FFWD REW

No Action: Why Tedium Can Work in Games Pt. II

Only the most serious art contains scenes of people being sad in the rain.

Click here to read part one of this essay. Or don’t. See if I care.

When I was a kid I used to separate people into two categories showing my affinity for pithy reductionism even at that early age: Lego kids and 3d puzzle kids. Lego kids would build awkward structures out of Lego and populate them with whatever characters they had laying around from a dozen different playsets — spacemen ninjas knights… other spacemen. Then they’d play with the things for hours making laser sounds with their mouths and finish up by smashing it all to bits acting as the left hand of the plastic men’s God in some imagined apocalypse. 3d puzzle kids would buy a 3d puzzle of a Star Destroyer put it together then put it up on a shelf so that they might admire their ability to follow directions whenever they passed it likely on their way to do chores they volunteered for or to wank into a sock catalogue.

Yakuza 3 is a game made by Lego kids and Heavy Rain is a game made by 3d puzzle kids.

The approach needs to be refined but Yakuza 3 ’s early banality—if you’re able to stick with it—actually kinda-sorta works because the game leaves all its cinematic aspirations for the cutscenes. The story if you can call it that opens with almost no stakes: You’re a retired criminal living on the beach in Okinawa. There’s something about the government wanting to build a resort where your orphanage is and it’s all punctuated by brief outbursts of anime violence but you’re mostly left alone to hang out. You can fish you can golf you can go down to the arcade and play the crane game for stuffed ducklings. In any other medium a prologue this long would be baffling but in a game — or an open world game anyway — being given the space to soak up the milieu before the events of the story really begin to unfold is an interesting and dare I say viable way to build the world.

What it does essentially is allow players to invest in the world on their own terms before demanding they engage with a proper narrative. It’s about play at the most basic possible level — it establishes a system of rules for the artificial reality and allows you to test them to experiment with their limitations and develop your own meanings before it suggests any of its own. For example early in the game one of the orphans in your charge follows you around the city as you run some errands. When you’re finished she asks if you can hang out some more or if you’d like to return to the orphanage. It’s pretty nakedly a “would you like to go to the next area?” menu screen and whether you choose to spend time with her or not doesn’t appear to have any obvious affect on the game or Kazuma’s relationship with her. But I wanted to mess around with some of the minigames available in the city so I drug her along to the arcade where there was a particularly cool little SHUMP hidden away in the back. Then something weird happened.

I noticed a crane game in the front of the arcade. With absolutely no prompting from the game I went up to it and decided I was going to win little Haruka a stuffed duckling. There was no dialogue where she asked me to do this or any indication at all that she would like one. But there was a little orphan girl in my care and a God damn crane game in front of me. What else was I supposed to do?

The crane game itself was a funny little physics-based puzzler—an impressive detail but not much beyond that. I won the duckling and discovered there was no way to give it to her. But it didn’t matter. I won that stupid duckling for Haruka. It was hers. I put it in my inventory storage and told myself she had put it in her room or something. I wasn’t building up a “relationship bar” or exchanging it in the hopes she would trade me some nunchucks or a health potion. I didn’t even do it because I felt an emotional connection to the fictional little girl. I did it because it was a game and I was playing the game . The fact that the actions I had Kazuma carry out roughly sketched an affectionate relationship with this little girl were totally incidental to me but nonetheless resonant with the game’s story.The whole event struck me after the fact as an instance of co-authored meaning of the sort that only games can manage.

Most games ask you to care about their fictional edifice the moment you step into it but by giving you a few hours to hang out on the beach cook dinner for your kids and help some idiot with his investment woes Yakuza 3 allows you to approach the story as an inhabitant of its setting rather than a visitor. It’s pretty darn far from an unequivocal success but it’s a whole lot more intriguing than the approach used by another major PS3 release I could/will/have name(d).

