Notgames Forum

found this video of the first 9 minutes: WARNING SPOILERS but i'd suggest you watch it anyway!
http://notgames.tumblr.com/post/354475393/via-heavy-rain-first-9-mins

i really wonder what it will feel like to be in control of the character. will you feel like he is your avatar or constantly as if he is a puppet you cannot relate to?
(by the way, this video is posted to the notgames tumblr i've started up ...if you'd like to contribute notgames-y posts to it to it, let me know.)

Is the notgames tumblr the blog that Michael was referring to?

No. The Tumblr thing is just to collect reference material (video's, pictures, quotes, links). It's basically an extension to this forum.

The blog I was talking about before is for original material: articles and reviews we write ourselves, to educate the world about our initiative.

But feel free to correct any of my ideas. I'm not very familiar with the Web 2.0 community stuff.

Yeah, that's kind of what I had in mind.  Tumblr is more appropriate for shorter content.  Articles will likely be long.

Thanks for clearing that up :)  Sorry to hijack the thread...

i started the tumblr as a sort of feed for notgames links and videos... a way to aggregate things that are of interest.
http://notgames.org/forum/index.php?topic=41.0

I really like the mundane events that is going on, it is really unusual to find this kind of of stuff (outside of IF games).That said, it looks a lot like Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) which I did not really care for (except for the first 10 min, what was in the demo essentially). I do not like seeing all the options (which mostly is one option) seem so limited to me.

One thing about Heavy Rain that I am not sure about is the promise of the branching plot. While it sounds nice that all actions have consequences and that one never has to do anything over twice, it also makes me wonder with how many interesting stories they can come up with. Most games/books/films have trouble getting one narrative good :) I also wonder how much they can really branch. A branching story line grows exponentially it would be impossible to support this after just a few choices. My guess is that most choices are either superficial (will I drink juice or milk) or converges back to the same path after a while.

Still, I would really like to try it out and see what it all feels like.

Some more info in case anyone is interested:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/japanese-special-heavy-rain/61125

I didn't like that at all. It seemed like it was trying so hard to feel like a movie but it was wasting precious time that could be used for drama. I can't remember a movie where people get up and shower and brush their teeth etc, without something interesting about it (like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073198/), which was great!). The only thing I could imagine was that this sequence was some kind of drawn out tutorial. It had zero narrative significance. It was just bland information, dull facts, and no drama.

I'm still curious about the game, though, if only because David Cage is one of the few people who is really trying to get away from the games-as-games thing and towards a new medium. And the only one who has a serious budget for this.

Maybe he'd be interested in joining?

We've tried to contact him before. He doesn't respond to email. Maybe we should corner him in a conference somewhere.
But it's probably best to wait until after Heavy Rain is launched. If he's not totally crunching now, he's probably a nervous wreck. I can imagine the last thing he needs right now is inspiration and challenge. :D

Gah! I kinda understand the thinking behind making the player go through this but still... so boring. I'd so much rather take a shower and drink OJ in real life.

So true!

We should do things in virtual life that we can't do in real life. Or that are better in the virtual.

I still think it nice that they try this kind of stuff in games. Although the shaving and toothbrushing seems a bit too much. I think it could help build the character although boring. I mean, he is supposed to be a boring guy right? :) Also this kind of mundane stuff could be a large contrast to upcoming events and make these stronger.


Speaking of mundane gameplay. Here is an IF game with a very boring (and non-gamy) start, but it has an excellent twist to it:
http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=qzftg3j8nh5f34i2

It only takes 20min or so to complete so I encourage all to check it out!

I brush my teeth too. And I shower. But I am not boring!  :o

Didn't you know missing some teeth and smelling bad are the first steps towards becoming interesting? ;)

Jokes aside, from a game standpoint these are the acts of a really boring characters (Kratos sure never brushed his teeth). So for a player it conjures the feelings of a "boring" (average better word?) character and thus is a help in conveying emotions. I think this can be a good thing to have in games  but perhaps not so early (since one usually wants to grab attention at the start).

Do not think I am some heavy rain fan boy now :P I am actually quite skeptical about it (not liking Fahrenheit very much) and this opening scene could probably have been made better.

To do some constructive work. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make it more interesting? If the meaning (guy wakes up an prepares for childs birthday) needs to be remain, how can one do this better? I am think perhaps adding a glimpse of something to come (hinted by flashes or whatnot) + cutting down on the toothbrush and shave mini games is start. Interested in hearing what all else think!

It would be nice to learn a bit about what is not average about this person.

We don't even know how he feels. Is he happy this morning? Is he sad?

Why is the room so insanely clean? Is he neurotic? Is his partner? Do they have a neurotic maid? And where did he get his taste in interior decoration? Why is everything perpendicular? Why do they live in an architecture vizualisation? Is this a technical compromise or is there a narrative reason? Does he not care about aesthetics? Does his wife have bad taste? How does he feel about this?

