Every time David Cage comes up, I have to repost this
7 Likes
Thanks for bringing up the context I missed. I thought those draws Kara found were clues that he murdered the girl’s mother
I wouldn’t trust David Cage with the birthday video for his own hypothetical child.
Like, dude does a fucking disservice to his own damn sentiments. I get that point about stories coming naturally in a vage sense, it echoes a lot of how I write. But to take that at face value isn’t even like submitting a first draft without even reading it, it’s turning up to class late and explaining what your homework would have been if you could be fucked to do it. It’s the absolute first step in constructing a narrative, if it goes somewhere you aren’t equipped to handle, drop it. And if you are absolutely determined to go through with it, become equipped to handle it.
Like, I know there are a billion things wrong with the bullcrap Cage has been pulling recently, but that’s what bugs me at a fundimental level. 'Cos like, he genuinely beleives that his stories are birthed fully formed in his mind like gifts from the heavens. Has this man ever done a redraft in his life? There’s way more I could write about how fucked this is, but like, I can’t be arsed, I deal with children enough at work as it is.
5 Likes
David Cage is the narrative equivalent of Peter Molyneux. Molyneux promises the moon, but fails to deliver. That said, Molyneux’s promises are often related to game mechanics, and if you miss your mark, you can still deliver a game that is playable, and even enjoyable.
However, David Cage’s promises are narrative. You can still miss your target with your story and get an enjoyable experience. All the times I’ve had fun watching The Room, with friends will make that clear. And as much as Tommy Wiseau thinks he’s the reincarnation of Tennessee Williams, David Cage thinks he is the guy to bring serious dramatic emotional narrative storytelling to video games where he thinks everyone else has failed. With that is the idea (clearly from film and paintings), that to get a truly artistic film, you have to be able to walk away from it with multiple interpretations, and he builds his narratives with that in mind.
The problem is, like so many creators who think they’re God’s Gift to Storytelling (or put that on as a front while running a version of the con from The Producers like Uwe Boll), Cage is not willing to accept the idea that he’s wrong. Like with those other creators (such as Shyamalan), the response to criticism isn’t to let the work speak for itself, or for audiences to draw their conclusions, but to push back against critics - because truly they don’t understand their brilliance, because they’re either ahead of their time, or because the masses don’t understand “true art”.
I could be wrong, and Cage is, in private, re-considering his narrative and considering how to adjust the game’s story before its release date - and even if he doesn’t do that, he may keep these concerns in mind in his next game.
However, if the game features an Evil/Asshole Critic who Bad Things (possibly caused by the Player) happen to, and with no negative repercussions for those Bad Things, then we can reasonably assume that Cage has joined Shyamalan and Crichton on the list of people who bought too far into their own hype.
6 Likes
This is a great piece that helped me to articulate what bothered me about the trailer. There is something interesting, though, about Dias talking about the (I think valid) criticism that introducing player choice to a domestic violence situation is problematic:
Every time you give the player a choice, you give them agency. But the flipside of agency is responsibility, complicity. When you put the player in the shoes of a domestic abuse victim and then represent their struggle as a series of gamebook-style choices, when you offer this anodyne, neutral vision of agency, you are suggesting that domestic abuse victims are complicit in their own abuse. You are representing their situation as a test they can pass or fail. You are suggesting that they could make better choices and avoid, or escape, their situation. There’s no way to slice this where this isn’t fucked up.
Others have already mentioned Life Is Strange, which is one of my favourite games, but it actually does the same thing. Spoilers for an early episode:
You are essentially put in the same position of having to save someone from committing suicide by making conversation choices. There are some obvious differences in execution, of course. For one, your character is predisposed to preventing the suicide, so you don’t make any decisions there; it’s just a matter of whether you’re successful or not. Second, Detroit allows a much wider range of actions than Life Is Strange; you’re limited to conversation options in the latter.
Nevertheless, I think the same criticism can be directed at that moment in Life Is Strange: by giving the player choice, and setting up a scenario where you can succeed or fail, the game makes you feel complicit in something that arguably you shouldn’t be. We take great pains as a society to tell friends and family of people who have committed suicide that there isn’t a thing they could have done, a phrase they could have said, that would magically make that person not commit suicide. And yet Life Is Strange offers you exactly that ability: say the magic words, and Kate doesn’t jump off that ledge.
It’s a powerful moment in the game, and it clearly stuck with a lot of people. I didn’t really see a lot of discussion about this other element of it, but even when that subject came up, the general consensus seemed to be that it was handled reasonably well.
