I can’t wait to see what comes next. 

The Way We Play

by C.T. Hutt

The very first console I ever played was my neighbor’s Atari; the controllers for it were little more than simple joysticks with a pause button in the corner. The original NES found its way into my home within the year and came equipped with standard blocky controllers which left my tiny hands stinging with gamers’ arthritis. Even in those days crazy peripherals abounded. The original NES Power glove was almost completely ineffectual, but undeniably cool looking, in an eighties sort of way. Long before the Wii Fit came onto the scene, gamers were sweating bullets in front of their televisions with the Nintendo Power Pad which was little more than a Twister mat attached to a television.

The SNES controller was a similar beast to its predecessor, only there were more buttons and the edges were mercifully rounded. I got so much mileage out of that console that I actually wore out the buttons on several controllers. In hindsight, I should have kept them and had them bronzed; they would be a fine memorial to my gaming tenure.

While Nintendo was my favored console early in my gaming career, many of the other name-brand consoles followed a similar development path. As time wore on, controllers became increasingly complex and ergonomic. Vast improvements in graphics and programming technology, coupled with a growing consumer base, pushed developers to create controllers which offered superior interactivity and choice. Initially, this simply meant adding more buttons, but that was poised to change.

When the Nintendo 64 dropped into the world back in 1996 (yes, it really has been that long), everything changed. 3-D games where no longer a theoretical experiment for developers, almost overnight they had become the standard. The medium had added an entirely new dimension to itself and our controllers had to evolve in turn. Now we needed controls which not only manipulated where our avatars went and what they did but ones which altered our perspective on the action. The N64 Rumble Pac add-on brought an additional connection between the digital world and ours.

The Playstation 2 Dual shock controller lead the way toward the adoption of the now popular double joysick multi-button controller configuration we see in all major consoles. Wireless controls have also become an industry standard, further removing us from the umbilical cords of systems past. Rather than sit inert in our hands, modern controllers, shake and pulse in sync with actions taking place in the game, some have built-in speakers for more immersive sound effects, and peripheral devices of every description litter the shelves of gaming stores.

Never content with the status quo, we now have controllers (notably for the Wii) which react to body movement rather than merely the manipulation of levers and buttons. Sony is developing similar controls for the PS3 and Microsoft has been creating a great deal of press surrounding project Natal, a devise which removes hand held controls entirely and tracks our body movements instead. The market for video games has never been larger and the developers and distributors of controllers are surging forward to capture our attention with their next great innovations. Responding to the ever growing desire for greater interactivity, they are creating systems that will allow us to control digital worlds with our very bodies and minds, and all of this progress has happened in less than thirty years. Just imagine what kinds of controllers we will be using thirty years in the future.

The Horror!

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I’ve been playing Silent Hill: Homecoming for the past few days (as you can tell from our handy new “Now Playing” section on the sidebar!) and it has me thinking about horror in games. Like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5, the new Silent Hill provides the player with a more capable, combat-ready protagonist. This has been the trend in recent years: horror games have been blending traditional horror elements with action and shooter sensibilities. I can understand why this evolution has taken place; the horror genre in games has grown fairly stale. By introducing more action-oriented gameplay developers bring in some much needed variation and draw in a wider audience. The unfortunate side effect of these modifications is that the horror genre is moving away from horror itself, instead of realizing its potential.

For the most part, traditional survival horror games rely on the same well-worn paths to instilling fear that movies have been using for decades: establishing a frightening mood through location and music, surprises that make the audience/player jump out of their seats, terrifying creature design, and so on. In mimicking movies, horror games have failed to capitalize on the primary promise of interactivity.

One of the only games to truly evolve the horror genre is Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Looking past its horrendous title, Eternal Darkness has some incredible ideas that other horror games should look to for inspiration. Besides the traditional health bar and a bar measuring the character’s magical abilities, the game introduces the quantification of sanity: as your character encounters horrible monsters with irrational bodily structures and a hunger for flesh, their sanity meter depletes. As the sanity meter lowers, the environments in the game change, as does the game itself. To reflect the character’s developing insanity, the walls might bleed or statues might follow the character’s motion. At its extremes, the game begins to break the fourth wall, informing the player that their save files have been corrupted or that the game is over at a cliffhanger moment, and will be continued in the sequel.

