Narrative Play in Heavy Rain and Mass Effect 2
Bryant Cannon
Narrative has long been associated with linear media. Novels, films, theatre and even music have expressed what is known as “a story or account of events, or the like, whether true or fictitious,” according to Dictionary.com. Thus, narratives are linear entities, and are generally not associated with play; while a narrative is similar to play in that it exists in some sort of “magic circle,” (narrative’s being the reader’s suspension of disbelief, or belief and investment in non-fiction’s case), play is free and involves the partaker in its creation. What we can say, though, is that play is a sort of narrative-producing machine. Even the earliest or most unstructured forms of play produce a narrative when enacted. But only certain instances of play—mostly twentieth-century productions—have taken advantage of this capability of narrative production as a fiction producing artifact. In many circles, play has become a mode of escapism, where the fiction is just as important as the rules that govern the play. And in the past 20 years, video games have become more and more of a “space for play” than a “game” by definition. Thus, games have come quite close to being effective fiction producing works, with seemingly one antithesis: the reluctance of the industry to give up its definition of “game.” But recently, with the release of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain—which rides the coattails of the also recent Mass Effect 2 by Bioware—we see that narrative play is possible in a structured set of rules, or a “game.” But by comparing to the latter example, we also see that Heavy Rain attempts to defy the term “game” by chasing structured narrative play instead of a readily apparent ruleset.
Play in any sense produces a narrative. When children play house, they are creating a narrative based on the norms and procedures they’ve learned in real-world domestic settings. The narrative itself is then captured by such media as a video camera, photos, or even memory and word of mouth. A child would describe how he “made dinner” with his “wife” in “their kitchen,” and the “baby brother” starts “crying” out of “hunger.” Games also produce a narrative. A board game such as Power Grid (2004) or a video game like God of War (2005) creates fictional context and a systematic form of play that allows the player to guide the narrative within that ruleset. Even sports events produce a narrative, as relayed to TV and radio alongside an in-depth analysis of the game. But this is where play ceases to be fiction-producing entity. Even in a video game, the fiction is generally pre-defined, and only the individual actions create a unique narrative (and therefore a rather boring one). The narrative is not the play, and thus, we don’t see “narrative play.”
Again, narrative play exists wherever the play revolves around manipulating a fiction-based narrative. Though free play (children using their imaginations, and little more; also known as “mimicry” by Johan Huizinga) dates back perhaps to the beginning of humanity, structured narrative play mostly has presence in the early to mid 20th century. This type of play likely started with gamebooks (more commonly known as “choose-your-own-adventure” books), in which readers read a section of the book, and the text presents them with a choice to make in the context of the story. For example, “to fight the pirate, go to page 45. To run away, go to page 22.” The reader was an agent in the story, and therefore the reader was in “play” with the fictional narrative. Around the 70’s, a few additional mediums followed similar principles. In mystery dinner performances, the participants hold a set of information (which was planned and written by the writer or designer of the mystery dinner kit) and either compete or collaborate to solve the mystery of a murder that happened before or during the dinner. Pen-and-paper role-playing games introduced quantifiable game mechanics, but players often use their own fiction—regulated by a game master—as a context for the game. Eventually, text-based adventure games brought narrative play to the computer, offering a branching narrative (akin to gamebooks) to curious video gamers.
The average modern video game, though, does not follow suit. Beginning as early as asteroids and pong, games have been about quantifiable outcomes and competition in skill between two or more human players. Technically, even these games, or games such as God of War allow the player to “manipulate the fiction.” Technically, whether Kratos (God of War’s main character) uses a grapple or a vertical slash to defeat the harpy is part of the fiction; but these are hardly meaningful actions in the actual narrative of God of War. While the playing of the game still produces a narrative—just as sports and mimicry do—the macro-level events in the story are the same, no matter what choices the player makes. The player is not “playing the narrative,” but rather playing the game world, so we can hardly call it narrative play.