So does that mean giving the player agency over a horrible situation necessarily makes them complicit? Is there a way to make this work that doesn’t feel exploitative or awful? Is it just the apparent glee with which the trailer tells you about all the awesome choices you can make to avoid child abuse?
3 Likes
Holy fucking shit are you KIDDING me?!
I’m not even particularly well informed/in touch with that part of my ancestry and that sounds just laughably unresearched and awful.
1 Like
I haven’t been paying super close attention but I feel like so far all we’ve seen out of Detroit have been some David Cage Ass nothing-statements about racism, slavery, authority, abuse, and “can androids be peepole?” that seem to exist solely to try and make people catch feelings without saying anything of substance.
The line in this article about Cage’s stories having feelings in them being akin to saying a song has notes in it is probably the most apt description of his work that I’ve ever heard. Dude is still just sitting at his grand piano mashing the keys and people keep funding his games.
2 Likes
There was some minor discussion about that Life is Strange scene back when it first debuted along the lines of what you’re mentioning here, but I think a big part of what made that more successful to a larger playerbase than Cage’s work is built into the mechanics. The removal of Max’s time travel powers when she’s standing on the roof with Kate mean that the only way to “do things differently” would effectively be to savescum or cheat.
And plenty of people did do that! There were definitely players who did circumvent that removal by stepping outside of the confines of what the game could keep you from doing. A lot of people did look to outside sources like game guides, but in the earlier, initial moments after that episode launched, the only ways to prevent that from happening were to 1) savescum, 2) get really lucky with your choices, or 3) demonstrate an active interest in the things Kate holds onto to know what things she cares about or which things will make her feel worse, which I think are unfortunately still colored with that mythical “ability” you talk about but at least try to approach it differently.
I personally think that’s another side of the coin entirely compared to Cage’s handling of Detroit here – his trailer is centered around the ability to prevent that from happening, a proverbial Life Is Strange where you can rewind forever and there’s no negative consequences to rewinding until you find the right answer. For all that he thinks bad endings are a “failure of the game designer”, to quote his eternally nonsense words, he seems to have flipped the other way entirely and often encourages the player to do what would be savescumming in any other game. His games are basically designed around that.
For clarity, I definitely don’t think Life is Strange handles their approach perfectly or in some cases even well, but I think Cage pretty frequently strikes a much more darkly Groundhog Day-ish tone with how he encourages players to throw themselves at the walls of scenes with sexual or domestic abuse over and over until they find the exact right combo of answers to survive.
(Also, I can’t believe that quote about why he wrote that scene. Jesus.)
10 Likes
Despite the marketing slogan of “things could have been different” (which I think is extremely poorly used in a trailer containing this subject matter) I think it was more meant more to showcase all of the variable ways the story could branch and not really around the idea of fishing through every plausible choice to find your desired outcome. I remember around the time Heavy Rain came out he was out there saying he wishes people would only play the game once because you make the choices you make and the story unfolds from there, and probably actively dislikes the idea of anyone treating it like a Groundhog Day to go back and do things differently a million times.
I’d probably venture to say that the moment in Episode 2 where Max loses her powers is the most similar in style to a Quantic Dream game Life is Strange ever got.
2 Likes
This is an excellent post
That’s actually an usually to Parker and Stone. Sacks of shit they may be,they’re at least talented.
I think we should look at all the outcomes because this criticism doesn’t seem like such a solid foundation to build upon. [TW for discussion (including state of mind) around the topics already raised in this thread]
By giving players choice, it is presented that there are different outcomes and that things could be different. Yes, this runs counter to various platitudes that are offered in various scenarios which are primarily about helping those who are living with trauma (scenarios similar to or including survivor’s guilt). These are what people need to hear, because once the event has already happened then it is 100% true that there is nothing anyone can do to change that and getting endlessly caught up in the "what if"s of it is a common and destructive pattern. But this is fundamentally a fatalistic view of reality which creates the alternative way of dealing with such events in a game…
By giving the player no choice we would be reinforcing that these events are inevitable and cannot be changed in any way. That there is no escape possible so you shouldn’t try. That harm reduction doesn’t really exist so there’s no point to enable access to least bad options before more fundamental changes to society can lead to a more permanent alternative. Specifically in the case of Life is Strange, they provide both a non-fatalist view that rejects this position while changing the mechanics of how the game offers choice to reinforce the significance and prevent the message that you could rewind time and fix things (even in their supernatural setting).
Dealing with a choice-based narrative game, it seems like these are the only two options for how to handle the situation without simply saying that the genre cannot handle these topics (something I think Life is Strange already shows is not true). We should be critical of how Detroit is handling this topic but broadening that to saying that including multiple paths is fundamentally a mistake seems incorrect because the alternative (making it fatalistic) may be cathartic but also teaches total disempowerment and ignorance of harm reduction. There’s no way to slice this where this isn’t at least just as fucked up.
