The Art of Video Games exhibition (opening March 16, 2012) will highlight images and footage from the 80 games that won the public vote in April, as well as five games that will be available for visitors to play for a few minutes. In addition, the exhibition will highlight some of the most influential artists and designers across five eras of game development.
Here is an excerpt from our interview with David Cage during this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles.
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Screen shot from Heavy Rain, 2010, Written and Directed by David Cage. Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC.
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Georgina Goodlander: What was your main goal in Heavy Rain?
David Cage: I had one and only goal. It was to make the player feel something. All the experience of Heavy Rain was designed with emotion in mind, and I wanted - you know in video games you feel emotions. You feel fear, you feel stress, tension, frustration. But I wanted to explore more complex emotions, more subtle emotions that you usually find in movies or in books. I wanted the player to feel sad, to feel depressed, to feel uncomfortable, to really care for what's going on on-screen and forget that this is just a program moving some pixels on a TV screen, but truly believing in these characters and paying attention to them.
Georgina: Heavy Rain is unusual in that it reveals a story as you play. The story is told through gameplay rather than cutscenes (in-game movies). Why did you decide to do it this way?
David: The narrative structure of games has always been a problem for me, because usually games are really articulated around action scenes. With Heavy Rain I was looking for a way to make the player play the story. Not watch the story [in between action scenes], but really tell the story through his actions. And that was the main challenge from a conceptual point of view, to make this story fully interactive.
Georgina: Why did you choose video games as your medium of expression?
David: I guess what is really unique about games is the fact that they put you in the shoes of the main character, and you make choices that will have consequences. What I enjoyed and discovered during Heavy Rain was the fact that the game could behave like a mirror [for the player]. There are some moral choices at some points, some things where you really wonder, "What should I do?" You need to decide what you want to do and who you want to be. It's not about writing one single story, or one character, it's about writing multiple stories for multiple characters.
In July, we featured our interview with Jenova Chen from thatgamecompany. If you missed it, check out the blog post.
