Also, we filmed just before finding out the name of Sony’s Arc was actually going to be the Playstation Move. So save yourself the trouble of yelling at the screen and calling us idiots when we call it the Arc.

Now hold on. Before you close the tab because you think this is about to be some rant about sexism in games, let me assure you that this isn’t that article. I just wanted to point out the reality of that reaction. Not only is it a realistic reaction, but it’s also a fairly reasonable one. After all, the person probably just witnessed Batman beat a criminal into submission, Master Chief impale a few Covenant with an energy sword and Marcus Fenix fill a Locust grunt full of bullets just before chainsawing him in half. So let’s be clear in saying it is fair to say that hyper-masculinity and violence are two general trends in a large portion of popular games. I’m here to tell you that there is a pretty huge reason why it’s a crying shame that those would likely be the first words out of an observer’s mouth.

Stay with me now. I said I wouldn’t be burning my bra in this article, and I am a man of my word. Let me start by saying that playing both Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain made me feel something that I had rarely felt before as a player. It’s possible that I had truly never felt this way in a game at all. That feeling was vulnerability, and it helped me become a part of those game worlds better than any photorealistic graphics or 7.1 surround sound ever have. Creating vulnerability has the power to deliver more immersion through closer relationships between the player, the characters and the game world.

So what does vulnerability have to do with being a violent super man? When was the last time you saw Superman feel vulnerable? How vulnerable do you think Marcus Fenix feels when he’s hefting around a death machine like the Lancer? Not ever and not very should be your answers. The point is that it’s hard to feel anything other than invincibility, both physically and emotionally, in a game when the avatar is built like a truck and has the ability to solve any problem with a hearty helping of bullets and fists. And since I don’t regularly feel invincible in my day-to-day life, it makes it hard to relate to a game as being anything more than just a fantasy. As any writer or director in any other storytelling medium knows, it’s difficult to deliver a compelling story if the audience doesn’t relate to the characters.

Many of the greatest stories throughout history depict an ordinary character put in extraordinary circumstances. This is a lesson that games have yet to learn. Most developers go out of their way to create characters that are just as extraordinary as the situations they are put in. There’s never a situation a player feels they can’t handle when they are a Spartan or “the one soldier who can save us all.” What kind of emotional conflict can arise in a narrative when you know from the outset that your character only knows how to win win win? Think of the last movie you saw that you felt truly connected to. It probably didn’t star Vin Diesel or The Rock. It likely starred an every-man type of actor. You could relate to them because, like you, they didn’t have all the answers and wasn’t always in total control of the situations they were in.

Looking at the violence, let’s be clear. I have no problem with violence in games. Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy both certainly have their share. However, there is a major difference between the way violence is implemented in those two games and the other games I’ve discussed. Those two games don’t use violence as the primary or, in most cases, only problem solving tool at the player’s disposal. With most games, it seems that even if the main character really is just a normal person, they have an endless arsenal of weapons or combat skills at their disposal that they are happy to use as the means to any and every end. Got a problem? Shoot it! Something in your way? Punch it! Need to open a door? Roundhouse kick that bitch clean off the hinges! If a game doesn’t give you real guns, it gives you the type of “guns” that your buddies cleverly inquire whether or not you’ve bought a ticket to see while they point at their poor excuses for arms. Bottom line, games tell players that every answer in the world is just a bullet or backhand away. Again, I get that this is empowering, but it’s not very relatable on any level.

And then there was Heavy Rain. If you don’t think that removing some of the invincibility factor can have an impact on a player’s relationship with a game, then you haven’t tried Heavy Rain. Sure the game has the whole “any character could die at any time” hook to make you overtly aware of your stunning normality, but it’s the subtle, in-game things that make this even more apparent. For starters, all of the characters are just regular people. Ethan is just a father trying to salvage his relationship with the world. Scott Shelby is a private detective; surely he must have some firepower at his disposal, right? Wrong. You know what he has? Asthma. Little things like this let the player know that these are characters that they can relate to. They have problems like getting their kid to school on time and refilling an inhaler prescription. The developer didn’t need to hit me over the head with a “death warning” to get me to care about the characters. They accomplished that just by making them normal and putting them in normal situations.

As Alex pointed out with his Indigo Prophecy article, developer Quantic Dream has a knack for making the simplest thing seem intense and action packed. Heavy Rain is no different. I attest that they do this here by sparse and deliberate use of violence in the game. Just like in real life, the player often has to talk their way in or out of a situation. When a bouncer blocked my way at a club, all my previous game knowledge had me searching for the punch button, but how realistic is that? More importantly, how immersed could you truly be when your problem solving skill set is that ridiculous? Just go try and get past a bouncer that way. See if the reaction you get pans out like in most games. Intensity gets created in this game because the two reasons that are stated above are nowhere to be found in this game.

