This is silly.

Back in the day, you could play through all the way to the end of a game of Super Mario Bros. for the NES and die on the last stage with no lives left. It all came down to the player hitting a "single, clumsy button press." How is this any different? Hell man, if you weren't able to save Slippy in time on Starfox 64 you'd get a different ending and play a different set of levels. Your arguement and any complaint is totally invalid. You hit the button wrong and thus didn't get the game you wanted. That's your fault, not Cage's.

(I've never played Heavy Rain and am not in any way a PS3 fanboy. I don't even own a PS3.)

For the record, just by comparing Heavy Rain to Super Mario Brothers and Starfox 64 in terms of emotional connection with a narrative, you made it very clear that you've never actually played Heavy Rain, and didn't need to go out of your way in inform us. :)

I have to agree with Dennis. I'm not sure I'm totally on board with poo-pooing the game for the story decisions the designers made, but the choices in Heavy Rain are wildly different than just about any other game out there (Mass Effect, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Age, KOTOR come to mind).

Read again. Wasn't comparing them in terms of emotional connection with a narrative, I was comparing in terms of someone getting a story they didn't want because they sucked at playing the game. Big difference.

But hey, would you like a different game to compare it to? How about Mass Effect 1 and 2? The game changes depending on choices you make and skill of play. And if we're talking being bummed about getting an ending, imagine how bad I felt near the end of Mass Effect 2 when I realized that to change an outcome I'd have to play all the way back through Mass Effect 1!

I'll never be able to get the Braid ending I want to because I'm not good enough for some of those super advanced puzzles. I beat the game, but I haven't unchained all the stars. I'm not good enough and don't care to invest the time to get better. That's sad. I got over. It isn't the designer's fault that it is hard, it is my fault for not being good enough / smart enough / wanting to put the time in.

The emotional connection with the narrative is *everything* in Heavy Rain. In effect, that IS Heavy Rain. It's not a "video game" the way we tend to think of them. To wit: comparing unchaining stars in Braid to the events of Heavy Rain is really inappropriate. I think you need to play this game before opining so vociferously about it, Andy. The closest analogy I can think of is the old Sierra adventure titles built around a truly emotional narrative thread.

The problem with the way Heavy Rain is designed is that the fate of these characters we care so much about comes down to -a single event.- The Mass Effect comparisons are also totally inappropriate here. In Mass Effect 1, the fate of Rex comes down to the weight of all your choices throughout the game. The choice of Ashley or Kaidan is an overt choice. It's not the result of a mistake, or a slip of the finger. It's a hard choice, but you get to choose. In Mass Effect 2, you have TOTAL control over whether you lose any members of your crew or not. Gaining everyone's loyalty and making some decisions as to mission assignments at the end which are pretty obvious if you've been paying attention to who the characters are throughout the game leads to everyone surviving.

In Heavy Rain, you can do ALL of the various challenges in the game correct...and still get Ethan killed. It would be one thing if losing Ethan, this character who the game has spent eight hours trying to convince you to care about, was the result of many mistakes throughout the narrative, but I've since looked up how the various choices play into whether he lives or dies, and I did -everything- right...except for getting Madison on that motorcycle.

That's why the design of this game is flawed.

It sucks you didn't get the ending you want. It is not the develper's fault. It did not come down to a single event. It is the combination of skill, choice and probably some luck to even get you to that point in the game. In the end, you fell short on skill. That's your fault. You can make all the decisions about the story you want, but (just like in life) you still have to be good enough to see them through.

You failed to get her on the motorcycle because you weren't good enough. That isn't the narrative's fault, that's your fault. You were given a gameplay hurdle to get over, you failed to do it right and it gave you an ending you didn't want. That's simple.

And honestly, did it all come down to a single event? How many actions before that went into getting you to that moment? Every single thing you did in that game brought you to the point where you'd get her on the motorcycle or not. That isn't one single event, that's just the one single event that didn't go the way you wanted it to because you weren't good enough. Glancing over a Wiki I see 11 different ways Madison could die. That isn't a fate coming down to one single event, that's a fate coming down to AT LEAST 11 events.

Think about it. Just give it a minute and think about it. Your game and the story that you got didn't come down to one single event, and the fate of each character is tied to both the decisions you make and how well you play the game. That isn't bad game design. That's the very nature of many modern video games.

