I've been playing Dragon Age 2. It's a game that i find myself playing and I kind of disconnect my brain. You know the setting, it's fantasy so theres some orc things and dragons and demons to fight. There are towns and wilderness and lots of helpless people that need you to fetch things.

There are main quests and sub-quests but they are nearly all completed by wandering around and hacking stuff into bloody lumps. I find Fable suffers from the same condition. Combat is the root of the game but the combat is kind of dull. The rich fantasy worlds created in Dragon age and fable are rife with politics and intrigue, but as the player you basically behave like a human lawn mower.

When the game does provide a situation that can be resolved through talking, it doesn't feel like I'm taking control of the situation and using my intelligence and reason. Instead it feels as if I'm looking for the right combination. Get it wrong and I return to the default chopping up gameplay.

Fantasy novels have never been as bland as fantasy games. They are (like good science fiction) an insight into the human condition. Fantasy games are combat games with walking about and occasional puzzles interrupting the fights.

Fantasy games have explored the nature of good and evil, how your actions impact a world but they limit my interactions to such an extent that it doesn't feel like my story. I'm the worlds butler, 'fixing' problems by killing them.

Games like Assassins Creed embrace this. You are an assassin so it seems fair that you'll mainly be killing people but still the game drives you to playing the game the way the game wants you to play. As an example - my character has been sent to a camp of bandits and I have to kill them. The game wants me to walk through the gates and fight, and fight and fight till I reach the boss then fight him. If that were me I'd want to sneak up the river and pour poison into the water. As the bandits drink they fall sick then die. Even better although I've solved the bandit problem, I've tainted the water supply that runs down to the village I was protecting. I need to race to warn them or they will suffer worse than letting the bandits continue stealing.

I also must confess that I'm a completist, I want all the sub quests, I hate thinking that I've missed out on something. But when i played the first Dragon Age I promised myself that I wouldn't play in that way. I'd just play by the seat of my pants, stick by my decisions and play through 'naturally'. It's a liberating experience. I'm playing the sequel the same way. I still spend time mopping up the sub-quests as I go but I will live by my decisions. I think the addictive part of a role playing game is the character development. People love to feel like they are getting better. Wouldn't it be nice if they could do that in any other way than just hacking living things to bits?

So to sum up. I'll complete Dargon Age 2 and mainly I'll have enjoyed it, but I want so much more. More sophistication, more choices and I really don't want to play as a butcher just because that is the only choice the game gives me. Brilliant people make games, they are passionate and imaginative but they set their sights too low. I'd just like to say that when they brak the genre open (and it will happen) I'll be hanging around to scoop that up and shout it from the rooftops.

Did I ever mention the future?

Where is the most exciting place on the planet?

The future.

I'm almost tedious in my belief in the future. Anyone who has spoken to me about the future has recieved the tidal wave of opinions and ideas and my general enthusiasm. The thing is the future is up for grabs, it hasn't happened yet and as time passes it can solidify your ambitions.

I'm lucky enough to work in the video-game industry. I've been playing games at home since the mid eighties. Things have changed and not in a predictable way. Every a new generation of machines pops up the game changes. I love that, I welcome the changes and I embrace the future. I can imagine the things that havn't happened yet and let me tell you 'games' are going to be massive. Not just selling millions or having millions of players but actually have cultural significance. The important thing is that we are still at the start of gaming. Its an on-going story and the future isn't set.

If you buy games, play games or make games you have a chance to shape the future and experience things beyond your imagination.

Technology drives our industry. If you give us more power, or better graphics, motion control, improved sound, rumble, plastic guitars or cloud storage we can use them. We build, we innovate and we push forward. We do this because gaming isn't all it can be yet. So while it seems like the best games are made and the story is all sewn up, that is so very far from the truth. More will come and it won't be the way you think.

Not very secretly I'd like to pushing for the future. I want our industry to be more than it is. I want games to be important to everyone, just as music or movies are. (By the way, games ARE NOT movies or music, so really we shouldn't treat them the same way). The future sends electricity up my spine. It gives me energy and I want to channel that back in and make something amazing.

I was very lucky to see David Cage talking about his latest game -Heavy Rain. If you don't know this game it was made exclusively for the PS3 and you should really stop reading this and go and find out a little more about it.


