Heavy Rain, Deadly Premonition, and The King’s Speech

My favorite talks at this year’s GDC were from the creators of two games I didn’t like. David Cage gave a talk on Heavy Rain. Hidetaka Suehiro (known as “Swery”) gave a talk on Deadly Premonition. I didn’t care for either game.

But I can’t stress enough how important it is to listen to people with whom you disagree. Too often those of us who write about games — and that includes people just posting on a forum or in a comments section — base the value of an opinion on whether or not they agree with it. And there’s no faster path to stupidity and deafness than the inside an echo chamber.

After the jump, games without Colin Firth

In his talk, “Creating an Emotional Rollercoaster in Heavy Rain”, Cage defiantly dismissed thirty years of videogame history as a stale vocabulary involving only ten verbs: run, shoot, jump, roll, and six others he didn’t specify. It was the sort of facile observation I’d expect from someone who’s lost touch with what videogames are accomplishing these days.

But Cage is keenly aware that emotional connection is the key to making a story work. One of his slides proclaimed “Identification is everything!”. For that reason, I hope people making games will play Heavy Rain. It’s built around this premise, and even though I think it fails spectacularly, it is a factor in nearly every moment of the game’s six-hour run time. Cage bristled when he mentioned people making fun of the early tooth brushing and orange juice drinking in Heavy Rain, which is as far as some people got before drawing their conclusions. But I get that part of the game, and I love it. These mundane activities, in lieu of gameplay, exist to create a connection to the character. I get it. It just wish Cage was a better writer.

But I wish that about nearly everyone who makes the videogames I play, so that’s not my main problem. Instead, I suspect my main problem might be a “me” problem more than a “Heavy Rain” problem. When I peer down into an uncanny valley at some creepy puppet theatre going on at the bottom, I don’t feel any meaningful connection. Early on in Heavy Rain, lead puppet Ethan Mars plays with his sons. At that moment, I should feel an emotional connection. I can tell that’s what the game wants from me, but I just can’t connect as Ethan swings two boys around in the yard and clacks toy swords with them. I get it on an intellectual level, as in “Ah, here’s where the game wants me to care about this guy”. But it’s not enough to get me through the disappointing story that follows.

I can’t help but think of the first moment I felt an emotional connection to Prince Albert in King’s Speech. It opens with a man of privilege who — boo hoo! — has a stutter. Like I care. He’s royalty. He can console himself by running his hands through piles of jewels in Westminster Abbey or wherever they keep that stuff in England. But then we get to the scene in which he’s telling a story to his two daughters, contending with his stutter as he connects with them. At that point, the movie had me.

Ethan Mars playing with his boys in the backyard and Prince Albert telling his daughters a story are human moments. Cage is absolutely right to try to build a game around them. But the difference between Cage’s lead puppet and Colin Firth is the difference between success and failure. Is that just a “me” problem? Do I need to learn to suck it up and love those creepy puppets down in their uncanny valley? Cage couldn’t tell me because I didn’t get a chance to ask. There was no Q&A after his talk, because he ran out the clock railing against running, shooting, jumping, rolling, and whatever the six other verbs are that drive games like Bioshock 2, Braid, Defcon, and Far Cry 2.

Swery, the developer of the equally ineffectual but far quirkier Deadly Premonition, has similarly misguided ideas about connecting with characters. His process seems to be informed by what I’m guessing are Japanese videogame traditions for how to build characters. For instance, he says it’s important to give characters gestures fans can emulate. Write up exhaustive resumes that include things like their favorite flavor of ice cream. Give them names people will remember. Don’t worry about what they’re saying as much as the cadence of their speech. This sort of stuff must be great for JRPGs and cosplay. But they’re terrible things to tell an audience of potentially impressionable game developers who might go on to accidentally make games like Deadly Premonitions.

But unlike Cage, Swery didn’t make pronouncements that everyone else is doing it wrong. Perhaps because he’s newer to the scene and hasn’t been beating his head against the struggling adventure game genre for so long, as is the case with David Cage. Furthermore, Swery put actual gameplay into Deadly Premonition (although he confessed the only reason he included combat was because of pressure from the publisher). It’s one thing to make a bad game because you don’t understand what games are capable of these days. It’s something else to make a bad game because you have really weird taste and just want to express it. And at least Swery left time for everyone to ask him questions.

I’m not convinced either man is capable of making a good game. Cage is too dismissive of actual gameplay and Swery is too in love with Japanese quirkiness for Japanese quirkiness’ sake. But they’re both bold and convicted enough that I look forward to playing whatever they make next.