Heavy Rain Dev: "Let's Stop Making Games For Kids"

[Sylocat]

To quote Daniel Floyd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jdG2LHair0] (one of the better Yahtzee imitators out there): "The reason is frustratingly simple: Good writing doesn't sell games."

 

[Avida]

[snip]

I mostly agree with most of what you're saying to i'll just skip to the bit i have issue with

MB wasnt trying to say that kids want "cutsy, cuddly, crap that goes in shovelware" and that we should give it to them, look at the example he pointed out - Ratchet and Clank, that is a game no-one could call shovelware, its just that it appeals to the younger generation more. Another game he could have pointed out would be LittleBigPlanet, both of these cater for kids while still being fantastic.
We need more of those, would you really want little timmy growing up on a diet of grit and murder in his games? - Which, having a little brother with lots of gaming friends it appears they are.

Come to think of it why to story, writing and child-friendly elements even have to be apart? There are dozens of films i could name that manage it, from Coraline through WALL-E for the sake of being recent.

Reguardless, even if it is shovelwre that gets made you've got to admit the guy has a point, catering for a sigle, constant ageing demographic is not a wise choice... Unless prehaps the teens+ that are being aimed at now reach an age when they have children, and then everything comes full circle and ties off nicely...

... Nah.

 

[AmrasCalmacil]

I LOVE the sound of that. Bring on the Warhammer 40k-inspired bloody bloodness! Bleh! Bleh, I say! Bleeeeeeeehhhh!


But seriously, it's good to know at least one developer isn't devoted to Nintendo's new policy of Let's-Make-Some-Kid-Friendly-Crap-Tastic-Games-For-The-Wii-For-Fun-And-Profit strategy.

You only read the thread title, didn't you?

Heavy Rain Dev: "Let's Stop Making Games For Kids" The reason games are so far behind in the storytelling department is "because we don't dare stop doing what we have been doing for 15 years...let's change some of the traditional game conventions that we have had for 15 years that we take for granted, like, you cannot make a game if there is no ramping, if there is no game over, if you don't progress in difficulty, etc."

So basically he wants all games to be some some sort of challengeless interactive movie or something?

 

[LINKXIII]

I've said it before, I'll say it a hundred times:

If I want story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. I play games for game play mechanics; to engage in a social activity, or to stimulate the puzzle-solving parts of my brain. Story, characters, emotion: the potential is there and should be explored, but it should be secondary. Mechanics come first.

Someone I agree with finally

 

[level250geek]

I probably misread your post or got the wrong vibes out of it, but you seem like you think it's a bad thing that gaming is trying to get a deep and meaningful story out to the public.

I'm upset that some developers seem intent on making games a primarily narrative driven experience, as opposed to a game play experience with narrative elements. Follow that road long enough and we'll be playing interactive movies composed entirely of QTEs.

 

[Juan Regular]

There needs to be a variety of both juvenile, stupid games and adult, thought provoking games. They always talk about movies in camparison. But how many bullshit splatter, blockbuster, romantic comedy, etc... movies are out there?
There will always be Gears Of Wars and Halos (Fahrenheit didn't really have a good story either). But we need more mature stuff. So he's right on some level.

And Heavy Rain will be awesome.

 

[jamesworkshop]

I don't agree "games for kids" ignoring viva pinata I can't think of a single age appropriate game on the xbox for anyone under 16 same situation applies to the PS3.
A bad story is a bad story no matter who it is aimed at

 

[Jumplion]

Condense

I suppose in that sense, Moviebob has a point. However the way he was coming off to be as "catering to the younger audience" was that you needed the vast variety of crap that you see in manga with the school girls and " ^o^ " stuff. To me he seemed to say "you need to cater to the younger audience" and that to me seemed that he wanted them to make those cheap cute n' cuddly crap.

However, kids basically want to be adults. There was a Sessler's Soapbox that dealt with games and maturity, I'll find it if I have to, but he basically said "Kids want to feel like adults. Even if that means sneaking into an 'R' rated movie or looking at Playboys. It's puberty."

But then I guess that would dwell into the teen age group, wouldn't it?

I'm upset that some developers seem intent on making games a primarily narrative driven experience, as opposed to a game play experience with narrative elements. Follow that road long enough and we'll be playing interactive movies composed entirely of QTEs.

Frankly, I don't see too much of a problem with that. If loads of QTEs are the first of many steps to make story and gameplay combine seamlessly, then I say go for it. Many people say that Gameplay and Story, compared to Graphics, are the two most improtant ingredients in a game. If the story is amazing, it could make up for gameplay. If the gameplay is amazing, it could make up for a crappy story. The graphics (or as I like to call them, "visuals") add even more to that game.