Recently, though, a number of video games have seen the light of day that we might say involve this narrative play. A game like Planescape: Torment (1997) involves interpreting narrative clues and cues in order to make decisions as the main character. As an existentialist game about the inevitability of fate, though, the game only has one ending. Much later, Bioshock (2007) tried to involve the player’s morality with the ending, and implemented two different ending sequences based on player choice. Most recently, Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Heavy Rain (2010) have made tremendous strides forward in presenting true narrative play in a video game. Essentially, these games strive to use narrative clues as one of their key feedback loops. They contrast to the tried-and-true but very simple “this person needs to find all of their chickens. Find them and receive some sort of reward!” in which the fiction is merely a context and codification of otherwise abstract tasks. These two games give us a difficult dramatic problem to solve, and offer more than one way to solve it. If we were to adjust my definition of narrative play to specifically fit video games, it would be when the play revolves around manipulating a fiction-based narrative based on signs in the form of narrative clues. In other words, these games use narrative events as both input and feedback.
Mass Effect 2 was developed by BioWare Austin and released in January of 2010. The player assumes the role of Commander Shepard, the leader of the space vessel Normandy. The game is primarily a first-person shooter. Players spend a large amount of time in combat, buying and upgrading weapons, or searching for useful items. But one of the unique draws of the game is its deep dialog system. The player chooses a line a dialog for each beat in the conversation; the character will never say anything unless it falls under the dialog choice of the player. Often, the game ditches the exhaustive nature of previous attempts at branching dialog, and challenges the player with meaningful decisions within the narrative of the game (even “cutscenes” involve these dialog decisions). For example, one scene requires the player to kill one of two characters, who are both potentially key to the story. Each one has an entire set of dialog, sidequests and animation that is completely missed if that character is killed. Also, throughout the game, the character has the responsibility to manage upgrades for the Normandy. The upgrades chosen have a significant effect on the narrative conclusion of the game. In fact, the ending of the game is totally contingent on some of the narrative paths that the player chooses. The game systematizes this: some dialog options are open after acquiring a certain “paragon” reputation (earned by choosing heroic dialog options) or “renegade” reputation (earned by choosing harsh dialog options). Also, each character has a quest for the player to aid them in a personal matter. Once completed, that character is considered “loyal.” Loyal allies have a much higher chance of surviving the final mission of the game. If only a few allies or less survive, then the game ends with the player character’s death. It is essentially a gauge for how fully the game has been completed. As such, the player has a place as an active agent in the narrative.
Heavy Rain was created by Quantic Dream, a French company led by designer and writer David Cage, and released in March 2010. Instead of starting with action-oriented gameplay like Mass Effect and the majority of games before it, Heavy Rain starts with narrative action. The player assumes the role of four different characters for different scenes in the game. The general narrative revolves around a father, Ethan Mars, and his search for the serial killer who has kidnapped his son. Actions available can be divided into three categories: dialog, which works in a similar fashion to the dialog in Mass Effect; thoughts, which are available at most any time; and actions, which are usually context sensitive buttons. Many scenes and action prompts are timed, forces the player to make decisions on their toes, and many scenes require a number of specific button presses in sequence (known as a “quicktime event”) to keep the character from failing their task or dying. This game, of course, also has a definite branching structure. Most scenes have two or more possible outcomes, as well as a number of variables that are affected during the scene that will have influence on scenes in the future. All of these variables weave together to create an organic narrative that can end in a variety of ways, all depending on the player’s actions and choices.
So here, we see that narrative play is possible within the structured setup of a video game. Since the birth of games, we have seen them as a form of competition and quantifiable outcomes. The rules, procedures, and results were based almost completely on numbers and abstract representations affected by the skill of the player. In fact, after playing a game for a few hours, the average gamer will begin to ignore the fiction, and entirely systematize the game. In his book Half Real, Jespur Juul refers to this as “information reduction,” or “The process where user improves at a task by learning to ignore irrelevant information” (Juul). A player in such a state subconsciously boils the game down to the basic formal elements. In a first-person-shooter, these elements would be the motion of different projectiles, the position of each player, the amount of each projectile able to be used, the bounding boxes of the environment, and the amount of hit-points that each player has; the player then traverses this system in an attempt to end the game session with a win (positive) state. The aforementioned games, though, factor in narrative elements to each decision made. This strategy leverages the player’s emotion, values and previous experience in making a decision—a more human interaction—and gives the potential for the game to be immune to information reduction. In this sense, the game’s formal and dramatic elements are inseparable; each depends on the other.
