Heavy Rain

By Harry van Vliet on 19 March 2010

Heavy rain is a strange game, or isn’t it? I mean is it a game? Sure it is, I’ve got a controller in my hands and I am pushing buttons to make things happen. But if you instantly switch from current popular games such as Modern Warfare 2, Bayonetta or Dante’s Inferno to Heavy Rain, it feels like nothing less than a cold turkey: involvement is still key, but not based on over the top actions but on characters and plot. Still it is recognizable as a game: game mechanics are there (press a certain order of buttons to win a fight: anyone played God of War?), there are save points, and the characters move like they are still attached to a stick. But at the same time film techniques are prominent: framing, music, and character introduction is far less in your face and more appealing to emotions. There is a delicate pace and the flow is extremely tuned. It does remind me of a game like Ico, totally different in realism but also all about emotional player involvement. It is still one of my favourite games.

The engineering of the interaction is also quite different, for instance their is no ‘power bar’, no HUD, no selection screen for weapons or magic, no cross hair in sight. Possible actions are projected on the objects in the environment: controlling the left stick to tie someone’s tie, move the controller up and down to throw a boomerang, etcetera. It is not ‘natural’ but it feels logical. It certainly sets Heavy Rain apart in the sense that normal day-to-day activities (brushing your teeth, starting a car) mix wonderfully with more typical game play activities (fighting, running for safety). Again: balancing rules.

Could we say something more on the ‘interactivity’ aspect? On the subject of interactivity, theorists are usually the first to acknowledge that this concept often is used incorrectly. Still it is important to figure out what ‘interactivity’ means. A way to approach this is an analysis of different instances of interactivity. For instance Michael Joyce argues that true interaction is only the case when the medium responds as often on the user as vice versa, as both the medium and the user are influenced by the behaviour of the other. This is an example of a constructive hypertext; the user can change content and structure of a hypertext. Joyce puts this besides an exploratory hypertext, a hypertext that lets users explore different organisation structures but does not allow them to change anything. Is Heavy Rain constructive? No, all branches of the story are there and certain story parts have to be played. Does it feel constructive? You bet, not helping a character early on in the game when she is harassed, does have consequences: she has a scare in her face later on. Helping her and there will be no scare. It was my choice to do so, to take this story branch (exploratory) but it feels like I constructed part of the story.

Another distinction often made in the case of interactivity is that between passive and active. Zapping channels on your TV, or switching viewpoints in a videogame are interactions but one of the more passive kind. In Heavy Rain you can regularly choose to walk away from scenes that are part of the story. So you can ‘zap’. Communicating with other viewers/gamers is considered more active interaction. Teams playing multiplayer games and shouting commands over their headset are actively communicating, with the discussion being whether they are communication ‘about’ the game or ‘in’ the game? Affecting the storyline is also considered active interaction. My decisions in Heavy Rain are affecting the storyline, although no real new content is being made (everything is already there on the blue ray disc), still it can be viewed as active interaction. 

 So Heavy Rain is a constructive explorative game with a passive active overtone. Strange, isn’t it?

tagged with: hypertext, games, interaction

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