You're actually making my point for me, Andy. All 11 of those ways that Madison could die were avoided. My wife and I did everything right to achieve the ending wherein Ethan lived and was reunited with his son...except for that single event of getting Madison on the bike. Therefore, a single event ultimately determined Ethan's fate. Perhaps someone else can find another way to explain it to you, but I'm out of ideas. :)

You did all of those 11 things correctly beause you were skilled enough and you failed to do the last one because you weren't skilled enough. It was your fault, not the developer. Think about it, man. Think hard. Think past the destroy-your-tv rage. It wasn't David Cage's fault. He gave you the ability to get the ending you wanted, and you failed to get it because you were not good enough. That's the very definition of "your fault."

Maybe someone else can explain to HIM that he simply sucked at this game. Anyone?

Basically, you are arguing that it's good game design if someone goes through Mass Effect 2, gets all the loyalty quests done, makes all the proper mission assignments in the suicide mission and then, I don't know, fails to make one series of three headshots and then everyone in Shephard's crew dies?

If so...we look for very different things in our video games, and that's okay.

I don't think you can be good or bad at Heavy Rain, it seemed to me that success or failure boiled down to alot of luck.

I'm with you Dennis, the only characters in Heavy Rain I liked were Ethan and Shaun and even though I got the "good" ending the story left me angry. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with blaming the developer because Heavy Rain's story was supposed to be different than other game stories. In the end I didn't so much feel an emotional pull as I felt frustrated with all the absurdity.

Yup. That's excellent game design.

What's the point of a video game if you don't have to try to win? Did you just want to sit back and watch the story without having to do anything? If so, why not go "plug in a PlayStation 3 and a television in the lobby of one of the art-house theaters I go to specifically for a foreign film experience that may be depressing as hell." Because a game where you don't have to use skill to get through a level or an action or a fight isn't actually a game.

Once again, this is very, very simple. Look at what you say:

"Video games should be about fun, first and foremost. The tragedy of a father losing his son, or vice versa, isn't fun."

Now, really, think about this very hard. Put on your thinking cap. Do you understand why you didn't have fun? You didn't have fun because you lost the game. You failed. You weren't good enough to get the fun ending. If you were better you would not get the tragedy of losing the son. You weren't good enough. You lost. You lost. You. Lost. The ending you wanted, "A New Start," would have given you this: Ethan and Shaun move to a new apartment and live happily ever after. A combination of good choices and skill you lead you to that fun ending. Sadly, you were not skilled enough. You lost. This happens sometimes in life. That is not the developer's fault. You were given the tools to win, and you lost because you were not skilled enough. That is the very concept of "game."

Think about it this way. It's "interactive drama", as the developer likes to put it. In the end, it's still a game; there are consequences to certain actions if they are failed. Let's imagine, just for a minute, if you did fail and it did not make an impact on Ethan's fate. Would that make sense? I have not experienced the ending you had, but you seemed to know exactly what the consequences were for failing the correct button press(es). But, if your actions made no impact on how the story progressed, or in this case, ended, what would be the point of playing interactive drama? Might as well watch a movie...

Thank you, Rachel. :)

TJ, I have actually argued that Heavy Rain is -not- a game. It's easier to just call it a video game because that's what most people recognize it as, and in order to have any sort of coherent discussion one has to first agree to terms, and so I voluntarily make that concession for discussions like these...to a point. 

I think that Heavy Rain is, essentially, watching a movie. The amount of interactivity is very limited compared to what we think of as a video game, and if you played the game on easy it would basically be just like walking through a film while pressing a button or two now and again.

No, I had no idea what the consequences were for the "Madison on the motorcycle" QTE when it first began. I don't think anyone could on their first playthrough. It wasn't until the camera cut to a shot from behind her, and the front tired was aimed in the Lieutenant's direction, that I put two and two together...and we could then have a discussion about how the game telegraphed where things were going several times, which is just poor writing.

I have no problem with consequences to actions, but Heavy Rain, IMHO, needed to play by a different set of rules based on the narrative choices of the director. There's a reason why we don't see movies very often, if at all, about a father trying to save his son for several hours and then either the son dying or the father dying after he finds the son: because the audience wouldn't stand for it. I just hold Heavy Rain up to the same sorts of considerations. :)

I would also suggest that this game is an entirely different experience for someone with children, or a nephew they're very close to. -Some- of us in that position may not be able to think about Heavy Rain so capriciously as others might.

Heavy Rain is sort of like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books.  The Goosebumps kind.  Your choices make a difference, and then so does your timing for button presses and the like.  It's not that the game design is flawed or bad, because that's how it's supposed to be.  You're intended to feel bad that you killed Ethan.  You screwed up.  Just like in real life, one mistake can make all the difference, especially if it were a life-and-death situation like the one in the game.  If the one mistake you made had no relevance to what was about to happen in the next scene, and yet Ethan STILL died, then this would be a valid complaint, but that's not what happened.  If this one mistake DIDN'T affect the outcome, then what the hell is the point?  Why bother having you go through the QTE at all?  There has to be consequences for your actions.  You should have known that going in.  Of course you're not necessarily going to know exactly what's going to happen next, but hey, even you guessed that Ethan's fate would be sealed immediately after your fuck up.

