Games are “light years away” from the level of emotional storytelling found in films and other media, Quantic Dream’s David Cage thinks, and that’s because developers are too scared to try something different.
Quantic Dream boss David Cage hates children. Well, he doesn’t actually hate children. (Probably.) He just thinks developers should be making fewer games for them, and more for adults. “I mean, let’s stop making games for kids and teenagers,” he told Joystiq in an interview. “Let’s ask ourselves the real questions.”
Cage, who helmed the development of Indigo Prophecy and the upcoming Heavy Rain, thinks that games are “light years away” from the level of storytelling power that other mediums possess. “We are just telling stories about little boys shooting and jumping,” he said. “When will we be able to tell real stories with real characters and real emotions?”
The problem as Cage perceives it is a lack of willingness to push the boundaries of the medium. The reason games are so far behind in the storytelling department is “because we don’t dare stop doing what we have been doing for 15 years…let’s change some of the traditional game conventions that we have had for 15 years that we take for granted, like, you cannot make a game if there is no ramping, if there is no game over, if you don’t progress in difficulty, etc.”
The idea of a difficulty curve in games is counterintuitive to the act of experiencing a story in a game, Cage thinks. “You want to play a game that is interesting and that is an emotional journey. It is the story,” Cage explained. “It is what you feel playing. It is not that it gets more and more difficult until to the point where you just leave the controller and say I don’t want to play that anymore.”
Can Cage back up big statements like these with Heavy Rain? I hope so, but we won’t be able to find out until next year, since all signs point to the game being delayed.