Not making the player all-powerful also has the ability to keep action games, and games in general, from getting boring. Any player looking for more than cheap adrenaline will grow tired of only having the same feelings evoked from them over and over again. Limiting the problem solving set to just violence will also become uninteresting. No matter how pretty the graphics look, it will start to not matter if all we’re going to do is blow holes through them. Not stylizing every character to be a ‘roided out meat-head also expands the situational possibilities for the character and therefore the player as well. Let’s face it; Marcus Fenix is only good for one thing, destruction. Ethan Mars, on the other hand, can believably exist in any situation.

I understand that many people play games to live a fantasy or for escape, and that’s totally fine. However, I also thought that one of the points of games was to immerse the player in another world and different situations. Sensory immersion techniques like graphics and sound will only get us so far. Developers need to start paying attention to games like Heavy Rain that use situational and character-driven methods to strengthen the relationship between the player and the game world. By keeping characters and their abilities grounded in some sort of reality, Heavy Rain was able to make a convenient store robbery feel more intense than a full scale battle ever has, and it was all because for a few moments when I wasn’t sure whether that single gun was going to fire on me, I felt vulnerable.

Related Links

• Gunnar Optiks
• The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom

Related Links

• Indigo Prophecy PS2
• Indigo Prophecy Xbox

For those of you who still haven’t played developer Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy, Lucas Kane is one the main characters of the game. What I have just described to you is a scene that takes place very early in the game. However, what makes this scene so special is the fact that I made him do all of that. After receiving only the smallest of cues – the quick inner-monologue line that Lucas just wanted to go about his day – I made him go to the bathroom. I made him take a shower. I made him stop and look in the mirror. My question is simply, why? I could have just as easily gone straight to the closet, put on some clothes and been done with it. Why was I so willing to dwell in the mundane tasks of everyday life in a medium that, for the most part, is meant to take us out of all this banality? But at that moment, I was living the life of this man. I made him shower because he was going to work. I made him go the bathroom because when you wake up you have to pee. Lucas was real, the immersion was real and I was swimming in it…the immersion, not the pee. This is the magic of Indigo Prophecy.

Ewwww, yeah…I’m gonna need to wash my hands after this.

In order to uncover some answers as to how Quantic Dream is able to accomplish this feat, let’s look at some other games that have also attempted to achieve greater immersion through “real life” tasks with less than favorable results.

The first game that sprang to mind when I was trying to figure out why I was completely fine with making sure Lucas took the time to wash his hands and blow dry them after using the bathroom was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here is a game that goes out of its way to include things like working out, eating, and getting a hair cut into the gameplay in order to create some sort of connection between the player and the character, and yet it fails so hard. The problem here is that it tries too hard. GTA:SA makes some of these acts an important part of the overall gameplay mechanics and, in doing so, makes them feel like a chore. If your character eats and doesn’t work out, he gets fat and slow. Don’t eat enough, and he gets skinny. It becomes something you feel like you have to do because it helps build the character’s stamina and expands his move set rather than something you choose to do because of honest immersion.

The other, and more important, reason I feel it doesn’t work is because the system doesn’t behave realistically relative to the time elapsed. You can make your character fat, ripped or skinny in such a small amount of time relative to any sense of real time passage in the game. Again, this just serves to highlight these things as game mechanics rather than something that psychologically or emotionally connects the player to the character. The eating and the exercising are about reaching the end goal of having a character with the player’s desired stats. It’s not about being in the moment of eating or exercising. And that is what Indigo Prophecy is about, sharing the moment with these characters and existing in the same reality of time that they do.

Another way that other games try to add bits of immersion is through available interactions with random objects throughout the game’s world. The game that did this most recently was BioShock 2. As I lumbered around Rapture as Subject Delta, I noticed that I had the ability to turn on water faucets. Why? Why did the developers find it necessary to make the sinks work? There wasn’t much else in the world that I could play with. We’ve seen this in plenty of games. Doors open. Toilets flush. Phones ring. But for what? These do not help immerse the player in the world because they are exactly the way I described them, random. They have no meaning or reason to exist in the narrative of the game. They serve no purpose. Through the use of a meter that displays your character’s mood, Indigo Prophecy gives purpose to having them use the restroom, turn on some music or get a glass of water. Even the actions that don’t have a direct impact on the character’s mood still seem to make sense due to the simple narrative implications of their everyday life. Making a character wash their hands after using the bathroom doesn’t elevate their mood, but it makes sense in the situation because it’s what I would do in the real world.

Indigo Prophecy’s greatest trick is to blanket the player with a feeling of connectedness to all of the main characters. The presentation of the narrative plays the biggest role in this feeling and helps foster the player’s participation in these mundane tasks. Here’s what I mean. Lucas wakes up in a trance and finds himself in a bathroom stall. He murders a man, has some visions and blacks out. He had no control over his actions. As a player, I was the mercy of the director’s whims had no control since this was all presented in the form of a cut-scene. Emotionally, the player is instantly on a level playing field with Lucas due to the shared helplessness of that experience. While playing as Carla or Tyler, the two cops charged with finding Lucas, you also share the emotional gravity of the situation because just as they were thrust into the case, you are thrust into the situation of solving the murder you just saw yourself commit. You don’t have the choice to not play these parts; it’s what the director wants.