What we need in horror games is more of a willingness to exploit the player’s expectations and understanding. After reaching a point in a game where you feel competent with the controls and well-equipped enough to take on any enemy, imagine a sequence where you find yourself suddenly losing all control of your character. Unbidden, your character approaches a cliff face. You struggle with the controller, perhaps slowing the walk forward and showing some signs of internal struggle in your character, but it continues. He leans over the edge, hanging onto something, and then snaps out of it. If the controller shakes every time your character is attacked, what if it shook suddenly and violently when nothing was happening? What if buttons occasionally yielded unintended results, or directions were switched at inopportune moments? A horror lurks at the end of the hallway, and moving the joystick in any direction results in you walking toward it. When you do nothing, you stand still. When you press the attack button, you call out to it.

These are just a few examples of what games can convey that scary movies never could, and we haven’t even explored thematic elements, horror tropes and plot. With so many ways for games to reach a more terrifying, unique experience, it’s a stone-cold shame that they’re either falling into step with cheesy horror movies or migrating into the herd of action-oriented games.

Where's My Virtual Lightsaber?

I’m a pretty religious Penny Arcade reader, even going so far as to pepper my everyday dialogue – that is, the things I say to real people, when I’m looking at their faces – with phrases from the comic. (Yes, in real life I drop references to an internet comic focused on the gaming community. Someday I’ll show you the stick with which I fend off the hordes of ladies perpetually surrounding me. I call it “Sting.”) Today’s PA entry ties into what I feel is the most significant development within today’s gaming scene, with Gabe bemoaning – via a, um, novelty T-shirt – the increasing prevalence of physically immersive simulations. His complaint is that simulated experiences, like those presented in Rock Band and Wii exercise titles, require a very real level of coordination (and produce, on occasion, equally real sweat). I remember the predictions from the pre-Wii, pre-Internet halcyon 1980’s and 90’s concerning the future of gaming: we were going to strap on VR suits and gloves, and pick up our virtual swords, and fight some virtual zombies. Their matted hair would be tangibly repugnant; the smell of the grave would fill our nostrils. (Alternatively, we were going to strap on VR stirrups and riding crops and ride some virtual magical ponies. The rest – matted hair, smell of the grave – still stands.) I look back now on all the movies promising these developments – Hackers comes to mind, as do The Matrix and The Island – and can only mourn our failure to realize so noble a goal. I’m on the opposite side of the debate from Gabe; I yearn for more immersive experiences. I maintain that I’d be a much more efficient zombie killer, fighter pilot or Space Marine than video games today imply, if only I could utilize the respective tools of these trades as they were intended to be used – with both hands, and my feet if necessary. Something in my brain bone rebels when I press a button or push a joystick to swing a sword. It’s as though my deep, reptilian subconscious is shouting at me, “No! No! We built you arms for this very purpose! Entire arms for holding swords!” When I’m playing a game, I want to feel a sword in my hand, and move it in a way that threatens to dislocate my entire shoulder. I want to strain to stay upright while wearing full plate armor. I want, in short, to look left by moving my neck. As it stands now, using a cursed twin stick control scheme, I put a lot of stock in how well a game maps its skies. This is because I spend a good portion of my time looking directly up, or down, or off into the middle distance, unable to focus my gaze upon a given point. If a button could be utilized to slacken my character’s jaw and trigger a drool response, I imagine that I would inadvertently press it. I’ve really enjoyed games like Rock Band that challenge our assumptions on the nature of a “controller.” I may not be able to sync up the Left Bumper with my need to reload a shotgun, but I’ll be damned if I can’t understand the basic mechanics of a guitar and how one is played; my head can wrap comfortably around this process, as I’m doing with my hands exactly what I want my character to replicate with his own. So, gamers, thoughts? What’s your preference: an immersive simulation, or a contained exercise in hand-eye coordination? I know that I’ll be the first in line to buy a holodeck, so what’s the argument against physically demanding games?