@Dennis: Did you play Heavy Rain on easy difficulty? If I treated Heavy Rain as a movie and wanted to go through it and get the best possible ending that didn't break my heart, or at least one that pleased me, I'd have played on easy difficulty to give me the edge.

I'm not understanding how you are angry at David Cage for creating a piece of interactive drama that allows the storyline to take different shape based on your actions, giving you an array of end results (sorry, but this sounds to me like a game). You were not betrayed in the slightest. Just because your first experience was bad doesn't mean you have to blame the person who developed it with multiple paths (yes, we know he can live!).

 If in the end, no matter what I did, our subject lived (as sadistic as this may sound), I would not care to play something that calls itself interactive drama. To defend myself here, I loved knowing the fact that my choices and actions truly mattered to the survival of these people. It was unfortunate that on your first playthrough our subject died, but understand that your decision mattered. You involuntarily killed him. And that's great, if you think about it.

That's the thing, K.M. - I don't want to feel bad on account of playing a video game. That's the betrayal. That's not what I paid for. That's not what I'm engaged in the hobby for. If someone had told me in advance "Hey, you can do 99% of the tasks right and still lose the game because you did 1% wrong," without even knowing what the rest of the game was, I never would have picked it up because I think that's incredibly poor design.

This is what no one is addressing - we're not talking about the collective weight of a set of failures. We're not talking about playing the game wrong, for almost the whole game, and therefore receiving a victory condition of "loss" as a result. We are literally talking about a player who did 99% absolutely perfectly, and then did 1% wrong and "lost." I don't see how any of you can justify that. Remove yourselves from Heavy Rain for a moment. Stop thinking about anything else we've said.

Justify a game where you can play 99% perfect and 1% imperfect and still lose from a purely hypothetic perspective. When and if you can do that, and not just be playing Devil's Advocate on account of this conversation, AND convince me that you're correct, then you might make headway with me on this point.

What amazes me is that no one seems to have realized the import of this statement:

"I would also suggest that this game is an entirely different experience for someone with children, or a nephew they're very close to. -Some- of us in that position may not be able to think about Heavy Rain so capriciously as others might."

That should change the tenor of this conversation for you, if you really think about it.

Ideally, one would say "Huh. Maybe the author of the piece is one of those people. Yeah, I can see what he means, now. If I had a son and I had to sit through this game and do everything right except one QTE, and then have to see a son crying over the body of his dead father, I might be a little pissed off too because I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed that experience, and I play video games to have fun."

I wouldn't say you "lost".  There are just multiple endings, and no real "right" ones.  You didn't hit a game over screen.  If you screw everything up the story still progresses.  All in all, the game is actually very forgiving in that way.  I get that you didn't enjoy the ending you received, and just wanted to have fun playing a video game, but Heavy Rain was never meant to be all sugar and rainbows like a Mario Kart game.  You screw up, the story changes, sometimes for the worse.

Anyone who looked at coverage of the game prior to its release would have known this.  It's not like the developers tricked you into buying it with false advertisement; Interactive Drama, they called it, and even went so far as to try and tell people "it's not a game".

I hear what you are saying. I wouldn't say I lost, either, in Heavy Rain - but again, to discuss this "game" one has to talk about it as if it -were- a "game," and that leads to our having to define our terms like I'm doing with you right now. :) I only used that anology just now to try and explain my thoughts purely from a game design theory.

From what (admittedly little) I've read about game theory, each "player" is attempting to procure a victory condition which is beneficial to them. In this case, I would argue that most people's beneficial condition would be the survival of Ethan and Shaun.

Sid Meier gave a speech at the GDC this year about player psychology, and to sum it up: the player wants to win, and the designer should always let them. Make a game too hard and the player thinks that the A.I. is just cheating. The trick is to make a game -just- hard enough to challenge the player, but still allow them to win. That's what Sid says. I think he's on to something, personally. In 34 years of gaming, I have yet to meet the gamer who has said to me "Yeah, this game here never lets you win, and I love it. It's one of the best games I ever played because I can't beat it!" More often that not, when I meet a gamer who is playing a game and facing ridiculous odds or stupid victory conditions, they're somewhere on a spectrum from irritated to angry.

