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A word of warning to those of you interested in the upcoming PS3 game Heavy Rain: If a friend or loved one walks in on you playing it at the wrong moment, things can get awkward fast. Early in the game, for example, there's a scene in which you guide a character in his boxer briefs through his morning rituals. By following the on-screen commands, you can have him take a leak, hop in the shower, or do various other mundane tasks people do to start the day. I chose to make him brush his teeth. As I vigorously shook my Sixaxis up and down in order to get my character to scrub every last nook and cranny, my roommate walked into the room. He looked at me and my vigorous shaking, then at the nearly nude man on the TV screen, then back at me again, his right eyebrow arched. I hurriedly tried to cover my embarrassment with a joke. "I, uh, play games for the escapism," I told him, "and this guy is brushing his teeth better than I ever could in real life." Heavy Rain is filled with tiny, insignificant events like teeth brushing, the kind of moments typically edited out from movies and novels. But developer Quantic Dream wants you to experience every last facet of a character's life, from the ennui of a bathroom break to the unfathomable despair of a son's death. Their hope is that these moments together construct an emotional bond unlike anything you've experienced in interactive entertainment.
It's a hard sell. The game looks beautiful, but because of that, it suffers acutely from the "uncanny valley" effect. Any deviation from what a "real" person would do looks like a neon sign garishly flashing "THIS IS A GAME." In order to take Heavy Rain seriously and fully embrace the characters, you're going to have to leap across the uncanny valley. I couldn't do it at first. The seriousness with which the game takes itself begs to be mocked. So when I noticed that the characters have an jarring jerkiness to their movements, and when they turn their arms flap like wet noodles, I took to amusing myself by spinning my character around at pivotal moments just to watch him flail. After that fun ran its course, I began crafting my own goofy persona for him. To wit: I walked him to a wall, had him stare at it a few moments, then said, "Hello, wall!" Another time I steered him to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, where a cake cooled. "Happy birthday to me!" I shouted. But an hour and a few gut-wrenching plot points later, my snarky attitude had evaporated. As I helped a grieving father prepare an afternoon snack for his emotionally vacant son, I realized that I cared about these characters. I felt as if I inhabited them, and any actions I chose thereafter I chose because that's what I'd in their shoes. So I had the father take a long swig of beer to calm his nerves, grab a granola bar out of the cupboard, and sit down next to his son to watch some cartoons. I let him sit there for a long time. I listened to his thoughts -- you can hear what a character is thinking by pressing L2 -- as he ached to connect with his son. My own thoughts spiraled downward. My body weighed heavy with sadness. A powerful moment, to be sure, but one question nagged at me: Is this a game? If not, what is it? My theory: Heavy Rain presages an entirely new form of interactive entertainment. For all its graphical prowess, it reminds me more of indie "experiences" like Passage than any big-budget spectacle on consoles. Whether console gamers will be interested in the experience that Heavy Rain offers remains to be determined. But I'm curious to play -- or maybe I should say feel -- more.
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