Tag Archive for 'Death in games'

‘Heavy Rain’ Has Persistant Story, So Don’t Reload

Published
on September 24, 2008
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Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer promises a non-linear and cinematic which is intended to be play without any reloading according director David Cage, who spoke with CVG this week.

“There will be the opportunity for players to reply as much as they want from where they want, but we would really like to encourage them not to do so — to continue to play with one story bearing with the consequences of their actions,” Cage told CVG.

The story can even survive the deaths of its multiple player-controlled characters, accommodating all player choices, even fatal ones. Is this the end of the Game Over screen?

“This is what’s exciting about it,” said Cage. “This is a story that you told. It’s pretty unique. So why would you want to do everything perfect and change what you’ve done. You will be able to redo what you like but we recommend not to.”

Cage is the founder, CEO and auteur of French studio Quantic Dreams. His last effort was 2005’s Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), which also featured a non-linear story, told through bare-bones controls and heavily scripted quick time events.

Judging from these early previews, Heavy Rain is a definite improvement over Fahrenheit and may establish new conventions for interactivity in storytelling when it comes out for the Playstation 3 last next year.

Mistakes and pitfalls always break the mood in games. They pressure or outright force the player to flip back a few pages and rewrite the story correctly. Some recent games have broken from the trend of checkpoints and quick-save/quick-load.  BioShock allowed players to continue after dying by restoring the hero at the nearest Vita-Chamber — a kind of in-character checkpoint.

Heavy Rain will liberate players from the constraints of failure by offering in-game consequences rather than a forced reboot and maintaining immersion in the plot rather than ending it.

A Hero’s Death: PAX’s Panel on Storytelling in Games

Published
on August 28, 2007
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This past weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, which has outgrown its webcomic roots to become one of the top video game conventions in the nation, hosted a a Q&A panel addressing the new possibilities for storytelling in games afforded by advances in technology.

Titled “Once Upon a Time… Storytelling in Games Today,” the panel consisted of Dave Grossman, creator of The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, also of LucasArts, and Sly Cooper developer Nate Fox. Moderated by Chatterbox Radio’s Alon Waisman, the three developers addressed a number of interesting points, including user created content, linear and dynamic narratives and AI involvement, all of which are quoted in Gamasutra’s coverage of the panel.

One of the most interesting and most often undiscussed subjects visited by the panel involves death in games, which is ironic because only an absolutely infallible gamer could avoid it. All of us have led our protagonist into the gaping maw of death only to have him spat out in shame, perhaps minus one of his collected “lives,” and sent back to face the barely-surmountable odds once more.

“I think the death of the protagonist is just one of those things where the belief has to be suspended. I think in games people just don’t think about that. You don’t want to kill people to introduce frustration, I think death will just be one of those languages of our medium that people just don’t think about,” commented Gilbert.

Death is so common in games that it becomes mundane. That demoralizing exclamation of “Game Over” loses any significance it holds in real life, loses any significance at all beyond annoyance–all it takes is a quick tap of the reset button to start anew. However, the protagonist’s death is not without its repercussions.

“Interruption of the narrative is much more important to me than anything else,” said Grossman. “I don’t like what happens when you have to restore from a saved game. I try to avoid it.”

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Protagonist or Pawn: Canon in Video Game Tie-Ins

Published
on August 5, 2007
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Gamers regularly make choices when playing a game. But what if those decisions were truly important? What if they changed the future of the plot?

An article in the most recent issue of The Escapist looks at how games in multi-media franchises treat “canon” — the official position on plot and characters which is necessary to ensure continuity in series like Star Wars that span films, shows, books, graphic novels and games. That is, you delivered 100 pizzas in the Spider-Man game, but is that the Sam Raimi-approved number of pizzas delivered by Spider-Man?

This may seem like the realm of nerds and Star Trek enthusiasts, but the changing relationship between canon and video game tie-ins raises an interesting question: What if the player’s actions and choices tangible repercussions in movies, games, and books to follow? What if the player could influence a franchise in a way that readers and film and television audiences cannot?

Chris Dahlen’s Escapist article, titled “The Open Source Canon,” looks specifically at The Matrix Online, a tie-in to the Matrix films with an interesting catch. Troy Hewitt, a writer and community event manager for the game, said in 2005, “Our intention is that players who play a really big role, or make a key decision, become part of the Matrix canon, and they become part of the story.”

In other words, The Matrix Online’s player-driven events and their conclusions are part of the official canon. This includes everything from small quests to major plot events given to the community to play out. In 2005, one of these events resulted in the official death of Morpheus, demonstrating the magnitude of the story decisions players are allowed to make.

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