This still effectively the same in practice because it decides how good or bad an ending is. Visual novels do the exact same stuff. It’s an idea that can be done well, and has been done well (even inverted into meta-narrative in 999), but those sorts of stories tend to stick to more universally understood concepts and drama. Live or die, kill or be killed, not abuse. The reality and fallout of that is far more emotionally complex during and after, a simple choice isn’t really enough to tackle that subject matter well (I suppose framing the choice a certain way could work, like not making it clear to the player what the choice entails fully to reveal something about the player character and make them a separate entity from the player, which Lisa and Undertale both pull to great success, but David Cage clearly isn’t as thoughtful as the writer for those games).
This is almost a tangential point to the rest of this comment, but this line stuck out to me. Because you’re right, really- Detroit & Heavy Rain seem predicated on this ‘exploration of the choice you made’ thing, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. As others noted, it’s a super common structure in visual novels, for example.
The reason Detroit rubs me the wrong way (& why I agree with the OP) is that this isn’t a scenario where there is a ‘good enough answer’, I don’t think. And I don’t think even David Cage himself thinks that- the scene was presented as a pretty clear pass/fail sequence. Pass means you stop the dad from abusing the girl, fail means the girl falls to further harm.
Because that’s the crux of the whole problem. Cage wants to have his cake & eat it too, in that he wants a game with multiple choice-branches but ALSO a game that talks about a rather simple moralistic quandary. You have the ‘choice’ to act in savior to a girl who’s being abused by her father, or… not. From what we’ve seen of the scene, there is a clear ‘right way’ to play it.
…which is sort of my entire issue with Cage on many levels. He’s obsessed with ‘not saying things’ but structures Detroit clearly in a way that is saying something: ‘child abuse is bad’, ‘violent revolutions cause unnecessary collateral damage’, ‘policing works’. These are all messages communicated in the trailers alone.
yeah like, that’s the big thing for me here. between choice-driven narrative or linear narrative there ultimately isn’t a “better” choice for tackling sensitive matter in a videogame, but Cage will take both and fuck up with both of them because he doesn’t want to take a stance on anything and doesn’t realize that he’s stumbling into taking a lot of stances by doing so.
This is why I find the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead series to be leaps and bounds better than anything they’ve ever done since. Aside from a small handful of moments, choices don’t affect the actual course of the story but change the framing in key scenes.
You can’t save Larry in episode 2 but the way you handle their death changes how certain characters regard your sense of judgment. Ben will always die no matter what, but keeping them alive longer changes the redemptive arc of another character in a small way. You’ll always have to deal with The Stranger at the end, but your choices throughout the season can make the scene either about Lee facing up to their selfishness, or the vehicle for a broken person to try to project their guilt onto.
Story-altering choices like those in season 2, or in games like Heavy Rain, have little-to-no narrative weight and exist solely so that the player gets to feel more like an active participant. It’s the difference between a game with one slightly variable cohesive story, and a game with a dozen permutations of middling stories.
Absolutely killer discussion here. I’m new to this discourse dot zone, but there’s way more thought going into these posts than I’ve come to expect from gaming forums/communities. I’m blown away by how the takes aren’t hot so much as meaty!
Regardless of where I sit and how I feel about this trailer or Cage’s stories, as a designer I can’t help but try to focus on what I’d do differently to try and deliver the best player experience possible.
What kind of IMPLIED choice structure, (given we’re getting a taste and not the actual experience) do people think would help their preview of this scene make us say “I want to play this” instead of “I don’t trust this”?
Silly to ask without an example, an attempt, so what if the trailer implied that the victims of this abuse would be harmed regardless of player input, and the choice was focused instead on how to deal with the abuser in the aftermath? All these “break through your programming to try and help” interactions imply a certain almost video gamey kind of agency, but this makes me wonder what Cage is more concerned about the player feeling; A sense of disappointment that they didn’t get to save the day, or a sense of what it actually feels like to be “programmed” by society to be exposed to abuse.
Great article and I agree with the overall sentiment. Based on his previous work and the on the nose marketing for Detroit, I don’t think Cage has it in him as a creator to handle this with the subtlety it requires. I want to be proven wrong and I hope that Detroit deals with these topics sensitively but I worry that he’s going to fall into his old tropes and pitfalls as a creator.
David Cage is like an overly ambitious first-year film student who wants to break with conventions before he even understands how they work.
There should really be a What Did French Ken Levine Do This Time dot Com single-serving site. Anyway, any remaining confidence in Detroit seems to be evaporating as we approach release and Cage keeps failing to really engage with anything (currently: criticism of studio culture).
If nothing else, I guess it’s pretty consistent with the picture that has been painted of David Cage over the last few years. He is so utterly caught up in his own hype that he has become impossible to talk to about not just his games and the critcisms there of, but also the world in general. That this somehow also spilled over into his professional life and turned into horrible working conditions probably shouldn’t surprise me but it is sad and disgusting none the less.
Well I wasn’t planning on getting this game but now I 100% sure to stay away from it from every angle.
It looks like they’re now planning to sue people in response so you know totally innocent
We could reasonably shorten the title of this thread to “I Don’t Trust David Cage.”
You could have put a period behind ‘David Cage’ in that headline, and it would have still been a completely valid article imo.
David Cage Has Occurred [Insert Byline]
it is with a heavy heart that i must announce that david cage is at it again
Sony just blacklisted a journalist over this mess.
Guess I’m never buying a game from them again.
First the Naughty dog allegations now this. Sony may want to be careful if they don’t want to be in a bad place.
Nintendo fired a women as a direct result of a gamergate harassment campaign and are now hailed as the saviors of the industry with the Switch I don’t think Sony is too worried
you make a good point, these kinds of things don’t stick nearly as well as they should for one reason or another. Still, it is pretty disgusting how blatant what Sony did is.
Then again, David Cage blackballing members of the press isn’t exactly anything new either.
David Cage doing it is sort of a different thing than Sony proper doing it though
