Hacker Cinema
Heavy Rain
2010 · Film · documentary · 8 min
Directed by Neil LaBute
A powerful short documentary inspired by the launch of the genre breaking PlayStation 3 title HEAVY RAIN. Directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Neil LaBute, the seven minute short was filmed in London, LA & Paris and asks leading luminaries, 'How far would you go to save someone you love?'
4 positive2 negative4 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
heavy rain is good art. and its really accessible to first-time gamers because its more like an interactive movie than a game
I haven't played Heavy Rain but I really enjoyed Farenheit / Indigo Prophecy. Your choices had a limited effect on the structure of the movie, but the game was making constant nods to what you did, often in clever ways.
Heres an example. In the very first scene you have to flee a crime scene. You could leave the murder weapon where it is, or try to hide it. If you hide it, the game doesn't show you where you hid it. Later on, you play as the cops investigating the crime scene. If you didn't hid the weapon, it's in the same spot, but if you hid it, you'll have to look for it now. Most changes to the movie follow this structure. Demonstrating a higher level of play results in a movie with more and longer scenes, and all those extra scenes make it very clear that your actions caused them to exist in the movie.
I believe when Charlie Brooker first got on board with Netflix to produce the third season of Black Mirror, he made a suggestion to introduce some kind of interactive element to the show but Netflix decided it wasn't technically possible to do what he wanted at the time. I can't remember where I read or heard this but it got me thinking about what kind of innovation you could bring to a traditional TV series when it is distributed via the internet.
For example you could show slightly different versions of the show to different viewers, of you could subtly alter the show when viewed on second or third viewing. Or the show could change depending on the time of year that you watch it. This kind of breaking of the fourth wall and breaking of fiction from reality could fit extremely well into a Black Mirror type of story. I'd love to hear what others suggest.
As far as interactivity, and 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of story telling I think that will probably get boring pretty quick. We already have this kind of story telling with games such as Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls and while many people view those games as innovative forms of cinematic games, I would say they are pretty tedious and non-immersive forms of cinema.
If there's anything that Detroit: Become Human does well, it's branching narrative. Does it approach true freedom? Not at all. But compared to, say, Telltale games or something like Until Dawn, it's pretty impressively open ended[0].
Now, do I recommend it? Absolutely not. It starts off really good, especially if you're already expecting another Heavy Rain or Beyond Two Souls. But after a few hours (maybe just one?) it gets heavier and heavier handed. It's impressive how quickly it turns from an interesting story about both intolerance and what it means to be human, and just becomes a series of scenes that practically scream "DO YOU GET IT YET? DO YOU?".
Probably still the best David Cage game I've seen, mostly for the strong intro and branching narrative, but that's like picking your favorite Uwe Boll movie. If you want to play one of these style of games and can handle horror, I'd point you toward Until Dawn instead, as I think that's probably the best example of the genre.
[0]: [Spoilers] Here's a graph of the choices available in one mission. Some are significantly more linear, some are even more complex. Note that other missions may include two or more (Up to 5 I think?) starting points. https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2018/05/fugitives-82-percent-flowchart-detroit-become-human.jpg
Like a sibling comment says, in the 2010s videogames have "gone Hollywood". My perspective is similar to what you say, but actually in the opposite direction: I think videogames in the 90s experimented more and were less focused in graphics, even though of course there were very technical programmers like Carmack. In the 2010s, videogames seemed to think graphics were the most important improvement; but even worse, every game designer thought of himself as an amateur movie director. Unfortunately, most game designers would make terrible directors. I'm going to single out David Cage of Quantic Dream as someone who writes embarrassingly bad plots for his videogames (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain), and actually calls himself a "director".
The problem with "games as movies" is that most games tell a story that would feel amateurish or childish if told as a movie. But also, as one piece in the Atlantic controversially argued [0], games are a different medium than movies; trying to "tell a story" with a game, in the traditional sense, is failing to take advantage of the medium.