The two games here, though, represent the fine line between this inseparability. Mass Effect 2, despite its situation of deep narrative events on its core input and output systems, remains vulnerable to this complete systematization, or information reduction, more so than Heavy Rain. First of all, the game’s outcomes are strictly positive and negative. The perfect end state results in all of the characters surviving, while the worst possible end state results in all of the characters dying. These possibilities are essentially a “win” and “lose” state, with a degree of in-between. Thus, a player can, after some time with the game, optimize his strategies for achieving the “win” state, and ignore most of the fiction. The morality system in the game (the Paragon/Renegade dichotomy mentioned earlier) does raise some ambiguous moral questions, but has little effect on the win or lose states of the game; it mostly provides two ways for doing the same thing. The game has its moments in which the best course of action is ambiguous. One mission has the player giving bird’s-eye intel on an assassination target, and is eventually asked to confront him. When the target seems regretful but cowardly for what he had done to deserve an assassination, the player must choose whether to block the assassin’s shot path and allow the target to pass, or to let the assassin (a good friend of the player character’s) take the shot. But problematically, there is no real change in gameplay either way (though data such as this in the Mass Effect series is known to move onto unreleased sequels), and the game rewards you with black-and-white “good” (Paragon) or “bad” (Renegade) points. While it strives for true narrative play, it falls short to the demands of the game industry, and the typical, clear-cut feedback.
Heavy Rain, though, does not have a clear win state. Fighting the grain of current industry trends, each scene in the game has two or more different outcomes, or two or more different variables that create a unique outcome. A scene in the game allows the player-character to become romantically involved with another. When the player-character finds out that the girl he was with was a reporter and possibly only there to spy on him, the player has a choice to forgive or leave her. Each choice has different consequences in the game, but neither is the “right” choice or a “win” state. The scene ends ambiguously. The player can, in theory, create their own vision for what an ideal end state would look like.
Further, Mass Effect 2 overtly quantifies each of these narrative elements. For instance, the player earns “Paragon” and “Renegade” points for choosing appropriate dialog options in conversations, which the player can view on the pause menu. In fact, a “tip text” shown randomly in the game explains that the dialog options displayed at the top of the dialog tree correspond to Paragon actions, while those on the bottom correspond to Renegade actions. Thus, the player can literally complete the game effectively without knowing what the text content of each choice actually is, choosing each action based on where on the tree it is. In addition, each character in the game is considered “loyal” once their associated side-quest is completed, which is also a quantified statistic in the game, readily available as information in the pause menu. The simple fact that this information is displayed to the viewer changes the nature of the game significantly: it essentially becomes a math problem to the player, and allows the ignorance of narrative elements once the player understands how the system works. In this sense, Mass Effect 2 is similar to many other RPG’s, in which augmenting narrative elements with abstract, quantifiable values that are visible to the player and calculated in-game to decide an outcome of win or lose.
Heavy Rain, though, takes a different and very new approach, simply by hiding many of its underlying systems and variables to the viewer. This mostly comes in the same form as suspense in movies; the player doesn’t know what will happen next. While in many games, the player knows that no matter what they choose do, the story and characters will progress in the same way (as in Mass Effect 2; the overt system design lets the player know that doing a “loyalty quest” will earn the player the loyalty of the other character). Instead, Heavy Rain gives the player a difficult situation, and gives few hints as to what the consequences of an action will be. The effect is a sort of trial of instinct based on narrative events. An early scene gives the player the role of detective Shelby, who walks into a liquor store owned by the father of one of the victims of the Origami Killer. While in the back of the store, a shoplifter walks in with a gun and threatens the clerk. The player is then given the option to sneak around and take him by surprise, but if caught, a dialog between Shelby and the shoplifter begins. The player can be sympathetic or aggressive. But instead of trying to calculate how many “like points” they earn from the shoplifter through each dialog option, the player will naturally ask themselves, should I be violent with this person? Does he deserve a chance? What will he be inclined to do if I show weakness and side with him? The fulcrum of choice in the game is centered around the player’s emotions and feelings toward the characters and plot thus far in the game.