There are two dimensions to the conversation I started. First, the emotional dimension, to wit: don't play with the emotions of a player if you're dealing with a subject matter that may hit very close to home. These are the same rules I would apply to a novelist, a screenwriter, a film director, or even a music composer. IF an author is going to play on emotions of tragedy, it should be to a greater end, to point out some sublime truth or make some ground-breaking point. Heavy Rain is doing neither of these things - it just plays on those emotions like a cheap romance novel, pulling strings for the sake of pulling strings, and as a writer I personally find that lazy and offensive.

Second, the game design dimension, to wit: don't set up victory conditions that are capricious. A single QTE as determination of victory or loss is as capricious as it gets. It's just bad game design. QTE's are not easy the first time around, but they are not about -skill- so much as -memorization-, which makes some of the earlier arguments in this discussion entirely flawed. Anyone who is being honest and who has played a lot of games with QTE's can attest to this. In God of War III, or Dante's Inferno, or The Force Unleashed, no one is "skillfull" for pulling off those finishing moves, because they really aren't that difficult compared to some of the things we need to do during FPS games or the hundreds of commands per minute a really skilled Starcraft player needs to navigate in order to win in competitive circles. The successful navigator of the QTE has just memorized the sequence after a few attempts, and usually faces no victory condition of failure for "screwing it up" once, twice, three or even four times. They are allowed to keep trying until they get it right.

Perhaps if Madison had gone through...I don't know, THREE Quick Time Events, success at -any- of which might have led to Ethan's life being saved, and only if ALL three of which were failed the victory condition of loss would be triggered, I'd still think it poor design that eight hours' worth of successful QTE navigation led to a trio of events determining a condition of loss, but at least the player would have been given three attempts to earn the optimal victory condition. I still don't think that would have been -good- design, but it would have been better than what we got.

Finally - I didn't look at coverage of Heavy Rain prior to its release, because prior to May of this year, I didn't own a PS3. I bought one specifically because I was writing about video games, and had heard a lot about Heavy Rain, and felt compelled, as someone who needs to know about this industry more than other people if I intend to write about it, that I had to play games like these which were having an impact in the industry.

Reading about the game now, after the fact, I'm not the only person discussing how flawed this game is. I have my own particular angle on that subject which is as much an emotional reaction as an intellectual one, but Heavy Rain had a lot of problems.

I love most of BioShock's story. Up until the boss fight with Atlas. How ridiculous is that? You've got this great story, with its real conclusion in Ryan's office, and you get this stupid boss fight at the end. I consider that a failure to properly end a story (or playing to the expectation of a traditional boss fight). 

Dennis, you really have to broaden your definition of what video games are and particularly what they can represent. Dragon's Lair is a video game only by the slimmest of margins, but to pretend that it's NOT a video game is to capriciously define them based solely on precarious individual criteria. Video games are defined by their interactivity, and while including some interactive element doesn't magically make something a video game, to say that Heavy Rain is not one is a gross mischaracterization. Indeed, what you say about it, that playing it on easy would be tantamount to watching a movie where you press a few buttons, is a lie. Numerous moments in the game give you direct control over your character and unfold similarly to an adventure game, with the outcome of said events depending on what choices you make.

Regardless of that, I agree with some of your sentiments, namely that Heavy Rain is very flawed as well as with the notion that video games should generally not betray the player's expectations. (As an aside, I think mutliple endings in a video game are generally bad ideas and that video games will never be a good storytelling medium, but that's a whole other discussion.) But to believethat video games "should be about fun first and foremost" is to denounce the progress that has been made in games since their inception and to limit their domain of influence to little more than the child's playthings they were once (and are sometimes still) believed to solely represent. Your encounter with one of the game's bad endings may have elicited unpleasant emotions within you, but that in and of itself does not constitute bad design. In fact, it highlights just how far games have come, namely that you could actually empathize with Ethan as a character. Games have every right to elicit unpleasant emotions in the player if that's their intent, and I see no reason (at least ideologically) why a game can't end with the main protagonist shot to death or the death of his son. In heavy rain the negative emotions represent a poorly executed finale, but pulled off correctly, a tragic outcome is just as valid a conclusion to a videogame as a "fun" one. 

I'm going to be a hard sell on the notion that interactivity defines a video game. I've written before about Jason Roher, and how I feel that some of his work is inappropriately labeled "a video game." I don't agree that we have to expand our notion of "video game" to include objects which don't appear, at first glance, to fit into that group. I think, rather, that we have to first consider whether these new objects are actually something different that deserve their own label, because it's more appropriate to create new labels for groups of objects which are more similar to one another than to try and cram them all into a previously existing group. Biologists sometimes make this mistake when they identify new species: they find a new species, and they group it with other forms of life that it -seems- like it belong with, and then they sometimes find other new species which fit more with the first new species than the other species that the first new one was grouped with, and so all the new species then become their -own- category of species.