David Cage is on a mission, he is attempting (one game at a time) to prove that games can be a meaningful and powerful way to tell stories. He spoke with passion and conviction and after Heavy Rains critical and commercial success he really has earned that right. As a game designer he took a vision of how he wanted games to be and he has attempted to build it. I'm sure that he would say that his exploration isn't yet complete and his next game will merge game and story even further. That kind of vision and dedication is what games design should be about.





One part of the session Mr Cage talked about starting a game with a story. He said that instead of finding the story late in game development you should begin with the story you want to tell. From that point on you try to involve the player as much as possible in every aspect of the game. This led onto him saying 'mechanics are evil'. Can a game exist without mechanics? Interestingly this isn't really what he was saying. His point was that you should involve the player by allowing them to 'play' as much as possible. In the case of Heavy Rain the game gave the player the chance to 'play' the mundane. Lay a table, brush your teeth, doesn't sound much like a game you'd want to play? Heavy Rain decides which actions you should participate in and creates an action that can be described with a control pad.

The interesting side effect of being so involved with the characters lives that you grow more attached. These are normal people that do normal things just like you. Just like a good story, the game draws you in by connecting you with the characters and gaining your trust and sympathy.

Heavy Rain has a very intense realistic graphic style. It wants you to believe that the action on screen is real, and you are involved with a real story. The connection with the player must be as easy as possible and any other approach to the graphics would take some acclimatisation. So the realistic graphics are an important part of the design.

The interesting thing is the choice of story. A murder mystery is interesting but of all they story types it is most game-like. As you progress through the story you cannot help guessing who dunnit. The best who dunnits spend most of the time disguising the culprit but leaving the clues necessary for uncovering the plot later in the story. Heavy Rain goes one step further by getting you to play the killer. Because Heavy Rain is a game the disguise is even more deceptive. The game connects you to the characters that you are playing and even allows you to behave 'out of character'. In a story the characters behave as the author allows, in a game the player can impose their behaviour on the characters they control and fool themselves into disguising the clues that are important to the story.

A good story has a beginning, middle and an end. To tell a traditional story the author normally has a hero that experiences events and survives until the final act. The hero can then unravel the whole of the mystery. Heavy rain's story is controlled by the player and because it is a game they can fail as well as succeed. How can the story be revealed in a satisfying way if the hero dies before the tale is told. Heavy Rain fixes this by telling a number of inter-twined stories. No matter what happens one of the selection of characters will survive, not least of which you play the killer. Every possible outcome of the story is covered.

David Cage talked about an 'elastic story'. To explain this bluntly it's like a choose your own adventure book (where the player turns to a new page when they have made a decision). The scenes in Heavy Rain were cut into many smaller scenes and between each scene the game allows the player to intervene and choose the course of action. No matter what the player chooses to do the story can progress (you can see why multiple characters are so important to this 'elastic storytelling'). So David Cage gets to tell his story but he allows a player to play inside, and to do this there is a meticulous plot. Every scene is played out and many outcomes are woven in. The player has a much broader sense of freedom in the game, and the cost of this is building huge quantities of content that may never be seen. It is a brilliant effect but it is a brute force approach.

I don't want to complain about Heavy Rain, I find it a fascinating game, pushing at the boundaries of what games can achieve. What bothers me is that the freedom is still limited. You cannot do any more in Heavy Rain than you can in any other game. The advantage of Heavy Rain is that it has built more of the alternatives. But the player is still experiencing the things that David Cage planned out for them, their only choices are the ones that were put into the game.

Interestingly there are several scenes in the game that require the player to react quickly and perform some more conventional game like actions. These events are normally big ones and can result in the characters death, if the player dosen't succeed. In a game these kinds of things are common place. But in a traditional game the consequences are normally inconsequential. the player can re-attempt and the death is just a short term obstacle. In a story the impact of a characters death is of huge significance. Here Mr Cage supports the story over the player convenience. It's bold and confirms the importance of story in this game. The player can always re-play if they want to explore other paths in the story. The only thing that jars for me here is that so many of the choices made in Heavy Rain were brilliant for introducing games to a new audience. The lack of 'mechanics', the strong plot to drive players through the game, the main-stream plot. The parts of the game that require gamer reflexes seem to be out of place - although they do fit into the context of the story.

Heavy Rain is a marvelous experiment. It works on so many levels but there is still room for more development. I'm sure Mr Cage will continue to push and explore the role of story in game. Anyone interested in the future of games should experience Heavy Rain and let it simmer in their brain for a while. While it may not be the future, it is a powerful attempt to move games out of the chase for the latest hit genres.