I think Life is Strange gives us a good point to ground wider conversations about the topic (as there we have an actual known quantity, the text is available so it’s more than speculative discussion of a theoretical handling of a situation - one that also centres around a choice-driven/branching game with heavy topics).
I don’t necessarily agree that by making things interactive you send a message about being an active participant or creating the notion that “you could have stopped this” that bleeds in to real life. I think, by and large, most people are able to realize that the game has control far more than they do and they simply can’t impact the story however they see fit. Even in games where you can change the overall resolution, I rarely feel like I had any particular agency in that change as much as I just happened to ace my multiple choice test. Lots of games have absolutely awful “romance” interactions which essentially boil down to press reward button until sex, I don’t think that most people walk away from these experiences thinking that’s how actual relationships work.
A big part of the problem is that video games cost so much more to produce than film or TV, you can’t just rent a set and pay some actors. If you want to have a scene in a living room, you’ve got to model the entire living room from scratch. With that much effort needed for everything, it’s no surprise that AAA games take narrative short cuts, laying the groundwork is prohibitively expensive. Making these characters deep and nuanced costs a lot more than making them an obvious monster and threat.
Indeed. And as well as the text itself, we know quite a lot about how people responded to it.
Some people did treat that scene as a pass/fail mechanic, and either looked up guides to get the ‘right’ answers or savescummed it to get the equivalent of not losing Max’s powers. Other people played it straight, and just dealt with it, which was IMO the better approach. I played it through once, did my best, but my Kate died and she stayed dead. I felt bad about it, but that was the(/my) story.
It would have lost all its emotional impact and, I imagine, would have felt like a fairly distasteful subject for a ‘game’ if you approached it as a pas/fail test of skill like scoring or missing a goal. I’m not sure that’s fixable other than by people getting used to not treating narratives that way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Well I wasn’t planning on getting this game but now I 100% sure to stay away from it from every angle.
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It looks like they’re now planning to sue people in response so you know totally innocent
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We could reasonably shorten the title of this thread to “I Don’t Trust David Cage.”
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You could have put a period behind ‘David Cage’ in that headline, and it would have still been a completely valid article imo.
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David Cage Has Occurred [Insert Byline]
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it is with a heavy heart that i must announce that david cage is at it again
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Sony just blacklisted a journalist over this mess.
Guess I’m never buying a game from them again.
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First the Naughty dog allegations now this. Sony may want to be careful if they don’t want to be in a bad place.
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