 

[Shotzey]

I belive games are at the same level of story telling as books and movies. If not then what about the stories of Metal Gear solid, COD 4, Lost Planet, and Halo.

 

[Tunahead]

Fine words from a man whose idea of good storytelling is a dead guy fist-fighting the antropomorphic personification of the Internet and an ancient Mayan Illuminati Super Saiyan for the fate of the world, aided only by his ability to hadoken cops and uppercut furniture. An ability he gained as a child from a chance encounter with the saucermen from Mars because he just happened to live inside Area 51 at the time, no less.

David Cage also liked to go on and on about how hot the female main character he designed is. And then he named her after his nephew. And he gave her a black comedy sidekick that has a funky blacksploitation theme playing in the background at all times.

The plot of Indigo Prophecy completely invalidates everything David Cage has to say about anything, ever. Designing a plot like Indigo Prophecy's and then going on about "mature" storylines is pretty much on par with telling people you believe the Large Hadron Collider is going to DESTROY THE WORLD because those eeeeeevil scientists are plotting the demise of humanity and obviously also know less about science than you, a person who read an article once and then succesfully misquoted it. It just completely invalidates your opinions on everything, because it's just that offensively stupid.

Also, QTEs are not gameplay. They're just cutscenes that randomly pause and pick a button from your controller at random to be the unpause button, and if you don't press it quickly, you skip to a "you died" cutscene instead. That's not gameplay. You don't have any input on what the character does. You are strictly on rails and you can't make a single decision for yourself. Doing an entire game as a series of QTEs defeats the purpose of making a game at all.

In conclusion, David Cage represents the most wretched kind of game designer: The "auteur". A person who doesn't believe games should be played for fun, which is the whole purpose of games, but to be experienced by the mundanes in slack-jawed amazement at the glorious artistic vision of the genius writer/director. A person who believes games should be "taken seriously as an artistic medium".

THEY'RE GAMES. Why would you want to take them seriously? Is the concept of FUN really something that needs to be dissected and analyzed? God, what is wrong with you, David Cage.

 

[Jumplion]

THEY'RE GAMES. Why would you want to take them seriously? Is the concept of FUN really something that needs to be dissected and analyzed? God, what is wrong with you, David Cage.

And the fact that they are supposedly not doing the whole crazy plot thing in Heavy Rain revalidates(?) it.

Quite frankly, I do not like this viewpoint as to somehow games are only meant to be "fun". Sure, games are meant to be enjoyed just as movies and books are. But not all movies and books, such as documentaries or true-story movies, are "fun" so much as they are "enjoyable" and give the person an experience.

I see no reason as to why not games can't do that either. Games do not always have to be "fun" but most media have to be "enjoyable" for the people experiencing it. Sessler [http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/694743/Sesslers-Soapbox-Fun-Vs-Art.html] makes an excellent point of this.

So, God, what's wrong with you, Tunahead? Don't you want gaming to, you know, grow?

 

[Tunahead]

And the fact that they are supposedly not doing the whole crazy plot thing in Heavy Rain revalidates(?) it.

Nothing will ever revalidate anything David Cage does after Indigo Prophecy. That game was as bad as three Daikatanas.

Quite frankly, I do not like this viewpoint as to somehow games are only meant to be "fun". Sure, games are meant to be enjoyed just as movies and books are. But not all movies and books, such as documentaries or true-story movies, are "fun" so much as they are "enjoyable" and give the person an experience.

I kind of lost you at the point where you arbitrarily defined "fun" and "enjoyable" as two completely different things.

So, God, what's wrong with you, Tunahead? Don't you want gaming to, you know, grow?

Prediction: You will be saving the world in Heavy Rain. I made this prediction through the scientific process of looking at the plot of every videogame ever made and noticing two things: First, they all suck. Second, they are ALL about saving the world. There may be a connection between these two points, but I'll write another wall of text about that later, perhaps.

My point here is that while it would be awesome for videogames to grow, I wouldn't hold my breath for David Cage to pioneer such growth, mainly because Indigo Prophecy made games regress, if anything. You had zero control on your character. If you saw one person with good reflexes playing one of the endless Simon Says segments, you pretty much saw the only way the segment was going to progress no matter what other person with similar reflexes played it. Indigo Prophecy was on rails probably moreso than any other game I'd ever seen.