I think it's going to be the same way with digital graphics and control interfaces. Video games pioneered this technology, but not everything that uses this technology is always going to be a video game, and increasingly less so as time passes.

Conversations about video games were not sophisticated enough at the time that Dragon's Lair was released to consider that it might not actually -be- a video game, but you raise a valid point. It may actually -not- be a video game any more than Heavy Rain is. They may -both- actually be "interactive fiction." That's a paper waiting to be written by an academic somewhere...

"Lie" is a pretty strong word there, Richard. If a seasoned gamer who knows a DualShock controller plays the game on Easy, they're not going to fail a single Quick Time Event. That means that the only way they're going to come up against one of the "negative" endings is either if they refuse to put Ethan through the challenges, or deliberately screw up. If Ethan passes all the challenges, and Madison gets on the bike, Ethan and Shaun are reunited. Jayden should bring in Scott to justice, game over. I fail to see how Heavy Rain ceases to be a game at all if we remove the "odds" of failure associated with making the QTE's more difficult, No potential for loss = no victory conditions = no game. Interactive movie.

I'm not sure what progress in graphics and sound and A.I. and control schemes has to do with video games no longer being about fun first and foremost. They are still video -games.- Unless there's some school of game design in a general sense, whether video or board or card or dice or whatever, that says that games aren't meant to be fun, you've lost me. I've worked with a couple game designers in the past, and not once have concerns about the game being fun not dominated a large portion of the design sessions and testing. One could read your statement as saying that fun is automatically a childlike aim, and "play" as a developmental or psychological notion has nothing to do with maturity.

Rather, I think that video games have progressed in the sense of providing more diverse and complex versions of "fun" for varying tastes. We have FPS and RTS and RPG games. Action platformers and third person shooters and puzzle games. The evolution of video games isn't to make them something other than what they've always been, but larger and more interesting versions of the entertainment they were originally conceived as. When Space War was designed at M.I.T., the creators weren't trying to develop some sort of cultural statement about technology, they were just trying to design a fun game that used a computer as its medium of transmission.

Again - the bad design of Heavy Rain, in my opinion, lies in the fact that a negative outcome -of such narrative weight- can arise as the result of a single Quick Time Event, not because a negative outcome is possible -at all-. That particular negative outcome was too harsh to be produced by a single QTE. If someone shows me a new game, and says "Dude, in this game you can pass 99 of 100 missions and then fail the last mission and all the main characters die!" my response is going to be "That sounds really stupid."

This is actually a really good example of what I was talking about. Check out this piece on Eurogamer, about how the sorts of technologies we see in video games are being applied elsewhere. It's a good read:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-06-game-of-life-article

I personnaly also have had the story evolved ways I didn't want because I didn't understand what triggering one button would make the character do or say. I am French and want to learn German so I wtach the game in German with English subtitles. I had never played the HR game and played my flatmates game to nights in a row because of insomnia. And I really enjoyed that game even though there are important plot holes and the fact that I couldn't master everything, even more because of that last part.

SPOILERS

My first deception was during Hassan's robbery. I didn't realise the cutscene was axualy finished for about a minute, so i guess I could have saved him. But the real shitty stuff was when I was in the jesus freak guy's house, I didn't realise pressing R1 would make me kill him, I just thought it was one of the quick action I was supposed to do. I really wanted to play again then, but then I realised that I had just been too emotional and maybe that s the way my Norman acts. Other things happened that I didn't want like I didn't know Scotts would leave without Lauren from the sinking car. But I guess here again I panicked, and in the end it makes sense with the story. What didn't though is that Iif I had known Scotts was the killer and his motives I wouldn't have let the Rich guy die cause in the end Scotts would probably have felt for a dad that wants to save his son and puts flowers on his brothers grave because of remorse. Not sure though. In the end I really like my story even because of the mistakes. Norman dies because I looked for clues to long even though I had the gold watch element I really thought it was lame (how many persons have that watch in the world seriously). Ethan can't escape the police the second time and only manages the driving wrong side of traffic and cutting his finger trials. He is no superheroe. Madison saves Shaun but dies after really long fights with OK, she was close to be a superheroe, but fortunatly it got realistic after the burns she got in escaping the fire. It just doesn't make sense though that Scotts doesn't get into troubles for killing everyone in the rich guy's house. But father and son got reunited and I feel like it was the most important thing.

I also meant to say that I had never heard of the game and really disn't know what to expect, plus it was my first day playing the PS3