David Cage Q&A

Since I’ve spent the last few months planning a two part feature on storytelling, I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that Heavy Rain, the PS3-exclusive title from Quantic Dream, is aggressively focused on changing the way we look at this in videogames. Even though we’re exclusively a 360 magazine, Sony was progressive enough to get a few of my questions answered by QD’s CEO, David Cage. Here they are:

Were you surprised by the success of Fahrenheit, critically and commercially?

To tell you the truth, yes. When you start a new project, you are always full of hope and dreams, but near the end of the development of Fahrenheit, I had more and more questions about what we were doing. I felt the game was very different from most games in the industry. I was talking about narrative and emotions when everybody was talking about guns, cars and monsters. I was quite depressed at some points, thinking that after four years of hard work, the game would be released under cover and that all the people who claimed we would fail (and God knows there were many…) would be right…

The first surprise came from the reviews. They were very enthusiastic and supportive about what we tried to achieve. They were also very consistent worldwide, including in the US, which is quite unusual for a game that was so different. The sales followed, including in countries known not to be fans of adventure games like UK, which was also something great. We also discovered that many male gamers played with their wife or girlfriend, and that this female audience really enjoyed the experience. That was something we really didn’t expect, but it was definitely something interesting.

Most of all, all the industry played the game and many publishers came back to us wanting to know what we wanted to develop next.

Now that we are getting closer to the end of the development of Heavy Rain, I start to have the same fear as with Fahrenheit, wondering with anxiety if we made the right choices and how gamers will react. The game breaks many traditional paradigms and tries many new things, it is really scary for me to compare what we do with other titles out there because I almost get  the feeling we don’t work on the same medium anymore… I hope people will enjoy Heavy Rain because it really has something different and unique to offer.

With Fahrenheit, did you feel the technology was a restrictive factor? In Heavy Rain, you must’ve been aware that the motion capture technology had grown more powerful than it was in the early part of this decade – did this affect the way you wrote the script, knowing that you could convey the subtlest emotions and that they’d then appear on-screen?

The problem with the technology is that the better it gets, the more things you want to do with it… The power of the PS3 was absolutely necessary to create the experience of Heavy Rain. I wrote the game having some ideas about how to use the console’s power, but also having high ambitions regarding virtual actors and motion capture. Conveying subtle emotions is definitely not only a matter of technology though. I realised how important the script, the work with the actor, but also the lighting, the camera work, sound design, and pretty much all elements are. In an experience like Heavy Rain, every single detail of the game should be consistent to trigger emotion. If technology is definitely a necessary tool, it does not do the job on its own. The role of the people in charge of art direction is absolutely essential. I guess this is what makes the difference between a tech demo and an emotional experience: creators’ ability to put a soul in the pixels.

Your experience of scripting Heavy Rain is, to say the least unique – can you recall how many pages you wrote, what you went through mentally and physically, as well as how long it took you to complete?

I am an incredibly lucky game designer, because I was fortunate enough to work exclusively on my original ideas since I started my career, all of them being related in a way or another to interactive storytelling and ways to trigger emotions. I wrote my first interactive dialogue fifteen years ago for Omikron-The Nomad Soul, my first title, which makes me quite an old writer in this industry…

The writing of Heavy Rain took me a little bit more than a year writing full time. I probably wrote about 6000 pages of scripts, deleted scenes, notes, schemes and silly ideas, for a final production script of roughly 2000 pages.

The initial idea came quite early and easily. I started thinking of Fahrenheit 2, trying to find out what could happen to all these characters, when I realized I had nothing more to say about them. They represented a period of my life, but I felt I had something more personal to tell and I was ready to do it.

I came back to the blank page and started to tell the team that we were not working on Fahrenheit 2 but on something different still to be defined…

Writing is always something extremely painful and difficult, because this format is quite a technical type of writing. It really requires your left brain and your right brain at the same time. It is very demanding, because you need to be inspired and creative, but also rigorous, organized and disciplined. Each time you start to really enjoy writing characters and situations, you need to stop, scratch your head, and think of all the possible variations to make the scene interactive.

The main difficulty is that you want every single route in the story to be consistent and just as good as the others. This is how the pleasure of writing quickly transforms into some kind of Chinese puzzle where there is always one piece that doesn’t fit anywhere…

All in all, the writing of Heavy Rain has been a very interesting exercise for me, something I would recommend to any interactive or linear writer. It can quickly become very complex, and the main difficulty is really to remain creative while having structures and variables in your mind…

I hope I will have some time to go back to linear writing at some point to give a rest to my right brain and just enjoy the pure pleasure of writing without constraints…

You’ve said that the game is, to some degree, based on your personal experiences. Is this reflected in the main characters? Do they represent parts of your personality?