Edit: I think the article does a good job of threading that needle, talking about responsibility and care without saying you can’t show choices (only that the way the trailer presented it as a web combined with the defensive interviews showed a lack of understanding of that finer point). The text around “How you structure your choices, how you present interaction mechanically to the player, is how you tell your story. It is the story.” is what I’m reading thinking that the article itself doesn’t mean for us to try to apply this as a universal (or conflate existence of choices with victim blaming).
2 Likes
On the one hand, I also don’t trust David Cage. I think he should be free to create this game, but I am not expecting much out of him in that respect.
On the other, I disagree with the line of reasoning represented by this article, which appears to imply that games should not present the player with a choice when it comes to avoiding or permitting problematic content, because that somehow means the victim is the guilty party. No, I don’t think this implies such a thing, nor that the world is just. The framework of the game itself may be just, perhaps, but not necessarily the actual world of the story within it. Therefore, games shouldn’t put the player in that situation…? No, I don’t think this way. That’s an area where I can’t sincerely agree with the author of this piece, let alone with the implications of such a restriction.
That said, I have no real urgency to play this game and I can understand that some people will be too offended by the trailer to give it much of a chance.
1 Like
You’re forgetting about player viewpoint. Games are kind of awful at choices sometimes because they game-ify morality in really idiotic ways (TOSS ENOUGH CHILDREN INTO THE NUCLEAR PIT FOR RED LIGHTNING EXPLOSION POWER UPGRADE). In the case of David Cage games, they aim to act like a choose your own adventure thing, but with a twist of skill. They’re plot experiments, which would be fine, except they tend to make light of very serious situations and events for the sake of player expression (PRESS X TO JASON).
In the eyes of most players, they don’t see their choices as actual moral choices in these sorts of games. I’ve literally seen people get mad that the genocide Undertale run isn’t fun. Like, they get why it’s not fun thematically, but then complain the game didn’t give them more lore and make them feel good for trying it. This is vastly different from something like, say, Mass Effect, in which the first game kind of gamified fucking space racism without really criticizing it unless you played as a distinctly not racist character.
People often assume the main character, or player character, is always in the right, at least initially, and you have to really try to break someone from that perspective. This is why something like The Last of Us still has people debate over if Joel was a good or bad guy, despite the ending saying very loudly that he absolutely is. He was the player character, so players emphasize with him more and that affects how they perceive his actions. He did have justifications and reasons for his actions, but that doesn’t make him good or right.
This is also why you have thousands of obnoxious dolts who try being a real life Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty, despite the show spending a season and a half basically deconstructing and calling out the character on his endless shortcomings that tend to make him fall into abusive behavior.
Shit, this is why people mistook Lolita as advocating for child abuse.
David Cage’s style of narrative is where you run smack dab into this problem. At best, it completely trivializes the subject matter into a what if scenario for the player’s enjoyment, which is kind of fucked up when talking about domestic abuse. This isn’t a messed up dark comedy, this is a serious minded story that treats its characters seriously, and this is how it chooses to treat them - like toys.
12 Likes
I am impressed by how you ended that last phrase, to be honest, but I don’t think the argument itself is all that particularly convincing in reality.
Why is that? Because you will never be able to force every single player to see moral choices in the “right” -or “wrong”- way, just like such a thing is also impossible when it comes to movie viewers and novel readers. The margin for player interpretation is, frankly, essentially infinite and will not be limited by the intentions or even the skills of the game creators.
Even if a situation as serious as domestic abuse is presented and treated with whatever level of respect and care is considered to be praiseworthy by any given critic, it’s entirely possible for many players to overlook that during their own practical experience. The opposite can also be true.
Whether or not the subject matter is actually objectively trivialized within the game’s narrative, players can and do retain the subjective capacity and right to think independently in both “good” and “bad” directions. This is also including whatever kind of enjoyment the player can derive from any given situation.
In that sense, David Cage could be replaced by the most progressive creator in videogame history and that probably wouldn’t prevent certain players from finding ways to ignore, downplay or subvert the resulting narrative choices (or even the story itself).
In my opinion, the solution isn’t to try and draw a line in the sand.