One of the big problems with the narrative is that it is a slave to the interaction. The character can't do anything without the player's input. Which means that he has to just sit there and stand there until the player does something. If it wasn't for that, we could think he is in doubt, or even depressed. He looks like he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. But this is not for reasons of narrative. It's because he has to wait for the player to do something. So because of the interaction that is required, this person ends up looking like an idiot.

Why is the note from his wife on the floor? It doesn't make sense. Why not put it somewhere meaningful, so we can have a little bit of narrative. Tape it to the mirror in the bathroom because the wife knows he's going to look there. Or on the toilet seat because they're always having arguments about leaving it up or down. Ditto when he's putting the note down. Why not give that action a bit of character, so we know how he feels about the message: is he annoyed? Amused? Bored? We don't know.

Is the reason for this "neutrality" that Cage wants us to project our own emotions onto the character? But how can we do that if the character does not express these emotions in his body language?

He looks at the bird but again nothing happens. He could smile. Or remember something. Or clean its cage. Or maybe the bird is not significant. In which case there is no point to interacting with it.

The least they could have done is have a radio playing that gives us some context about where they are and what the situation is.

And the whole scene with the shaving. Why doesn't he have any opinions about this? Does he like shaving? Does he hate it? Does he do it everyday? Does he shave his chest?

Also, seriously, in such a mundane sequence of scenes, just showing us his penis really would have helped to think of him as a real person. If only because the elaborate concealing of his private parts only reminds you that you're watching a movie. It takes you away from the idea that you are playing this character.

He throws away his towel casually, yet the rest of the bathroom is squeaky clean. How come? I hope the reason for this becomes clear later in the game. And I hope it is significant. Otherwise it's just another wasted gesture.

And what grown-up man would start playing with a remote controlled toy right after getting out of bed and taking a shower? That's just such a nerd thing to put in. And there has been no narrative justification for thinking that this man is infantile. Again, rather than cleaning up, as a normal parent would do, he simply puts the controller back on the floor, where supposedly the kid had left it. It's absurd.
Ditto drinking out of the carton of juice. There is no narrative justification for this clean-freak to be so sloppy. Again, the way he drinks could have been used to make a statement about his personality and mood. But instead they go for the nerd thing. Or the thing that is easiest to do, technically.

The narrative conclusion from this scene is that this man is a slightly depressed neurotic who doesn't care about his child, his partner or his life simply because he's too stupid. I hope that was the intention of the authors.


I really appreciate what David Cage is trying to do. And I admire him for immediately trying to do this with a AAA budget, in the hopes of having an impact on the industry. But I have a feeling that he's trying to do too much and can't handle it. The budget may be big but still this entire opening sequence seems to be filled with compromise and cheap decisions. And the authorial direction is vague at best (perhaps even non-existent). I think we need to do lots of small steps before anything this big can be pulled off with the appropriate impact. And that, my friends, is why we are here.  ;D

I guess it would be interesting to do a contest with "Man gets out of bed in the morning" as its theme. :)

Michaël:
Good stuff! Gave me something to think about! I hope Mr Cage peeks at the forum ;)

Thank you, Michael. Reading your thoughts on the Heavy Rain trailer helped me get a better idea of what you have in mind for notgames, too. That's the kind of writing we could probably put up on a blog.

So yes, this is why we are here. I'm excited now. :D

And I like the "man gets out of bed in the morning" theme too. ;)

Yeah, that should be the next one.  It'd be interesting to see what people do with that!

I like that idea: criticizing other games for where they are lacking in the "notgames" department. That could indeed be very inspiring (both for the writer as for the reader). And it's also interesting to take such a small fragment to criticize. Keeps one from make too general statements.

I also like the idea of criticizing games from this kind of stand point! Pointing out both good and bad stuff can be very helpful! While there is a certainly a need to approach things from a completely different angle, many advancements might be made by simply analyzing what there is.

Wasn't literature critique like this 100 years ago or so? From what I understand, many of the great authours where famous critics too! Not sure how this is/was in the movie industry. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can give more information on this?

it made me laugh. :)
and it's so true.
the author probably didn't want this meaning, but it is there yet...

thank you for your thoughts.
i didn't analyse all of this.

Some more: http://www.jeuxvideo.com/extraits-videos-jeux/0000/00004460/heavy-rain-une-douche-et-au-lit-hd.htm

You are right, Michaël, the characters when not 'puppeteered' by us as a player just... stand there. They have nothing to do on their own accord. It is the style Mr Cage has chosen in terms of interaction, but it is far more inclined towards a film being paused every now and then for the player to 'do' something that will make it go on. The drama princess system is wilfully lacking!

