The fathers of invention
The Age
Thursday March 11, 2010
Real-life anxiety leads to an innovative experience, writes Mike Wilcox. APANIC-STRICKEN father who lost sight of his child in a crowded shopping centre was the inspiration behind Heavy Rain, a new, cinematic, interactive-style challenge from Quantic Dream, a Paris-based games house.The developer challenges players to leave their gaming sensibilities at the door and commit to a deep emotional investment in the gameplay.Heavy Rain is described by the company's executive producer and joint chief executive, Guillaume de Fondaumiere, as an interactive drama featuring branching storylines that require players to choose how the action will unfold.This is a choose-your-own adventure, with many possible viewpoints.Since the early days of de Fondaumiere's own successful game development studio, Arxel Tribe, he has believed authors are essential to the game's industry.Seven years ago, Mr de Fondaumiere left his own company after a meeting with the charismatic Quantic Dream founder, David Cage. Work on Heavy Rain began in 2006 after the idea for the game came to Mr Cage when he momentarily lost his young son in a crowded mall.After several frantic minutes of searching, Mr Cage thought how he wanted to be able to bring this emotional aspect to a video game, where the central theme would be about the love of a father for his son."In the initial linear script for Heavy Rain, David wanted to talk about the love of a father, and about redemption and guilt, because when he had this moment of panic in the mall, a number of emotions came to him and one of the most important ones was guilt," Mr de Fondaumiere says."This strong feeling of guilt was an essential element to craft the Heavy Rain story and then imagination took its way towards a story that would be much darker than David's experience."In addition to playing the game from the father's perceptive, Heavy Rain features three other main playable characters, who expose the story from their own perspectives and focus on different emotions altogether. "Through each of these characters, David was able to really delve into the complexity and diversity of different human behaviour and psyche," Mr de Fondaumiere says.To avoid the linear path many video games offer, a unique aspect of Heavy Rain is the player-controlled storyline. "David developed a technique he calls the 'rubber-band writing technique'," Mr de Fondaumiere says. "He basically considers his story like a rubber band with a beginning, middle and end but a rubber band that can be stretched, deformed and made longer or shorter."This technique results in the game having a necessary backbone with several pivotal stages, though each player's choices will determine how the game plays out between these."The challenge with this was not only to avoid ending up with a huge branching tree that leads players to nowhere but to also bring all those different paths back together," Mr de Fondaumiere says."And, of course, not to bring them together into one ending but in our case we have 23 different endings, which leaves quite a lot of choice."Unlike traditional gaming paradigms, if any of the main characters in Heavy Rain die, players cannot simply restart the level to attempt a particular section again. The story simply continues and incorporates their death. "I think this is a tremendous way to strengthen the emotional response, because it means the player's very actions have consequences on the story," Mr de Fondaumiere says.His favourite part of the game is the scene where he is in charge of his son and has to take care of him. "Those are scenes that are seldom seen in video games," he says. "You really rely on identification, on the fact gamers will feel in charge."And when that works, that is extremely satisfying. That was a big relief for me when I saw that scene and I felt that it works. And it could have gone horribly wrong [laughs]."Regardless of whether players manage to save the boy and find out who the Origami Killer is, Mr de Fondaumiere believes gamers will be satisfied with however the story ends, "because it's the end of a story, so whatever happens, a sad or happy ending, the player has been in charge and they've made the choices they wanted throughout the story, so they have their own satisfying experience whatever the ending and that's far more important than the goal."
© 2010 The Age
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