The odessa steps, Modern Warfare 2, and Heavy Rain

Playing through Heavy Rain immediately brought up thoughts about the immensely disappointing Modern Warfare 2. For me, the unification between the two can be traced back to the Odessa Steps sequence in the 1926 Sergei Eisenstein masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin. For those that haven’t seen the film or at least the memorable scene of the film, the brief plot is that of faceless Cossacks gunning down helpless victims  in the midst of a celebration. The scene has been parodied to death and imitated in many other movies, notably the ending shootout of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Nevertheless, the seen remains timeless and still emotionally evocative due to Eisenstein and his remarkable theory of montage. Montage, in a nutshell, is the practice of editing together different images in order to convey a certain emotional response; it is not only bound to training sequences in sports movies.

The sequence itself is not that long, lasting only 7 or so minutes. However, In that brief period, a wide variety of characters are quickly introduced. We see a women with a parasail, a women with her child, a man with no legs, and old women with glasses, a baby carriage. This comprises the first minute of the seven. The next six are devoted to the fleeing and the carnage of these people by the guns of the faceless Cossacks. Through the use of montage, the editing and direction of Eisenstein, an incredibly deep connection is established in such brief moments that make this onslaught all the more horrific. The Cossacks are unknown, seen only from the back, and are not the focus of the scene. The attention is paid directly to the common people who are butchered.

In seven minutes, this sequence does more than both Heavy Rain, which drunkenly indulges in attempting to establish emotional responses and Modern Warfare 2, which doesn’t even bother to identify the people murdered in the airport scene. Rather, in the scene from Modern Warfare 2, the player is asked to identify with the killers and not the killed. As a result, the desperate attempt at controversy and attention fall flat because no emotional attachment is made with the player on the repercussions of their actions. What would have made this sequence actually work would have been that one minute part of the Odessa Steps. Have the player walk through the airport, noticing a family waiting for their flight, or the women traveling with her crying child, or anything that would have identified the nameless crowd.

Heavy Rain, on the other hand, goes to far in trying to establish its emotional connections that it beats the player over the head with trite sentimentality. The game opens with a father, Ethan, playing with his two children. He carries them, runs them around on his shoulders, engages in a  sword fight, and help prepare their birthday party. Then, they go to a mall where he buys one of them a red balloon, loses his child in a crowd, and watches in horror as his son gets hit by a car and dies. This all sounds like it should work on paper, because it makes logical sense. Establish an emotional connection with the player to the characters by having them live mundane lives until tragedy strikes. The problem lies in the skill of the game creator, David Cage, and his storytelling abilities.

This section of the game goes on for about 30 minutes in an 8 hour game. There are other sections of the game that are similar in muted tone. A few months after the death of his child, Ethan is divorced and has care of his other remaining child for the night. He can, if the player decides to, cook dinner, play with his child, force his child to do homework, let his child watch television or stay up late. This probably lasts 15 minutes. And there are other many more scenes;  spend five minutes making a sandwich for a prostitute, give a crying baby a bottle, and whatnot. The problem isn’t directly with the scenes, but their excess and poorly written nature. Each of these moments is begging the player on hands and knees to notice their sentimentality and their unique existence in video games.

When you give a player choice in a story driven game, it can undermine the intentions of its creator and reveal the game to be shallow. If the player in his control of Ethan chooses to not play with his children, help with setting up the birthday party, ignores his hungry child and doesn’t feed him dinner, or complete any of the five trails a serial killer has set up in order to find his son who is later kidnapped, there are no penalties. These scenes of sentimentality become even more false when the actions of its main protagonist are ignored. What is left is a game that has its manipulations of emotions so shallow that an inch beneath their surface reveals an empty abyss.

There exist moments when Heavy Rain succeeds and succeeds admirably. However, these issues involving its story and manipulation of the player reveal what may be a bigger problem in gaming where choice confronts artistic integrity. Other problems exist, such as the treatment of minorities in the game and its use of gratuitous female nudity, but those comments will be saved for another post at another time. Heavy Rain remains an intriguing, if deeply flawed, interactive experience.