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[0] Note I don't entirely agree with it, but it raises some valid points: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/
I think this better as a video game (like Heavy Rain or Sam and Max). Otherwise, the effort to make a 2 hour movie would probably make a 10 minute choose your own adventure movie.
I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind:
- interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs)
- simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims)
- pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games)
- puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness)
- others...
Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms.
The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.
Huh? The gaming community has spent the last 10 years or so fighting to get games recognized as an art form and now you think that limiting expressive freedoms is a good idea just so copyright infringement doesn't happen?
One of the most impactful games I've ever played was a PS3 exclusive called "Heavy Rain"[0]. That game, while having several branching storylines that create vastly different endings, was basically an 8-hour long interactive movie. It is one of the best games I've ever played but I doubt I'll ever play it again. I'm certain that I would make most of the same choices and reach the exact same outcome.
Another recent game that I really enjoyed is called Firewatch[1]. It's basically a three-hour movie. I don't even think it has different outcomes. You experience the story they give you.
That game was excellent (though really short for being $15). That sort of game would not exist in your worldview.
I watch Let's Plays almost exclusively as my digital content of choice. I first discovered Firewatch through an early pre-release copy that Marbozir played[2]. Luckily his pre-release copy only took you through the first 45 minutes or so and I was able to enjoy the full game on my own. Despite enjoying the game, the first 45 minutes of my game was incredibly dull because I'd already seen it played. Had I watched a full Marbozir playthrough, I would have probably never purchased the game. Without giving away any spoilers, once you've seen the whole game, there's really nothing left to experience.
I'm really torn about this article. I'm a game developer myself, so I definitely want to encourage people to buy games and support developers, but I have a family and rarely find enough time to actually play games. I get all of my enjoyment in late-night Let's Play sessions. This is a really tricky problem to solve, and I think being dismissive of a genre is dangerous ground to tread.
Thanks for your comment, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Rain
[1]: http://www.firewatchgame.com/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_gwFDm21zA
If so, then one or the other has a long, long way to go. We've seen attempts to translate the movie experience into a videogame format, and they've failed abjectly every single time; there is a reason for this.
For a recent example of the state of the art in interactive movies, let's look at "Beyond: Two Souls", a PS3 game released last year by Quantic Dream, a studio lately specializing in the format; their 2010 release, "Heavy Rain", was fairly well received. "Beyond: Two Souls" makes a halfway watchable B-movie (think "Hit Girl" meets "Enemy of the State" with a double shot of Evil Movie CIA), but as a game it is God-awful. This is because the need to maintain coherency, in a heavily pre-planned movie-style narrative, militates strongly against giving the player any kind of freedom to play the game; the result is a farrago of quick-time events ("press X to not die"), "find the blue dot" puzzles in which the game tries and fails to give an illusion of involvement by requiring the player to pixel-hunt in order to advance the narrative, and branch points at which the player gets to choose the next cutscene from a small collection of very similar alternatives. One need not be a "hard-core gamer", whatever that is, to find this a combination which utterly fails to satisfy; then again, even today's theater tickets don't cost anywhere near $60 a pop, a high price even for a good movie -- which "Beyond: Two Souls" manifestly is not.
On the whole, this bodes ill for the future of "interactive movies"; a game and a movie are clear different things, and so far no one has come up with a means of reliably bridging the gap between them. Perhaps that will change as new technology such as the Oculus Rift offers new possibilities both to game developers and to filmmakers, but I tend to doubt it; what seems more likely to me is the genesis of an entirely new genre, possibly synthesizing traits from both movies and games, but fundamentally not the same as either.
What do you propose the player does in an action oriented, modern, gun-based game? What skill based mechanic can eat up 30 hours of a 40 hour game and is superior to point and click FPS shooting?
At the end of the day, your player has to PLAY the game and I guess I can understand the frustration of the grinding and the mechanic, but I fail to see what is superior.
Maybe people want more games like Heavy Rain? I loved Heavy Rain, it was an incredibly engaging and emotional story. I had a great connection with the characters and story, but there's only one problem: it's basically a choose your own adventure movie. Lots of watching, some playing, very little skill involved.