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CGAA UNIT 3 – ENVIRONMENT PROJECT ESSAY

Investigate into Quantic

Dream’s ‘Heavy Rain’

(2010) using Freud’s idea of

‘The Uncanny’ and how this

impacts on the perception

of the videogame in

question.

By Emma Foster

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Introduction

This essay explores Freud’s idea of ‘the uncanny’ in relation to the 2010 videogame ‘Heavy Rain’. Particular interest and investigation will look at the impact of Heavy Rain’s character representation, use of reality-effects and how the occurrence of glitching impact on the game having an uncanny reality. A range of sources will be used to aid and inspire the investigation including Tzvertan Todorov’s The Fantastic: a structural approach to a literary genre (1975), David Surman’s Gaming, Uncanny Realism & Technical Demonstration (2008), Rolande Barthes’ Critical Essays (1972) and interview with Quantic Dream’s David Cage in Edge Magazine (2006). The assignment begins by defining the key ideas of the uncanny, and ambiguous, then goes on to investigate how the uncanny impacts on ‘Heavy Rain’ such as through the uncanny valley. In conclusion, the discussion will seek to summarise the importance of the uncanny as part of ‘Heavy Rain’ and how it shapes interpretation....

Uncanny is a 'species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well

known and had long been familiar.' (Freud: 1919)

Ambiguous is ‘having more than one possible interpretation or meaning, difficult to

understand or classify; obscure’ (Collins English Dictionary, 2012)

Main Body

‘Heavy Rain’ is a hybrid videogame of interactive drama and psychological thriller

developed by Quantic Dream as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.

The game follows four central characters that are all in

some way connected to the events and mystery of the

notorious Origami Killer who uses lengthy times of rainfall

to drown his victims. The player’s objective is to piece

together the puzzle to lead them to finding out who the

killer is as well as saving his latest potential victim who just

so happens to be one of the main character’s son, but there

is a catch, each decision and action the player makes

determines the final outcome of several possible ones the

game offers…

‘Heavy Rain’ is well known for its motion capture to generate realistic looking

characters and the atmosphere its Hopper esc environments create as well, as the highly

interactive gaming experience it allows through button pushing and motion controller

technology. However, there is a continuing debate into whether Quantic Dream have

pushed their game to be so realistic that it has travelled into the other side of the spectrum,

Figure 1- Heavy Rain (2010) Poster

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into the uncanny valley yet an interview in Edge Magazine with Quantic Dream CEO David

Cage permits us to believe that they would not have approached their production any other

way, instead it being their focus to engage their target audience as best they could through

realism. ‘I also believe that realism makes our media more instantly accessible to a wider

audience. A lot of people have found it hard to be interested in characters that don’t relate

directly to what they know.’ (Cage: 2006)

In spite of this the realism Cage has created could have an opposite and uncanny

effect though this fact that the audience cannot ‘relate directly to what they know’. It is

possible that the photorealism that inhabits ‘Heavy Rain’ alienates the audience because

even though what is produced looks realistic ‘the realist text- in whatever of the many

modes of realism it exists- has a distinctive, even unique, epistemic status: it represents

things as they are, it claims to tell the truth.’ (Lapsley & Westlake: 2006) What theorists

Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake are saying is that a media text- in our case a

videogame- is a representation of reality, it tries to suggest that what you are seeing could

be real. However, it isn’t and when the text fails to make us believe it could be real we

disengage from it. Take the loading screens of

‘Heavy Rain’ for instance, the close up shots of

the characters’ faces twitching and blinking as

we wait to continue the game may look realistic

but as we sit there waiting we start to notice the

jittering of inaccurate movement and this makes

the game lose its realistic qualities, it has tried

too hard to be realistic and has carried over into

the uncanny valley because of it. We can no

longer relate with this component of the game because it doesn’t ‘relate directly to what

we know’, the element of what we know being human expressions.

Quantic Dream does something out of the ordinary when it comes to game

development; the regular close up shots of characters to try and allow the audience to

become emotionally connected to them. Yet this could have backfired when related to the

uncanny. ‘Historically we see them at a distance, and in settings, whether military,

fantastical or otherwise- in which play dictates that the body be placed in the flow of

continuous action.’ (Surman: 2008) When it comes to keeping a portion of a game realistic

it is common place to keep it far enough away

so that it cannot be scrutinised and therefore,

not suggested to be uncanny. In relation to

shots of characters, highly realistic games that

do this are games like Mass Effect and

Battlefield. In Battlefield, the body of the main

character is not visible through the first

person camera but the bodies of the other

Figure 2- An example of one of Heavy Rain’s loading screens

Figure 3- Typical layout of characters in a realistic but not uncanny game, Battlefield 3 (2011)

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characters are far enough away that we do not criticise the way they move similarly, in Mass

Effect we only see the back of the main character’s head and again the rest of the characters

are not close enough to assess. However, Heavy Rain’s characters are close enough to

analyse ‘and so the image health underlies the critique of realism… We know the

proportions of the face and body so completely through the experience of everyday life

that a highly realistic image of human form must comply

with these conventions, or else be felt on a deep cognitive

level to be unsettling or unacceptable.’ (Surman: 2008) A

key example of close up camera work on the character’s

body is the nude shower scene of character Madison Paige.

