Beneath a canopy of crucifixes, I train my gun on a cowering creep with a major hard–on for Jesus. He’s a freak, but he’s morally innocent. My choices stand as follows: spare him and potentially never save my kidnapped son, or blow his brains out and get one step closer to my little boy. My options have been laid out by his captor, and I have five seconds to pick. My hands shake and so does the gun. My son, or my moral purity?
This is “Heavy Rain,” a video game by developer Quantic Dream. “Heavy Rain” is not “Call of Duty” or ”Skyrim.” It’s essentially an interactive film—a psycho network of decisions winding through a narrative about a sadistic child killer and four (supposed) innocents caught in his web. It’s a video game at its core, but it presents itself as the full integration of gameplay and narrative that many douchebags—er, critics—say video games will never realize.
This sentiment led me to rage–scream “Roger Ebert is a fucking idiot!” to my entire ENGL 260 class. A girl had quoted Ebert’s famously polarizing statement that video games “can never be art,” and I reacted by instantly pounding on my desk and dropping an f–bomb on the guy’s grave. Ebert says poetry is art. Film is art. But video games? They will never be film. They will never amount to anything. He’s the mean parent gaming never had.
I wish Ebert had been around at the Tribeca Film Festivial this year to see Quantic Dream’s next game, “Beyond: Two Souls,” featured as an official selection. The game stars Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe as it charts the life of a girl from age eight to twenty–five. It features drug addiction, suicide, an intensive treatment of poverty and the kind of decisions that made “Heavy Rain” a sort of cathartic ethical nightmare. And it’s the damn future, Roger Ebert.
Gaming matters more than film. As cave paintings eventually became the Gutenberg Bible, and Fireside Chats eventually became film, so will film someday flip over and submit to gaming. Sure, you can passively absorb violence through “Pulp Fiction,” sucking down the plot through a neat little straw, or you can hold an innocent man at gunpoint with the fate of your son in the balance and look at yourself—at the violence inside of you—instead.
But that’s pretty uncomfortable. You might cry. You might feel sick to your stomach. God forbid, you might shoot the poor guy. That might be your gametime decision, and how would you live with yourself? Besides, gaming’s for nerds, yeah? It’s niche. “Grend Theft Auto V” made $800 million in its first day, while the final Harry Potter movie made $400 million in its first weekend. Totally niche. Ignore it.
Or, you could put down the remote and pick up a controller. Take the feeding tube out of your mouth.
I blew the Jesus nut’s brains out. And it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