In my opinion, real growth for games at this time would come from five things:

1) Stop with the saving the world already. Nobody cares. When your storyline centers around saving the world it just makes me think that you didn't have the slightest bit of confidence in your characters being compelling, so you made a "The stakes are higher than ever before! Save the entire world from destruction! You care about the whole world being destroyed even if you don't care about the main characters, right?" scenario to compensate. Interesting main characters could easily even carry a story about something completely mundane, like small scale highschool drama. Which incidentally reminds me that Bully is the only good game Rockstar ever made. Man, that was a good game.

2) Invent a new gaming genre. We could do with some more variety.

3) As hard as it apparently is, focus on making good-looking hair with current generation graphics. I know that might seem like a ridiculous suggestion for more varied games, but it seriously opens up a lot of new possibilities. And by possibilitied I mean main character possibilities, because current gen gaming systems are only capable of making extremely short hair look good, and therefore we mostly just get angry space marines and butch man-hating action girl protagonists. That's not generic and boring at all, no sirree! Meanwhile people with hair are neglected because current generation gaming systems make any hairstyle over an inch long look like a toupee made of concrete. Somebody needs to do something about this RIGHT NOW.

4) Better AI. AI is terrible in current gen games. Somebody needs to do something about this, because I am having a hard time getting immersed in a game or caring about my traveling companions when they keep running into walls and prancing in the meadows with some butterflies while a crazed murderer is sawing my face off.

5) A completely new way of telling stories in videogames. This is probably the hardest thing to ask of game developers, but I seriously think this is the most important thing. Why? Because games are pretty much the only medium of story-telling that is interactive. And quite frankly, the stories games tell haven't adjusted to that. Every story in a videogame at this time is basically a play or a movie script or a rough draft of a book that's just been crammed into an interactive medium, and it shows. You can do what you like, in theory. But the game still calls the shots on where you go and who you interact with, and what method of interaction you use. In heavily story-centric games this usually means you get a cutscene telling you to find the red dot on the minimap and center your crosshairs on it and hold down the fire button until you're "rewarded" with another cutscene. That's not rewarding gameplay, because it isn't gameplay. Fun gameplay is its own reward! So just make stories that complement gameplay instead of sabotaging it, already!

 

[Jumplion]

Nothing will ever revalidate anything David Cage does after Indigo Prophecy. That game was as bad as three Daikatanas.

I heard quite the opposite of Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, especially from the Escapist here. Everyone I see seems to love it though I have not played it myself.

I kind of lost you at the point where you arbitrarily defined "fun" and "enjoyable" as two completely different things.

Look at the Sessler's Soapbox link I gave you if you havn't, Sessler says it very well. There are plenty of serious documentaries and books on horrific events in history and none of them are exactly "Ho ho ho! I'm having so much fun reading this suffering book!" but they are enjoyable to read and experience. Two different contexts with two different words, regardless of actual definition.

Just like how "graphics" implies the technical side of graphics, pumping every last pixel on the screen to get better resolutions and how "visuals" imply the aesthetic viewpoint of the game like tone, mood, and atmosphere. Two different things that are easily confused.

Prediction: You will be saving the world in Heavy Rain. I made this prediction through the scientific process of looking at the plot of every videogame ever made and noticing two things: First, they all suck. Second, they are ALL about saving the world. There may be a connection between these two points, but I'll write another wall of text about that later, perhaps.

I can name plenty of games wherey ou didn't "save the world".

God of War has you destroying the world basically.
Destroy all Humans makes you an alien destroying all humans.
Most horror games have a plot of you basically surviving.
Mystery games.

There are plenty of games that don't involve you saving the world, so I don't know what you're trying to do with this statement.

My point here is that while it would be awesome for videogames to grow, I wouldn't hold my breath for David Cage to pioneer such growth, mainly because Indigo Prophecy made games regress, if anything. You had zero control on your character. If you saw one person with good reflexes playing one of the endless Simon Says segments, you pretty much saw the only way the segment was going to progress no matter what other person with similar reflexes played it. Indigo Prophecy was on rails probably moreso than any other game I'd ever seen.

I'm not holding my breath either, don't get me wrong, Heavy Rain could suck 3 donkey's asses from the moon and back all at once. But I am hopeful that it will at least do something for the storytelling of games.

Heavy Rain is more of a choose your own adventure book where no answer is the "right" answer. This doesn't just change the story of the game and how it would play out, but it also changes up morality in the game. Since nothing is "wrong" in this game, you can go ahead and (judging from the 1st level shown to us and what they told us) break in the house, enter the front door, or go in the back. When the owner comes along, do you use a gun and shoot him or do you call the police? Or maybe you hide from him and escape?

