Teradome.

Wow, I don’t understand why people keep missing what is significant about Heavy Rain. The latest article I’ve seen claimed it and Wii Sports were not that different.

Now that we’ve all shouted “well, one has a narrative, for starters,” let’s get to the meat of this post. Why are people not “getting” Heavy Rain?

Believe me, this is not something that needs getting. Many people are not going to like it. The complaints seem to stem from the opinion that it is not a game, because the player has no agency in the plot, and the choices you make have very little to do with the story’s outcome.

But let’s step back from this for a second — this is an interactive movie — and so the goal isn’t to let the user control the characters to change story events, it is to let the user steer the characters into and through story events in order to heighten empathy.

Much of the Podtoid cast had their biggest problem with the selection of the Crime Scene chapter for the PSN demo. There was little you did except wander through an overgrown lot near some train tracks, and hit R1 several times to find a few hidden items. You can’t even leave the area until you find them all.

Yet the Crime Scene chapter could easily be seen as scavenger hunt, or even some sort of word search puzzle. Sure, it’s not a great game, but it is one. What Heavy Rain aims to do is have player live in between the lines of the script, sitting close to character intent and finding ways to transfer character emotion into the player by having them virtually walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s raining, it’s miserable. There’s a lot of officers getting in the FBI agent’s way, and he doesn’t want to be wandering around looking for evidence because it seems like he’s hiding something himself. The search game of the Crime Scene is a perfect juxtaposition to him because it is slow and tedious and allows the right kind of introspection on the character to occur as he is mostly alone with his thoughts.

If Heavy Rain fails, it will be because it is simply not a good narrative. If it can’t create a story worth caring about, and if it can’t offer characters that are believable or sympathetic when they are controlled, then no amount of interactivity can save it. It’s a movie after all, and there’s a specific story to be told. If it succeeds, then it should create a level of intimacy with its people & events that hasn’t been reached before.

I’ve heard the game reviewed as “emotionally draining.” Sounds like it did its job right.

dwineman:

Many people have Google set as their homepage, or just go there automatically because “that’s where the internet starts.” The difference between the address bar and Google’s input field is lost on them. They’re both things where you type stuff to get places, and it takes a huge amount of sophistication to see past that superficial semantic equivalence. Want a Facebook login? Type that! Wherever! You’ll get there somehow, even if you have to click an extra link. Who cares?

The cognitive load of remembering where to type what is just not worth it to most people when it only saves you a single click (most of the time).

I had quite the conversation about this story at home on Sunday as well. Here’s what I think are also major factors to what happened:

People don’t want URLs

Really, why bother understanding the difference between .com or .net when Google is there? Remember, we’re talking about people introduced to the web after near-perfect search was introduced. Most of “us” learned our internet skills well before web search existed. Hell, even Tim Berners-Lee has apologized for making URLs more complicated that they should be; This is why AOL keywords worked.

People use what we’ve given them

Automatic searches in the location bar. Default start pages with oversized search fields. Search toolbars and text inputs in the upper right. The truth is, unless you want to learn how to write code, you will follow the path of least resistance to get what you want from a browser. Don’t blame them for using the tools you added to make search easier. It’s encouraged behavior, really.

People use Windows, on the whole

And remember, when you type “facebook” you have to hold down a button to visit “http://www.facebook.com” and not “http://facebook/”. The default behavior is broken in an era where computers are not being used primarily in university computer labs. Newer browsers fix this problem, but AFAIK Internet Explorer still has this behavior.

All it takes is one broken experience with a location bar, for a user to get a satisfactory experience from the search bar instead. And even us experts do it too: We try to guess the URL for a product (like Basecamp) and it doesn’t work, so we search.

Now why the hell would a non-expert ever think “Hmmm, let me try and guess this page’s location?”

And after a successful search, why would they think “Hmmm. Let me memorize this code for the page’s location, instead of repeating exactly what I did next time I want to come here.”

No really. Why?

So let’s stop blaming people for not being “smart enough” to figure out our secret website handshakes and start focusing on making it easier to get them to content.

Apparently there’s some Avatar backlash after it took the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Drama. In my buddies’ Chatterous room, we had an epic argument about whether or not Avatar was a good movie. Obviously we netted out that it all depends on your definition of “good,” and how you set your standards for movies. This was my “closing statement”, modified with some of my preceeding thoughts to be a complete blog post:

You can say Avatar is a thrilling action movie, like an Indiana Jones film, where you have fairly one-dimensional enemies like Belloq & the Nazis. But there’s a number of things: first off, Belloq isn’t that one-dimensional, he has a history with Jones and he has a desire for the Ark that supercedes what the Nazis want with it. Ultimately, he’s using them, he gets moments to say so, and that fills in his character.

Secondly, his antagonist role is supported by the Nazi forces which are FAR from one-dimensional; Even if you present Nazis as pure evil, all of WW II comes along with them as subtext, it’s unavoidable. James Cameron doesn’t have this “shortcut”, he’s got to paint everyone in. But instead of drawing clear groups on the Human side he drops the conflict in as entirely Human vs Na’vi, even if Jake, Grace and useless unmemorable third guy are outliers.

The bad guys in Avatar are just bad guys because they’re bad. They want money, and we never actually know what the Unobtainium is used for. Does it push the story along? Sure, if that’s all you want. The general/captain/additional unmemorable character wants nothing more to execute his orders, he doesn’t even get the benefit of being tired of being on Pandora and wanting to go home, he just loves getting to shoot crap down and revels in the destruction he creates.

And this coming from the director who got a honestly moving performance from Arnold Schwartzenegger as an unstoppable killer robot.

It’s not that the storytelling is simple — Hell, Ponyo is a simple story, but it’s also real & honest, and frankly even more imaginative and inventive than Avatar — it’s that Avatar’s storytelling is just flat-out lazy. And that, to me, is a bad movie…or at least a movie that shouldn’t be winning Best Picture awards.