“How many first person shooters can we create per year? How many can we play per year?”
In an interview published on July 5, 2012 in GameIndustry International, David Cage, author of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, has called for more innovation in the games industry. Cage believes the game industry will die “if it doesn’t try to be innovative.”
Cage is wrong in one respect. The game industry will not die if it stays in its rut of big-boobed, muscle bound, blood-and-guts games. Hollywood certainly has done well in the genre, why shouldn’t games?
Cage, however, is onto something in the games he develops. Starting with Heavy Rain and continuing through Beyond, which is still in production, Cage’s games emphasize story line and depth of character.
Most games have some sort of back story. For example, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft has a rich, carefully developed lore that some gamers study carefully and discuss at great lengths in online forums. WoW’s lore heavily influences the visual, aural, and play-action content of the WoW universe. Other games, such as Call of Duty, have a minimalist back story barely sufficient to support the play-action in the games.
Even in WoW, however, the characters, tellingly referred to as “toons,” have no identity independent of the player. Races within WoW have traits that distinguish them from each other (Blood Elves, for example, are haughty and vane; Draenei are proud and spiritual) and these racial distinctions are manifest principally in the jokes that a player can get his toon to say. Unfortunately, all Blood Elves tell exactly the same jokes, as do all Draenei.
Some movies, such as Terminator or Die Hard, can be the same way; they have a simple veneer of story to provide a vehicle for action or sex or both, and the characters tend to be simple and stereotypic. Other movies, however, have complex story lines with characters who can elicit powerful emotions from the audience: sympathy, hate, or even simple curiosity. The pregnant high school girl in Juno, for example, is as real as a classmate (or, in my case, a daughter – or at least a neighbor’s daughter).
Cage has enough regard for the characters in his games that he casts the actors who do the play-action and voices for his characters like a movie director, looking for expressiveness in voice, face, and body movement that fit the characters he wants to portray. No one would call the people who populate his games “toons.”
When Cage calls for more innovation in gaming, he’s not simply talking about better controllers or more interactivity. Undoubtedly, he would like better graphics to enhance his ability to communicate subtle emotions, but for now he is content with PS3 graphics. He is not looking for technology innovation. Cage wants more depth to the content. He wants to shift the emphasis from male gaze and violence to plot and personality. The testosterone filled shoot-em-up games will not go away, but if Cage has his way, perhaps the day will come when shoot-em-ups, instead of defining the medium, will simply be one of the many genres within the medium.
Don’t expect movies and movie theaters to go away either. The couch potato will always want something he can sit down and watch without extending any more effort than it takes to reach for the dip. You can, however, expect movies/games that have multiple story lines and multiple possible outcomes. And game producers will demand that the players of their games, like readers of thoughtfully written books, understand the characters in the game and play them accordingly. Imagine that: playing a character in a movie….
Adding to the diversity of genres available within the medium will attract more participants. Think of it: GameStop will have to learn to service middle-aged men and women, and games, because successful play no longer depends on twitch reflexes, will move to tablets and e-book readers because those are the platforms used by the new generation of movie goers and book readers to consume – and interact with – their content.