Heavy Rain opens with protagonist Ethan Mars shaving showering and getting ready for his son’s birthday. Then he works on a drawing. Then he helps his wife with the groceries. Then he sets the table. Then he plays with his kids in the yard. Through all of it the only interaction the player is allowed is a vague pantomime of the action using various button presses and controller jiggles. And it goes on. And on. And on. By the time a serial killer kidnaps Ethan’s son I was relieved just to have something halfway interesting to make him do. I was not—as the game wanted me to feel—shocked and horrified.

The reason Heavy Rain left me totally cold during all of its “big” moments is the same reason why I find Yakuza 3 legitimately compelling in spite of its absurdity. In Heavy Rain every single beat of the story is predetermined with every subtle permutation of the event accounted for and planned out by the writer and animators. An early “bonding” moment where Ethan is playing swords with his kids fell much flatter for me than my made up one with Haruka in Yakuza 3 simply because the only thing I was allowed to control was whether or not Ethan deflected an attack or landed one of his own. The decision to play was not mine. The decision of what to play was not mine. Ethan—the character—was very clearly the one driving the scene forward. It was the videogame equivalent of telling instead of showing.

Still I wanted to find something to appreciate in Heavy Rain because there’s no doubt that it’s a daring direction to take a multimillion dollar production. So because Heavy Rain is framed like a movie—or if not a novel—I approached it borrowing the evaluation criterion from those media but even by those standards it fails. In a film if we deliberately linger for two minutes on Ethan setting the table we understand that there must be something pretty damned important about the way he’s doing it. In a book three pages devoted to the description of the building Ethan is designing probably means there’s something about either the design or his creative process that will become significant to his character. But in Heavy Rain there’s no suggestion at all that any of the banality is meaningful. Which means all it serves to do is distance us from a story that so very very badly wants us to take it seriously.

Yakuza 3 doesn’t care if you take it seriously. Sure it puts you in the shoes of an ex-criminal with a heart of gold who has used his retirement to look after orphans but it never claws at your heartstrings as desperately as Heavy Rain . For all intents and purposes the orphans may well be daycare attendees or the astonishingly populous illegitimate spawn of Kazuma’s own loins. More importantly all of this is framed as a game . Minigames abound sure but they all have recognizable rules of their own. At any given moment it’s easy enough to predict however abstractly what will happen when you press the X button. And if we can predict an outcome of an action we can assign the action meaning.

In Heavy Rain you set the table using a series of thumbstick movements that are also used to open doors brush your teeth and put on your sunglasses. If Yakuza 3 had a table setting sequence it would be a minigame after the fashion of Burger Time where you catch falling plates with the table while a panda bear tries to molest you. Sure it’s absurd and illusion shattering and all those things “grownup” games are supposed to be getting away from but the fact that it invites you to interact with it as a game and not a series of directions makes the experience feel more personalized.

Of course both games are from very different genres and have very different creative intentions so I hope this argument won’t be reduced to “ Yakuza 3 > Heavy Rain LOL .” But I do think that almost all of Heavy Rain’s problems come from the contempt it holds for interaction whereas Yakuza 3 is a big stupid slobbery love letter to interaction. As games I would call Heavy Rain a fascinating failure and Yakuza 3 a troubled success. And while there’s definitely a value judgment in there I hope this essay series is being read more as a discussion than a proclamation.

The useful point to pull from the comparison of the two games I think is that rules are important. Yakuza 3’ s rules are silly and they make no attempt at all to engage me emotionally but the fact that there’s a system of logic underlying them that’s consistent throughout the world means that the world itself seems much less facile. In Heavy Rain you’re given one rule: Do what you’re told exactly when you’re told to do it. Don’t do what’s expected of you and you instantly shatter the fragile reality of the game world. It’s the difference between being invited up on stage to play with the band and being allowed—grudgingly—to tap your foot along with the music.

Tune in tomorrow to read about what we can learn from Yakuza 3’s troubled success.

(UPDATE: Click here to read the conclusion of this essay series)

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