Someone said that all writers do is to write about themselves… I guess this is certainly true, we just explore different aspects of who we are… In my personal life, having kids is something that deeply changed me and the way I see things.

The love for your child is probably the strongest you can feel, as it is truly sincere, non-conditional and ever-lasting. For Heavy Rain, the central idea came from a simple question I asked myself: “How far would I go to save the life of someone I love?”. This is a very difficult question to answer, carrying some moral dilemmas and leading to ambiguous decisions. I thought that was a very interesting starting point for a story.

To what extent was your script altered as production went on – what kind of changes did you make after fellow writers took a look at the screenplay, or when you actually saw the actors performing the lines in person?

I wanted some script doctors to go through my script because it is very easy given the volume and complexity of the writing to get lost in the mountain of paper work and lose sight of important things. I made some changes to my original script, mainly by simplifying things, introducing characters in a more efficient way to make the audience care for them, and by giving a sense of closure to every single narrative thread I was starting.

Beyond that point, very few changes were made to the script. Everything is so intertwined that it is very difficult to make changes without breaking the whole structure.

The game has a deeply multi-stranded structure, correct, given that characters can die? How do you map this kind of storytelling – do you think of it as ‘this scenario + this scenario = this outcome’?

My wish on Heavy Rain was to treat the death of any of the main characters just as an event in the story, instead of making it a frustrating game over sequence. It is something very challenging to write, because I needed to integrate the fact that the main characters may or may not be there in a significant portion of the story…

Since I work on interactive storytelling, I have developed some writing techniques to handle this type of structure, including one I call “Bending Stories”.  It is the idea that my story is a rubber band that the player can stretch and deform. But whatever he does, I can still maintain the consistency of the story. It is some kind of mental gym, but once you get it, it becomes a very useful tool to write interactive narrative.

Do you look at every character and conceive their background, motivations and so on? With games, do you think some characters are merely there as plot or game devices – is that case in Heavy Rain, or do you feel as though you understand every character on a near-personal level?

To make characters act and talk in a consistent way, you need to know who they are and where they come from. This is obvious for the main characters, but I have done a similar work with all secondary characters in the game (Heavy Rain features quite a large gallery of supportive roles…). Most of them were written with a short story attached to them that is absolutely not developed in Heavy Rain but that really helped me to write their roles and grounded them in reality. Few games have a format that can actually take benefit from this work (when you develop a shooter, giving a background to every single soldier on the field doesn’t really support the experience)

How do you view the approach towards storytelling in the industry? Do you think the technology you’re using has encouraged developers to make more of an effort in the scripting process?

Until recently, storytelling was not considered to add any value to a video game. The dominant idea was that gamers were looking mainly for adrenaline, explosions and blood, and that having a good story or believable characters played a very minor role in this type of experience.

Things start to change, and more and more publishers understand that having a good story empowers the experience and keep players’ attention and involvement.

Having a good narrative is the difference between moving a bunch of dead pixels  on screen and getting involved emotionally with characters, feeling what they feel and being a part of an engaging story. In my mind, it is the difference between watching boring commercials and a fantastic drama movie: in one case you are emotionally passive, on the other you are emotionally involved. I am convinced that it makes a huge difference in the pleasure you feel as you play. Storytelling is very often what makes me want to continue to play. I feel attached to the characters and the experience, and I don’t want to stop playing until I have seen the end of the journey.

The understanding of the importance of narrative in games is in progress but it is still far from where cinema is. It is also a very complex subject, as there is no established rules and grammar for interactive storytelling yet. I hope that more and more publishers will push this aspect in their games and that more and more talented writers will find new answers to create more engaging experiences.

Do you think there’s enough recognition of great writing within the games industry?

The writing work in video games is still perceived as something quite minor, compared to level design, programming or graphics, so it is hard to give any kind of recognition to something that barely exists… I am convinced that this is going to change in a near future and that we will see very talented writers emerging from the game industry.

My vision of the future is that video games are going to split in two categories, one being toys (including kids/teen titles, casual, sports games), the other being a more creative medium with authors and content carrying depth and meaning.

Like on television you can watch football and game shows, as well as drama or tv series, different types of content can coexist on a medium. I hope that the balance between content for teenagers and creative content will change a little bit in a near future, which will allow us to reach a wider audience, create more ambitious titles and explore new grounds.