You’ve probably caught on by now that one of the biggest factors at work here is the manipulation of control for both the characters and player. Control is constantly being taken away from the characters and then given back bits at a time. Events are going to play out one way or another. As a player, you feel this lack of control just as the characters do, and it will effectively alter your mood and make you want to participate in as many actions as you have control over as possible. Enter the mundane.

It seems to me that it’s no coincidence that the game’s mood meter uses words like stressed, anxious and depressed to describe the character’s mental state throughout the game. Anyone who has chronically suffered from anxiety or depression can tell you that sometimes when the weight of their depression is at a paralyzing apex, it’s the most menial of tasks that can feel like the largest victories. Getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, doing some laundry; all these are minor things that a person has control over and can participate in when everything else seems out of control. Indigo Prophecy’s narrative reflects that by putting these characters in an extraordinary situation that they have little control over and telling them to continue to live their lives. You as the player have to live it with them, and when you get those fleeting moments of control, that few seconds to go to the bathroom or to dry your hands, you will take them. And what’s more incredible, you will enjoy taking them. Indigo Prophecy proves that you don’t need to force the player into some gimmicky gameplay mechanics or create the illusion of a real world with running faucets and flushing toilets. You just have to set the mood.

First, let’s look at what I mean exactly when I talk about using non-action as action. When we think of action in video games, we think of shooting our way through the frontlines of a war or running through the streets of a city as we make a daring escape. These are obvious action set pieces that are built to create tension and drama and give the player a sense of urgency. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been chased through the streets or in a big gunfight in quite a few years now. It just isn’t something that happens everyday to most people and can make the situation hard to relate to. What does happen to people then? Well, we get into some pretty intense conversations, we try to cover up mistakes, and we work on relationships. All of these are things that happen daily that make life exciting. If we say or do the wrong thing, it could mean ruining friendships or marriages. There is a lot of heavy stuff that goes on in our lives without the use of a gun.

So, how does this relate to games? I believe that video games can take these everyday occurrences that make life so exciting and implement them into gameplay. A great example of this has already been made in the form of Indigo Prophecy. There are moments, and I will site specific examples in a bit, where a conversation has you glued to the screen because you don’t want to say the wrong thing. At times you find yourself rushing frantically around a hotel room as you try to figure out an escape from the cops that are closing in on you. Now, I know that being chased by cops isn’t something that happens every day either, but it’s a lot more grounded in reality. This game doesn’t focus on the chase, which is something that I will get into in a moment.

To look at how Indigo applies these techniques specifically, let’s start by looking at scenes that contain only dialogue.  There is a scene towards the end of the game where Carla, the detective, is talking with Lucas, the killer. In this scene, Lucas pleads to Carla to believe his story and to help him put it all to an end. As Carla, you want to find out as much information as possible. The game let’s you ask about certain things, but it is up to you to decide what is most important. I say this because the game won’t let you ask every single question, like most games do. You’ll get to ask one or two, and then it moves on. This mechanic makes the conversation much more engaging. Another device used is the element of time. I know that we have discussed it on the show before, but having a timer forces you to choose what you want to say quickly, and more naturally, helps keep the pace of the dialogue, and in this case action, up. Everything starts to have a nice rhythm, and it almost feels like a shootout…with words.

So, in this scene, you aren’t really given the choice as to whether or not you’re going to help Lucas, which is arguably a good or bad choice by the creators, but that isn’t what is important. The fact that you start to feel like you are in Carla’s shoes is what matters. In my experience, I found myself questioning peoples’ motives and really starting to wonder if what I knew to be true was actually true. It’s the game’s ability to do this that makes it stand out from a dialogue system in a game like Fallout 3 or even Mass Effect.

Other non-action moments exist that aren’t just talking. Now, these could be considered action because they are intentionally built to be tense, but the things the player has to do aren’t the typical action stereotype and are worth taking a look at. Early on there is a scene where Lucas is in his apartment, and the police are coming to pay him a visit. Unfortunately for Lucas, there is evidence all over his place that can link him to a murder. The player has to clean up, hide laundry, and do other things before the police get tired of waiting at the door and decide to just bust in. Again, it is up to the player to decide which is most important and the order in which things should be done. Never before has a cleaning segment been more exciting in a game. By putting the stress of the cops arresting you on a scene like this, the creators have made a great scene that is both tense and gun free.

As Aaron had pointed out on an episode where he showed all of the crappy games he bought (achievement farm much?), nearly everything that comes out these days revolves around shooting. Let me clarify that a little. Nearly every narrative-based game that comes out revolves around shooting. Even if shooting isn’t a main mechanic, it is probably involved somehow. It’s refreshing to get a game like Indigo Prophecy that puts the guns down and thinks about action differently. We have become a Michael Scott industry where we only see excitement in the form of a gun. I know that we’ve talked about the industry driving itself into a little corner by sticking with shooting as its primary form of action, and I still think that it is headed in that direction. Hopefully, with games like Indigo Prophecy, it can be pulled off of that course, and we can see games that are chock-full of drama using different and exciting techniques.