Is Heavy Rain a Game?
Interactivity distinguishes games from other forms of entertainment. What constitutes interactivity, however? What if a TV show required you to raise or lower the volume every 5 minutes in order to continue? Would that make the TV show interactive (not just by definition, but in the spirit of the word)?
Heavy Rain is a unique product that pushes games in a direction that few have attempted in the past decade. Where does ‘experience’ end, however, and ‘game’ begin?
What counts as interactivity?
If you’re not familiar with Heavy Rain, take a quick look at this video. The game is essentially a series of conversations and gestural inputs that mimic what the character is doing on-screen.
If your character is brushing their teeth, you have to shake the controller back and forth to mimic the teeth-brushing motion. If you’re punching somebody in the face, you might move the analog stick to match a punching motion. You also choose what dialogue options you take with various characters.
Heavy Rain has ... yes ... rain
All of these inputs combine to tell a story. Although this sounds like most RPG games, there is a critical difference: you don’t have any input on what happens. Sure, you have to perform the teeth-brushing motion for your character to brush their teeth, but either you do it or they’re just going to sit there and wait for you to do it. The closest Heavy Rain comes to being interactive is when it allows you to control in which direction you’re walking.
The problem with all of this is 1) FMV games have been done before (Night Trap) and are largely terrible, and 2) There is no input on the outcome of the game. Sure, there are lots of linear games, but at least you’re allowed to fail. In Heavy Rain even if you are in a fight and you miss every QTE and get punched a billion times, you still succeed (you just end up with a few more bruises).
If you are given the facade of choice, but every time you choose what the game doesn’t want you to do it says ‘you didn’t really mean that right?’ is that really interactivity?
Night Trap: this looks high budget. So bad I didn't even care about horribly cropping the image
To be completely fair, the game hasn’t come out yet and there are situations where you can let a character die, changing the story. I’m sure there is more to it than some have suggested from previews and possibly I’m being unfair.
In addition, there are games like the Lego series that are for children where you’re not allowed to die; death merely slows down your progress, there is no actual failure. It’s difficult to choose what is encompassed in the ‘game’ definition.
Different demographic
I feel like the previous segment is me being hypocritical. I’m a big proponent of mixing genres in games, why not mix across genres? What’s wrong with adding a little interactivity to films?
Potentially there’s an entire audience out there that likes the slight interactive element in games but doesn’t really want to commit to learning a full control scheme. Maybe they just want to watch a fun story and feel like they’re a little bit involved.
This could easily be a situation where I’m not the target demographic. There’s a reason I don’t play Farmville (mostly because I have no Facebook friends) and it has 80 million users.
Farmville: This shit has 80 million users? Seriously? What's wrong with you people
I will be very interested to see the reception that Heavy Rain receives from the gaming public in terms of sales. Is this going to be a critical success (already looking that way) and a commercial flop, like most games from Quantic Dreams, or is this going to resurrect new FMV games?
Night Trap appeared to be the final nail in the coffin, but maybe everybody who played that is old enough now that they’ve died off.
