Heavy Rain and the Development of Interactive Story-Telling
You'll have to forgive me for the relative quiet over the past two weeks, but I made a last second decision to fly west for the last three days of the Vancouver Olympics and it's taken me a week to recover. However, the recovery time did give me chance to play Heavy Rain and reflect on the surprising power of interactive storytelling.Now, I've been playing video games since I was six years old but I had never considered the story to be significant part of the experience. Mario? Save the princess. Contra? Shoot aliens. Bionic Commando? Swing around the first level for hours. We played these games for the gameplay, for dodging death and never-ending bottomless pits. Who cared about the story?
And then in 1998, I played Metal Gear Solid and I was blown away by its ground-breaking cut-scenes, the hero's gruff persona, and the action-packed storyline that kept me on the edge of my seat. It was a revolutionary game and it set the storytelling standard for video games over the next ten years: cut-scenes, cut-scenes, cut-scenes.
Personally, I thought that this would be the peak of interactive storytelling but there was another little game that came out in 1998 that signaled the changes to come. It was called Half-Life. Now I didn't play Half-Life until 2002 so I never understood why it was considered such a great game. But where it did innovate was in how it told its story. Rather than use CG or in-game cut-scenes, it told its story through the eyes of Gordan Freeman. No matter what happened, you never left the point of view of the protagonist. This choice always made you feel that you were experiencing the story yourself rather than watching another character play out the story. In short, it led to a far more immersive experience. But it was also a cold experience. As a cipher, Gordon Freeman had no discernible personality. As a character, he had no character. Thus while the experience was immersive, I found that unlike Metal Gear Solid, I couldn't care less about what happened to the characters.
As the 2000s progressed, Half-Life's perspective on storytelling gained more and more influence in the industry, but I was so busy playing Metal Gear sequels that I didn't notice. Bioware allowed you to create characters and make choices that affect the storyline but the effect was somewhat cold and distant. I still preferred my cut-scenes.It was not until I played Fallout 3 in 2009 that I saw the power of the interactive storytelling that Half-Life had wrought. Unlike in previous games, choices had real consequences. A dress I found in the Statesman Hotel turned out to be a Father's dying gift to his daughter. A choice to sell a child into slavery horrified me. As I succumbed to Fallout's world, I came to the conclusion that the Nameless Wanderer wasn't just some character. He was my character. In other words, I was no longer the player, I was the writer of an epic tale and I could choose how it ended up.
As immersive as that was however, it contained some limitations. The choices were simply binary. You had good, bad, and neutral choices. It was fairly easy to tailor your character to these three categories, dramatically limiting your character-creating scope. Its artificial simplicity was one of the full elements that pulled me out of the Capital Wasteland. If your dog died, no big deal, just reload your save. Not happy with the choices you made, no problem, just reload your save. Thus while a groundbreaking game, its storytelling still left me with very little emotional connection to my character.
Based on strong reviews and hype from gaming websites like 1up.com, I decided to give an obscure game like Heavy Rain a try. For those unfamiliar with the game, Heavy Rain is an interactive novel that is played completely through Quick-Time Events. When you're asked to shave your beard, you slowly move the right analog stick to the right. When you put your son on your shoulders and run through the yard, you use the motion control to steer. When you throw or block a punch you use one of the face buttons. On the face of it, a game completely centred around Quick-Time Events is a dumb idea. However this design choice allows the game to focus completely on immersing you into the game and its characters rather than iterating on various gameplay mechanics. The result is the most immersive and emotional experience that I've ever encountered in a video game. Not only do I feel a part of the action when I chase down a criminal like I've never felt before, the emotional investment in the characters is unparalleled. 
When I lose my son, I feel like I've lost my son. When I do a series of increasingly horrific tasks to get my son back, I am mortified and repulsed by my actions but determined to do whatever it takes to find my son. In one scene, a mentally disturbed man pulls a gun on my violent partner. I pull my gun on the perpetrator and am faced with a terrible choice. Shoot an innocent man or let him kill my partner. The option to shoot is clear and easy to ready. The other choices such as "order" or "reason" are shake around the "Shoot" option. I try to order the mentally-challenged man to drop the gun. My partner screams at me to shoot, my options become more agitated. I am running out of time to make a choice. My surprise is not that my character is panicking. The surprise is that I am panicking too. In the end, I panicked and pulled the trigger, killing an innocent human being. My character's revulsion and horror over what he has just done is matched by my own.This is a revolutionary step that Heavy Rain has accomplished with seemingly ease. Not only do I play the characters in the game, I become the characters in the game. I feel what they feel, I think what they think. I have experienced the first true implementation of interactive storytelling and it is stunning.
But what does it mean? Will this be the future of storytelling? I don't think so. Interactive storytelling is so expensive and so time-consuming to get right. Heavy Rain took years and tens of millions of dollars to produce. Prose fiction, on the other hand, is relatively cheap and quick to produce. I imagine that prose fiction will remain the standard but that interactive stories such as Heavy Rain will continue to present a unique experience. The multimedia capabilities of the iPad could present some interesting possibilities such as the return of the Choose Your Own Adventures books that I loved as a kid but this time with far more complexity and innovation. Or how the use of digital graphic novels could explode with full access to a powerful sound and graphics processor? Perhaps the digital novels of the future could combine voice, illustration, text, and sound to create something new and wonderful. The possibilities are endless.
Top Ten Tips for Writers
The Guardian has a great article on tips for writers. The article is inspired by Elmore Leonard's top ten tips for writers and contains contributions from such luminaries such as Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. The article can be found online at http://m.guardian.co.uk/?id=102202&story=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one.Some of my personal favorites are:Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel - Elmore Leonard.Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK - Diana Athill.Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue - Helen Dunmore.Have fun - Helen Enright.Inspired by the article, I have written my own top ten list of tips for writers.1. Don't buy a TV.2. Don't buy a video game console.3. Don't get a girlfriend.4. In fact, just try to avoid having a life in general.5. Write every day (easier said then done) and set a word count goal for each day. Even the worst day of writing is better than nothing.6. Always write with a plan. Outline your story before you write. Not everyone is Stephen King.7. Never write by hand. You will never find the time to transfer it over to digital.8. Avoid writing groups. They don't have any idea what they're talking about.9. If you're on your eighth draft, it's time to stop and kick your manuscript out the door.10. Trust your own voice, don't let anyone tell you different.Of course, if you ask me tomorrow, you would get a completely different list. That's what makes writing so much fun. There's no right way to do it.