The nudity you mention certainly is an important subject, since I have yet to shower myself without seeing myself nude - and again in this ludic play-ized cutscene we never actually see her naked in the perceptual sense. We technically see her naked in a few stolen glimpses with camera angles carefully chosen so we never see her crotch. To be almost too dramatic, this is perhaps typical of the way we are meant to feel close to the character, whilst at the same time there is this incredibly artificial boundary that prevents us from perceiving 'her flesh is our flesh'. But this illusion does not have to do with showering or nudity - even when she takes the pill there is a sense of disconnection. The character has no warmth, no flesh. A soulless puppet. The game even allows you to make toilet (indeed!), yet that somehow lacks the human element as well. Not to mention a level of personal hygiene unoptional.

On the subject of nudity, I have always felt that if the director makes the choice to have nudity in anything it better be done in a way that shows he himself is comfortable with whatever he wished to express about it. There are always those plays in which a man is nude for no reason other than it being 'modern', and all these films in which the same approach is taken to nudity as in this scene... Hence, I was impressed with something like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, that embodied the carelessness Manhattan has for clothes after years of godlike power. A scene like this just wavers between the comfort she has (because she walks without shame) and the impossibility for the author in showing the same level of comfort. I was happily surprised with Salome's dance, actually, in terms of (not)games, because that took this subject a lot more serious - it dared to be sexy and tempted the viewer to feel the situation was sexy, for how morally corrupt it truly was.
I suppose it is hard enough for directors to really do something with their nude scenes, let alone for directors in games to make play around it...

Perhaps there is the issue of trust. Looking at this scene I do not trust the director to show me things in a good manner since he is coy and seemingly undirected. Hence, every time something lacks I think: "what prompted the director to do this?" rather than to accept it as part of the 'real' scene.

We should certainly critique more - but without squashing the good-but-failed examples... Mr. Cage is going in a certain direction that may get a following, even if scenes like this are completely uninteresting to me.

It seems to me that the camera angles in this Heavy Rain extract are mostly chosen to imitate cinema without really giving it much thought, and without realizing that a camera in an interactive environment speaks a different language than a camera in cinema.

Of course I wasn't actually interacting with this. But imagining that I was, as long as the character was alone, I felt I was playing her role (even despite of the "coy" camera). As soon as she started fighting, however, she became a game prop I had to use to achieve a goal. Emotionally, I was more annoyed than scared. And the pain inflicted on the character made me just wonder about the purpose of the director and think that he better have a damn good reason for hurting the character like that. Which is a typical response I have to cinema. In other words: I did not feel her pain. I was just a spectator wondering about the talent of the artist.

Maybe it feels different when interacting with this. But without the power to actually physically hurt me, and perhaps humiliate me, I doubt if the designer can do more than annoy me and frustrate me. Which is very different, emotionally, the latter taking place mostly on the game-as-system level, the former on the game-as-story.

Makes me wonder if a game that could actually hurt you would be enjoyable. I'm not talking about "bar games" like the Painstation. The pain you feel would have to correspond with the pain the character feels (same places on the body, same intensity). I doubt that would be much fun. So maybe our simulation capacity is limited to "nice things"?
(of course it's a bit silly to consider this since it would be infeasible technically -for all intents and purposes, our medium is about fiction and imagination, not about reproduction or even simulation)

if i try to imagine that i am playing at this scene,
i think i would feel that i am powerful.

1. i have the power to watch someone who doesn't see me. I am not this character ; the "movie" editing highlights it. Moreover she looks sexy (clothes, body (too much "perfect" to feel real, by the way), movements, editing, camera positions, focus effects) thus it is hard for me to identify to her. So i am me and i am watching her.

2. i have the power to control her: i can make her undress, have a shower, go to the toilets, fight...

so yes, she is my puppet. I dominate her.
i feel powerful... and frustrated: perhaps because domination is a drug?

as a player/watcher, am i very different from the "bad guys" who attack her? i wonder...

That's an interesting observation, Alphonse. I think I'd feel roughly the same way if I played the game... it's a very strange relationship. It draws very much attention to the creators of the game also. Every second they are in there: fiddling with the camera, telling me what to do or not, etc. Not a single moment on my own with the character it seems :/

i agree, the most powerful puppet masters are the creators of the game.
the real power belong to them, and they show it: they dominate the characters and the player.
and sometimes they allow the player to play with their toys, so he/she can feel a bit powerful too.

the biggest victims in all of this are the characters i guess:
they seem to be at the bottom of the pyramid.

Here's a pretty basic, standard review of the game: http://kotaku.com/5468585/heavy-rain-review-no-wrong-conclusion

What I find interesting is that the author touches upon a few of the things we've been discussing here, for example:

"Video game developers often have to decide whether to leave their playable protagonists as blank entities, the better for players to see themselves in the shoes of, or to make the lead characters distinct, a love it or hate it kind of persona. Three of Heavy Rain's leads are more of the blank type, which can make them bores compared to private eye Scott Shelby, who seems like an interesting and complex guy from the get-go. We all will have our favorites, and I finished Heavy Rain having enjoyed the times I felt I was more of a specific character and less of the time I felt I was controlling an avatar."

If anything I think this game will force more people to think about this things harder, which must be good!