1 Like
To clarify what I say in the article: I don’t mean you shouldn’t offer the player choice when it comes to a situation like that, even if the player is cast as the victim. I think you need to think about how the choices that you offer, the way they’re presented, and the mechanics that underlie them speak to your view of the subject and the story you’re trying to tell. So the problem is not that Kara’s story contains choices at all, but that they’re presented here as a multiple-choice test which the player can pass or fail based on making the “right choices.” This is a very common structure to use, it’s a structure that we use a lot in games, it works fine in a lot of situations, but I don’t think it’s appropriate here, which isn’t to say the only way you can do this is by offering the player no choice at all. You just have to do the research of figuring out how you match the agency you’re giving the player to the real agency of a person who lived that experience and then you have to think long and hard about how you build that, how you present that. Between the trailer and the interview there is zero indication that any understanding of this problem went into Detroit at all, but I’m absolutely not saying that you shouldn’t try, as a game designer, to give the player choices in a situation like this. I’m saying it’s a hard problem that we have no reason to think Cage has solved or even tried to solve. And yeah, you can’t necessarily come up with a solution that will please everyone or is criticism-proof, but what we saw from that trailer was blatantly not working.
What does a good representation of choice in a game from the perspective of a DV victim look like? I have no idea. To find out you’d have to pay me and several people like me to work for months. That’s the point, it’s a tough question that takes real work, research, iteration, and care to answer. I’m sure there are ways to navigate that but I wouldn’t even hazard a guess without a ton of preliminary work, and Sony just put out a trailer where they offer the answer, “use the same structure and choice mechanics we use in the rest of our sci-fi thriller game,” which is definitely not it.
15 Likes
One possible way of putting playing choice to such a situation is having the choices happen after the event. The event itself is done and over, but the character still needs to deal with the consequences. I think something like that could lead to an interesting game, although it’s not quite without its own potential problems.
At the very least, I don’t feel my reaction to that sort of scenario would be as bad as this one.
3 Likes
I’m not completely sure that’s true; it’s common in games with choices to have that pass/fail paragon/renegade red/blue split, but Cage seems to try to avoid that - Heavy Rain has enough flexibility to allow the story to both proceed, and to end, in quite different ways.
Some of the endings are clearly better for the characters than others but, partly because there are so many of them rather than just two, in story terms it always seemed to me that they’re equally valid, just different stories; they’re not a pass or a fail.
I would hope and expect that this scene in Detroit will be similar - you’ll make choices based on limited information and limited ability, and try to do whatever seems like the right thing at the time. Then explore what happens as a result. That worked in Heavy Rain because you could make a choice and still not know what the knock-on effect was for quite some time, if it ever became clear at all.
What I don’t expect is to get the narrative breaking “You failed, go back and try again” sort of thing that lots of games have.
Clearly, it’s possible to screw this up - if we get a CoD style “Press X to avoid abuse” then we’ve got a real problem. But it should be possible to do this well, and I’m glad someone’s trying, even if I’m not sure they’ll entirely succeed.
2 Likes
I think we might be saying similar things, actually. I still think the way Life Is Strange handled its particular case is good; it’s one of the early moments in the game that tell you it’s really something special.
I guess what I was trying to get across is that the author (who I see has subsequently commented in this thread!) seemed to be saying that the multiple-choice test as a way to determine whether Kara prevents the domestic abuse or not is problematic, and I remember feeling the same way about that specific situation in Life Is Strange.
But that doesn’t mean that I think that kind of multiple-choice test can’t work in a game, even with the subject matter is heavy; I was just trying to figure out for myself how to reconcile my appreciation of that scene in Life Is Strange with the idea that as a bystander, even a close one, you have limited ability to change someone else’s fate and that often there is no right answer, no magical set of choices you can make in the moment, that prevents that suicide. That said, I absolutely agree that harm reduction is important, and that the opposite extreme of disallowing player choice completely to reinforce that there was never anything you can do can also be a problematic stance, assuming the rest of the game is focused on player agency when it comes to shaping the story.
That’s not to say that I think the only two options are “choice” or “no choice,” though I think I’m in the same boat as Dias when I say that I don’t really know what a thoughtful alternative is in Detroit’s case. I do agree that Life Is Strange is a much more thoughtful example by underlining the significance of that one encounter, since it’s one of the very few times in the game your time powers are taken away from you, and the only time it happens spontaneously. If nothing else, it’s a marker that says to the player, “hey, this is meaningful, you should take this seriously,” in a way that Detroit trailer doesn’t. (It’s entirely possible the game WILL do the work necessary to respect the gravity of the situation; I think Cage’s work and thoughts in interviews points both to reasons why it might and reasons why it might not.)
2 Likes
Also, apologies if this particular discussion about Life Is Strange is dominating the thread, it is kind of tangential to the article’s main thesis. I’m happy to stop if needed!
