For the past few weeks, I've been following stories about the new Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Heavy Rain follows the story of a serial killer told through 4 different perspectives. The story unfolds through video clips rendered in a real-time graphics engine that is stunningly life-like. Sort of like the old Dragon's Lair games or Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you use the controller to make decisions for the character or perform certain actions. Depending on how you choose, the story alters, but never stops.
Heavy Rain is being described as a much more immersive and engaging experience than most games, blending genres and mediums to create a new form of storytelling- a type of story that many people have envisioned as a perfect project for video games- taking a cinema-esque experience and making it interactive, creating a world in which your choices count, making you a part of the experience. While Heavy Rain doesn't seem to fully realize this gilded dream quite yet, it is a step in the right direction. BTW- Gizmodo has an excellent editorial up about the successes and limitations of the game.
What I am wondering is how things will change if this more interactive form of storytelling becomes a dominant media format. In the nineteenth century, novels emerged as the dominant method for expressing the values and beliefs of our selves and our culture. For the last seventy years of so, film has taken on this role. These are the mediums through which we understand the stories of our lives. We imagine ourselves as movie characters or novel protagonists. We subtly create soundtracks in our heads to different moments, we think in lines from books from time to time, we imagine our prom night the way we saw it in Sixteen Candles, or we expect the type of love John Cusack encounters in a thousand and one romantic comedies. These expectations alter our perceptions of the world and reinforce, or create, in our minds the notion that there is a story to our lives, one to be played out in a certain way, with certain essential events occurring in line with story arcs at least somewhat dictated or influenced by the media we consume.
Mark Wilson, in his article on Gizmodo, has already discussed how video games could come to later the way stories are told. He writes,
If titles like Heavy Rain show us anything, it's that, yes, technology is unlocking new ways to tell a story. While most video games focus on a very linear plot, modeling themselves after movies and theater, they have the great potential to allow the audience to explore parts of a story that could have happened, altering fiction to better emulate real life and challenging the construct of a story as we know it—all well allowing the viewer to feel like they're somehow involved beyond mere spectating. Fiction evolves from a series of events to a series of choices, much like life.
Building on his point, if this genre develops into an art form in which we experience a multitude of consequences, in which there is not one path through which we progress, but a multitude of paths based on our own choices, will our concept of narratives in our own lives alter? Instead of imagining the perfect prom that we saw on a TV show, will we imagine a plethora of options based on diverse factors? Will we resign ourselves to the inevitability of chance? Will we see our selves as more responsible in the creation of our fate? We will stop pushing for idealized experiences? Or, is our desire to create narratives and story arcs too embedded in our psychology- either our psychology as humans or our psychology as western thinkers inclined to think with these types of stories regardless of media influence?
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