Culture Clash Sep09

(September 2009)

Being There
Juggling immersion and interactivity
By Matthew Sakey

A recent Edge magazine feature rummaged through the brain of Quantic Dream's David Cage, exploring his vision of games as artistry and the challenge of invoking complex emotion with them. With Heavy Rain nearing completion and a lot (for Quantic Dream, at least) riding on the game's nonconformist approach, Cage himself seemed focused heavily on the goal of eliciting emotions - and not the usual ones, either. Complex emotions, adult themes, stuff that many of us have often sought in games, only to be disappointed or to find it necessary to create or eke out such meaning ourselves.

Many current games are like domestic dogs or cats. Contrary what all pet owners including myself choose to believe, such animals possess extremely primitive brains compared to our own. According to scientists, they are incapable of even conceptualizing time, and can process only the most basic and simple emotions: fear, pleasure, affection, recognition, and the like. Compound emotions like irritation, melancholy, or even anger are simply too complex, while the idea of, say, a dog "taking revenge" on an owner for leaving them alone is an order of magnitude more complex than mere anger.

Games, similarly, typically manage to produce only certain, simple emotional outputs. They can be frightening, or exhausting, or exhilarating, or annoying. Only one in a blue moon can one genuinely make a player feel true, longer-than-a-second remorse for an action. Only a handful can make a gamer feel long-term grief, or a sense of estrangement. In fact, it's pretty infrequent that the player feels more than a casual connection with characters, even well-conceived, likable ones; or with narratives, even skillfully-written, effective ones. It's much easier for movies and other art forms to generate complex reactions, for two reasons: one, because the level of talent and attention applied to story is much greater in those media; and two, because interactivity creates a barrier between the player and the experience that can be difficult to overcome. Interactivity, despite being the key differentiator that makes games so unique as compared to other art forms, is a bit of an albatross in this matter. For all that we talk of games being "immersive," the presence of interactivity can really interfere with immersion. After all, how "into" a game can you get when no matter what you're separated from the gamespace by an imperfect interface device and the distractions of the world around you?

Narrative and atmosphere are only two parts of the puzzle. Even games with both, like Morrowind, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Valkyria Chronicles, or Cryostasis, can be undone by factors that don't exist elsewhere in narrative art: factors like mechanics, victory conditions, and controls. Factors that are the core of interactivity. It's because interactivity is new to entertainment and developers are still fine-tuning its integration with the more traditional tropes, while dealing with the added challenge of technology's relentless advance that renders much of what they try obsolete within a console generation. How, then, can developers achieve the ideal state of creating games with rich classically narrative environments while keeping interactivity both in the vanguard of the experience and experientially invisible?

It's hard. I can remember quite vividly moments of certain games - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Prototype, Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - in which I was breathless, exhilarated, self-forgetful, immersed, big time, only to have the immersion broken by a mechanical defect in how I interacted with the game world. I doubt the devs did it on purpose. In the case of Heavy Rain, it saddens me to see that they'll be depending on Quick Time Events to invisibilify control, which is weird since there's little more visible than Quick Time Events. No matter how nicely you dress a pig, it's still a pig; no matter how much you try to conceal QTEs, they're still QTEs. Assassin's Creed's unique "puppeteering" approach was hardly a runaway success, but was much more transparent than even the best QTE.

Far more challenging than the art of making controls invisible is the art of making the player forget he or she is playing, and give themselves entirely over to the game world. When I'm playing I always get antsy about going left rather than right, because I'm trying to remind myself to return and go right later on so I don't miss anything. Inevitably my mind keeps going back to that mysterious right-hand passage and I have difficulty concentrating on what's in front of me. Similarly, I know full well that reloading is always an option when something that displeases me happens, even though some games practically beg you not to do that, to experience the story's true flow. Cage and his Heavy Rain crew have built failure and missed opportunities right into the core of the game experience; in fact, Cage's even said he hopes most people only play once despite the fact that they'll almost certainly miss huge swathes of exposition, art, and environment; he wants to keep the experience pure and singular for each individual. That's both admirable and rather pie-in-the-sky.

One day, doubtless, games will move beyond their growing pains and interface will be either invisible or so elegant as to be practically so. At the rate technology is moving, "immersion" may become a literality rather than an expositive concept. I certainly hope that happens within my lifetime, because I'm most eager to experience such games. In the interim, the challenge developers (and players) face is finding the emotional core of interactive experiences without negatively impacting the gameplay, without which it is, of course, not a game at all.

Recently I've heard a lot of nostalgia from gamers; how nothing quite beats Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; how Autoduel offered a far more unforgettable open world than Infamous. This might explain the exodus of major developers to handheld platforms, where technology is more reminiscent of those golden age days. As amazing as console and PC technology are today, somehow the more advanced many games become, the more… hollow they seem. Indeed, despite the fact that many of them have bolder, more mature themes and storylines and emotioneering than any game of the far past ever imagined, at times they lack the gut visceral impact of the moment you walked into the town of Hauksness in Dragon Warrior, after fighting so hard to get there; the moment you burst into the Motavian governor's office at the end of Phantasy Star, the moment you realized the truth about Hobbes in Wing Commander 3. Does this mean that the more advanced games become, the less immersive they are?

I prefer to believe no; advancement is inevitable, and if advancing games means cheapening their experiences, it also means the death of our beloved hobby. Instead, let's assume that immersion, emotion, interactivity, and technology are complex and strange bedfellows - but fellows all the same, and those among whom some parity and consensus will eventually be reached.