But of course, the game does have a logic system; otherwise it couldn’t be a video game. The game still runs on ones and zeroes, and there are still variables floating around, identifying the state of the game in one way or another. And still, if the traditional theory of the gamer applies, the player’s goal—and even their source of fun—is the act of comprehending this system and mastering it. So why doesn’t Heavy Rain just appear to have these human interactions? Hiding the system does not mean that narrative play and character connections transcend the system that leads to a desirable end state. If anything, take this from Heavy Rain: one scene in the game provokes the player to kill a drug dealer as the missing son’s father, Ethan Mars. But when the chase inevitably ends in the dealer’s daughter’s room, the player is at a crossroads. One button press is between the player shooting the man in the head. If the player kills him, the player gets another clue needed in order to find his son. Without killing the drug dealer, the player can still succeed in finding the player character’s son, but the scene in which Ethan must find his son is a bit more difficult. And in fact, there is no systematic upside to sparing the man. It only makes the game harder, and the designers do a good job at making this fact clear (at least, subconsciously) to the player. When I was given the choice, at least, I had a good feeling that letting him go wasn’t going to help me at all. So again, given the traditional theory of gamer psychology, it’s quite obvious what most gamers would choose in this scene, right? This quote comes from an interview with Heavy Rain’s lead designer, David Cage:
“Here, what I wanted to do was say, "Look, you just need to press this trigger, you kill this man and you get a reward. Do it." And we realized about 80 percent of people don't shoot, just because it's about role play. They feel they are Ethan, and they believe Ethan would not kill” (Kietzmann).
When 80 percent of a playtesting group would not choose the option that is vastly in their favor, it is apparent that some narrative magic is afoot.
Roland Barthes, an early to mid 20th century philosopher and literary critic, wrote The Pleasure of the Text: a book describing the inherent pleasure of an artistic text. In it, Barthes creates a dichotomy between two types of texts: a “readerly” text and a “writerly” text. A readerly text is one that has inherent meaning as intended by the author. In such a text, it is difficult to read the text a different way, as the theme (or meaning) is controlled to a T. While Barthes argues that pleasure is found in these texts, actual “bliss” is only found within writerly texts. A writerly text is one in which the reader himself finds meaning, based on what is found in the text. The meaning on the surface is ambiguous, but reader interprets—or “produces”—meaning himself. Barthes says that the literal reading of the text then ceases to be a “reactive compliment of a writing” or a “parasitical act,” and becomes more of a “form of work” (Barthes). Reading this sort of text is actually blissful, which Barthes must have believed is an elevated or true form of pleasure.
When gameplay achieves true narrative play, though the rules, code, and representations are static and set in stone (the “text”), the player is essentially producing a narrative that is personal to him or her. These games of narrative play exemplify this in a more extreme fashion as the written texts and films that Barthes refers to. Games are literally absent of narrative until enacted upon by the player; matched with a personality and skill set, so to speak. So games of narrative play—according to Barthes’ principals—are a form of blissful activity. They take a writerly and opinionated persona in order to be experienced fruitfully.
This, as discussed before, is where Mass Effect 2 fails to take the concept of narrative play as far as Heavy Rain has. The game overtly defines its meaning: fictional elements are assigned a variable that is displayed to the player, allowing them not only to make decisions based on the numbers themselves, but it forces its position on what is good or bad, gentle or rough, wise or unwise. Heavy Rain, on the other hand, lets the player’s connection to the characters influence the choices that are made, thus bending the ideas of winning and losing. Heavy Rain, then, might be considered a more blissful text, as players are literally a part of the text, and make it their own each time they dive into it. Of course, this concept of ignoring the system as a system and seeing it as a sort of organic narrative; a vague and changing system of characters, their wants, and their journey to obtain them; a structure wonderfully reflective of the human condition. So perhaps “game” isn’t quite the word…
In conclusion, both Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain are quintessential examples of playing a narrative, but it is the hidden and ambiguous systems of Heavy Rain that make it a true example of narrative play. Even after 20 years of fiction-producing artifacts we call video games, Quantic Dream has been able to create an experience that keeps the magic circle, throws out the math, and adds in the much-needed component of human emotion. If Barthes’ theories can apply, this kind of interaction might be the kind that starry-eyed game storytellers are looking for, and a new frontier for interactive entertainment.
Works Cited
Heavy Rain. Quantic Dream. Sony Computer Entertainment America. 2010. Video Game.
Juul, Jesper. Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Massachusets: MIT Press. 2005.
Juul, Jesper. Half Real: A Dictionary of Video Game Theory.
Kietzmann, Ludwig. “Interview: Spoiling Heavy Rain with David Cage.” Joystiq.com. 19 March 2010. Accessed: 20 April 2010.
Mass Effect 2. BioWare Austin. Electronic Arts. 2010. Video Game.
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