Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you believe games can only be toys for kids and that you are successful at doing this, why would you look further and take risks exploring new directions?
I'm not fighting for the right to do whatever we want without any restriction. We need to be careful of the fact that we also make games for kids and teenagers.
We, as individuals, are defined by the choices we make. Some of our decisions can have very significant consequences and totally change the courses of our lives.
I love games like 'Flower,' for example - I thought this was amazing. It's great, it's new, it's different, and it's invented something that didn't exist before.
When you're a writer, you talk about things that move you, that you feel really deep inside you that's something that moves you, and you hope it'll move people, too.
If we keep making things based on violence and platform jumping, you don't need Ellen Page to do this, to be honest. It would be a waste of time and a waste of money.
'Heavy Rain' is really 'Fahrenheit' with more experience, more maturity, and probably a better vision and understanding of how this type of experience can be created.
Some people are shocked when a game evokes real-world issues. But this platform is about becoming the characters, not just seeing them from the outside, like in a film.
The first movies were made by technicians building their own cameras. Movies became an art when technicians worked on the technique and artists took care of the content.
I don't pretend that 'Heavy Rain' will be a revolution, and I don't know if people will love it or hate it. All I can say is that it is definitely going to be different.
Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.
For me, influences really come from everywhere: literature, comics, movies, anime, Internet, science, real-life situations. In fact, I think that writing is just about living.
The right way to enjoy 'Heavy Rain' is really to make one thing because it's going to be your story. It's going to be unique to you. It's really the story you decided to write.
Every time you try to create an experience with a character who doesn't use a gun, doesn't drive a car, doesn't jump off platforms, doesn't solve puzzles, you are taking a risk.
I approach video games the same way I approach theatre, filmmaking, poetry, or painting. I wish more people would take that point of view. It would help the industry to move on.
Cinema became what it is today when technology allowed movie directors and actors to develop emotion. You can see into the eyes of the actors and know when they are going to cry.
I wish more people would be allowed to take risks and try new things and new ideas because new ideas are what this industry desperately needs. I mean, how many shooters can you make?
'Detroit' started based on a book called 'The Singularity is Near' by Ray Kurzweil, which is about this idea that one day there could be machines that are more intelligent than we are.
Some media used to talk about video games only to say how violent or addictive they could be. With 'Heavy Rain,' they talked about the story of the game and the emotions they felt while playing.
'Heavy Rain' responded to a period of my life, things I strongly believed in, things I wanted to suggest or experiment with. I'm really happy with the overall feedback; the reception was a success.
When we talk about technology, often, we talk about the fact that it's going to be cool; it's going to do all these things for us. But at the same time, technology will deeply change our societies.
Working on 'Beyond,' I try to give an explanation to death that's different from the explanation religions have to give. So I made up my own story around all this and how life and death and souls work.
There are many different ways of telling an interactive story, I think. I don't think there's a right one and a wrong one. There are different games telling different types of stories in different ways.
In a movie, you're just passive; you're just watching a story that is told to you. But in games, I saw that you could be the main protagonist: you could be in the shoes of the hero and make the decisions.
We want to continue to explore new possibilities regarding interface and interaction. We experiment different solutions to make interface an important component for immersion rather than just a remote control.
'Heavy Rain' was my baby, my reason to live, and my oxygen for four years. And seeing the successful release of the game has been the most extraordinary reward I could have dreamt of, after years of working in the dark.
There are different games for different people and different expectations. Sometimes you want a great story, and sometimes you don't. I don't believe we should have stories in every single game. Sometimes it doesn't matter.
We're not going to just duplicate 'Heavy Rain,' because we are passionate about innovation and discovery, so we're trying to discover new ground and see how we can move from 'Heavy Rain' and create something even more immersive.
The videogame industry is really weird because it's an industry that's highly conservative. People see the technology evolving every month, but when we talk about concepts, what people really want is for things to remain the same.
On 'Heavy Rain,' the game started with something that happened to me when I lost my son, my six-year-old boy, in a mall. I was so scared. I was curious to see if I could create that impression, that fear, in a game, an interactive experience.
Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.
I'm not a big fan of free to play. And this is just me, but when I buy something, I don't like the idea that I start playing for free, but each time I want to do something a little more interesting or progress, I have to pay. I'd rather pay up front.
Games are quite shy at talking about different things. Most are about facing hordes of monsters or saving the world or whatever; few games actually talk about the real world, about real people, about their relationship, their emotions, their feelings.
If 'Heavy Rain' is a huge commercial success, it will show everybody in the industry that the world is sick of first-person shooters, that people are ready for an adult gaming experience. If we fail, it will say, 'Please keep making the same old stuff.'
I don't differentiate game design and script; it is one and only document. I think that one of the biggest problem with storytelling in games is that people tend to separate story and interactivity. Both should be conceived as one entity, each using the other.
'Indigo Prophecy' already brought a lot of new features to the traditional adventure genre, including the Action system, MultiView, Bending Stories, etc. 'Heavy Rain' will include features like advanced physics and AI, realistic characters and living environments.
As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.
I think the difference between 'Heavy Rain' and 'Beyond' is that 'Heavy Rain' still had a lot of references to films. Especially in the mood, and it was a dark thriller... where, in 'Beyond,' we tried to create something truly original and doesn't refer to anything.
I don't think that photorealism is required to offer emotions. You can have very abstract characters and renderings offering the same type of emotions - look at Pixar movies: they're not photorealistic; they're stylised, and it doesn't prevent emotion from happening.
We believe that we can use interactivity to create meaningful games. Games with emotions and virtual actors telling you something. Resonating with you as a human being, giving you food for thought. We don't need to deliver messages or whatever, just need to create a moment in time that will leave an imprint in your mind.
My goal is for 'Heavy Rain' to leave an imprint in you and change a little bit of who you are and how you see things. Maybe the key characters and key moments will leave a trace in you. If you don't have this ambition as a video-game creator, then maybe you should do something else, because this is what creation and art is about.
Game Over is a very frustrating game convention. In short, it means, 'If you were not good enough or did not play the game the way the designer intended you to play, you should play again until you do it right.' What kind of story could a writer tell where the characters could play the same scene ten times until the outcome is right?
It's like creating an artificial loop saying, 'You didn't play the game the way I wanted you to play, so now you're punished and you're going to come back and play it again until you do what I want you to do.' In an action game, I can get that – why not? It's all about skills. But in a story-driven experience it doesn't make any sense.
Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.
In general, I don't like game mechanics, I mean it's the idea you do the same things through different levels. I think, in my mind, it's an ideas I don't really like because I love to do different things and like to see the story moving on and I like to do different things and different scenes, not do the same thing over and over again. If it involves violence at some point fine, if it makes sense in the context. But violence for the sake of violence, it doesn't mean anything to me anymore.