This thing has a 2000 page script, over 20 average sized movie scripts I believe. And I think over 170 total of mo-cap work (source [http://ps3.ign.com/articles/937/937800p1.html])

But now I'm ranting.

In my opinion, real growth for games at this time would come from five things:

1) Stop with the saving the world already. Nobody cares. When your storyline centers around saving the world it just makes me think that you didn't have the slightest bit of confidence in your characters being compelling, so you made a "The stakes are higher than ever before! Save the entire world from destruction! You care about the whole world being destroyed even if you don't care about the main characters, right?" scenario to compensate. Interesting main characters could easily even carry a story about something completely mundane, like small scale highschool drama. Which incidentally reminds me that Bully is the only good game Rockstar ever made. Man, that was a good game.

2) Invent a new gaming genre. We could do with some more variety.

3) As hard as it apparently is, focus on making good-looking hair with current generation graphics. I know that might seem like a ridiculous suggestion for more varied games, but it seriously opens up a lot of new possibilities. And by possibilitied I mean main character possibilities, because current gen gaming systems are only capable of making extremely short hair look good, and therefore we mostly just get angry space marines and butch man-hating action girl protagonists. That's not generic and boring at all, no sirree! Meanwhile people with hair are neglected because current generation gaming systems make any hairstyle over an inch long look like a toupee made of concrete. Somebody needs to do something about this RIGHT NOW.

4) Better AI. AI is terrible in current gen games. Somebody needs to do something about this, because I am having a hard time getting immersed in a game or caring about my traveling companions when they keep running into walls and prancing in the meadows with some butterflies while a crazed murderer is sawing my face off.

5) A completely new way of telling stories in videogames. This is probably the hardest thing to ask of game developers, but I seriously think this is the most important thing. Why? Because games are pretty much the only medium of story-telling that is interactive. And quite frankly, the stories games tell haven't adjusted to that. Every story in a videogame at this time is basically a play or a movie script or a rough draft of a book that's just been crammed into an interactive medium, and it shows. You can do what you like, in theory. But the game still calls the shots on where you go and who you interact with, and what method of interaction you use. In heavily story-centric games this usually means you get a cutscene telling you to find the red dot on the minimap and center your crosshairs on it and hold down the fire button until you're "rewarded" with another cutscene. That's not rewarding gameplay, because it isn't gameplay. Fun gameplay is its own reward! So just make stories that complement gameplay instead of sabotaging it, already!

And aside from the 1st one, I completely agree with you here. Making better stories for games isn't going to be easy, but nobody ever said it would.

 

[Jumplion]

I am so glad that I am one of the few people of my age who understand complicated and "adult" plot elements. take that you dumb ass teenagers who won't "get this". all hail those of superior intellect.

Bah, I bet I understood this quicker than you did while I'm probably younger than you!

Take that you old man! OOOOooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh!!

 

[Jumplion]

I am so glad that I am one of the few people of my age who understand complicated and "adult" plot elements. take that you dumb ass teenagers who won't "get this". all hail those of superior intellect.

Bah, I bet I understood this quicker than you did while I'm probably younger than you!

Take that you old man! OOOOooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh!!

noooo, I'm gonna at the ripe old age of 20.

On a totally srs note right now, there is a difference between being "complicated" and being "adult" which I do agree with you on that.

 

[hagaya]

I think that he's stating that gaming is shying away from "Children's Toy." Video games are generally more violent than they were, and the rules keeping the impressionable and the young away from them are too loose. The eighties were a much better time for children's gaming, but the business really heated up and became huge in more recent years. I don't agree on "stopping" games for kids, but I think there should be a clear line between kids and adults in gaming like there is in movies or books, based on content and the intelligence of the media.

I really liked how he put the emphasis on story being a big part in a game. Games are bigger and they can actually tell stories now, and story can be a great thing for a game. I think that using gaming as a storytelling medium makes it more clear to people that its an art form like movies or books. Story is something that doesn't get too much attention in games, but it is one of the largest parts of the modern game. Indie games (unless in the adventure category) are the only exception to this thought. I want to see people give video games the same respect they do to movies and literature because it is art, and a good story can help gaming get to its rightful place.

 

[lacktheknack]

Play Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Or any traditional adventure game. They seem to match his ideas of a "boundary pushing concept". Instead of retreading old ground (even if it should be retrod), maybe they should expand and make it better than it was before.

 

[Guitar Gamer]

*gasp* are you telling me that the halo trilogy isn't an emotional experience for you?!! BLASPHEMY! why I..............I.................HA! sorry I couldn't keep a straight face but I really don't have anything against HALO I actually really like, I can just realize than Master chief is about as deep as my breakfast cereal