This scene is an example of realism turning into the uncanny

because we know the structure of the female human and

how females walk, or even that everyone walks in a unique

way yet there is something wrong about Madison, she walks

too perfect which makes her look stiff, not naturally human

and her body is too symmetrical which makes her look

artificial. The fact that she is nude doesn’t help either, with layers of clothes the wrongness

of her nature would be masked and she would exist as realistic. We critic the scene just as a

doctor examines a patient to see what is wrong with them but the moment we do this and

what we see does not comply to real conventions we are alienated from realism. ‘The

familiar is bent back on itself, twisted, such that it becomes strange- familiar- yet strange.’

(Holmes: 2010) We are familiar with the fact that this is a female human body but to us it is

a representation of this not a real one and that makes it strange to us because other than

that it looks like it could have been real.

Another aspect of ‘Heavy Rain’ that is strange to us even though it looks real is some

objects placed in the environments. There isn’t anything perceivably wrong with the way

they look unlike the characters such as Madison Paige yet, there is something odd about the

presence of some objects that otherwise normally would be considered complementary to

these environments. The reason why they are perceivably strange is because in a game that

uses a lot of button pushing, motion controller waving and timed reactions to simulate the

actual human movements to do the onscreen activities- in the long run making the player

feel they have embodied the

characters because of the

realism- when a minority of

objects in highly interactive

scenes of the game cannot be

interacted with they feel out of

touch with the scene because

they are in fact reality-effects.

Objects used to set the scene,

Figure 4- Uncanny perfection of Heavy Rain character Madison Paige

Figure 5- Interactive apparatus in playground.

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to make it seem realistically conceivable. ‘While a virtual world may have a horizon, light,

and gravity, without objects it would remain, for us, an utterly alien landscape… The

objects that constitute reality also conspire to render it uncanny. This is due to their

function as reality-effects in videogames’ 3D virtual worlds.’ (Holmes: 2010) If this was any

other game these reality-effects would be easier to accept because it is normal for them to

have many objects that cannot be interacted with however, because ‘Heavy Rain’ is so

interactive these reality-effects make the game dishonest in terms of realism and what we

know so therefore we are

disturbed by it. Take the park

scene of the game for instance, as

central character Ethan Mars it is

your job to cheer up and entertain

his son Shaun. One of the ways

you have to entertain him is to

play on the playground apparatus

with him and this you do, however as displayed in many videos of gamers playing this

particular sequence, it is common place to attempt to play on all of the apparatus yet the

signal for interaction only appears on screen for some of them which seems so disturbing

especially in a child’s playground where what we know is busy and high in interaction with

anything and everything, even the floor and so this renders it uncanny. As theorist Rolande

Barthes writes in his theory on the reality-effect ‘Encountering such an object, one becomes

unsure of the reality they belong to… empty forms irresistibly invite a content.’ (Barthes:

1972, 1989) This is especially relatable to the ‘Heavy Rain’ playground scene as the empty

forms there, with no evidence that life is using them are not relatable to a typical

playground and so these forms invite life but do not possess it and because of this, the

familiarity of the playground is there, but it is interrupted by these empty forms and we find

ourselves frantically wanting some life to emit in relation to these objects. Because of this

we are not sure of which reality we are in during this game, it has been pulled out from

under our feet because of the unsettling uncanny objects that sit there yes, doing the

purpose of looking right but not serving the correct interaction purpose.

Reality-effects of ‘Heavy Rain’ can further act to destabilise it and declare it uncanny

through glitching yet the way this does so is not always detectible in the game however,

there are extreme cases that cannot go unnoticeable. The world of ‘Heavy Rain’ is fairly

ordinary in that there aren’t any superpowers, magic or mass amounts of shooting. It is a

game that simulates the average world with average people except the serial killer plot it

adds and because of this, when things happen in the game that do not commit to the

ordinary the audience is automatically backtracked from their ability to view the game as

real, instead questioning if they saw that and even trying to find a logical explanation for the

event as it doesn’t sit well with them, it being something they do not know. There cannot be

an uncanny realism without the element of the familiar and ordinary being there firstly. ‘The

Figure 6- Apparatus in playground not possible to interact with.

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uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long

familiar.’ (Freud: 1919) In ‘Heavy Rain’ we recognise the environments and characters as

what they are simulated to be, possible real life places and people but when a glitching

occurrence happens we find ourselves battling inside ourselves between the laws of reality

we know and what ‘Heavy Rain’ is claiming to make us know. Up to this point the game has

possibly made us believe the realism and its laws it creates ‘however, when these facilities

fail, the reality of the game world flickers and becomes uncanny… Horror games harness

this uncanny effect to their benefit, but in other games these failures have an adverse

effect, destabilizing the very symbolic construction of the game’s reality…Glitches are

ruptures and irruptions in this reality-effect, and are, therefore, in the context of the

virtual worlds in which they appear uncanny.’ (Holmes: 2010) A classic example of glitching

in ‘Heavy Rain’ which ruptures the reality is key character Lauren Winter’s strange

movements throughout a scene, during

both live action and the cut scene

elements. We see her whizz across the bed

too fast to be humanly possible, suddenly

appear in front of the mirror and then

whizz back to the bed. Like writer Eben

Holmes states, horror games harness these

strange effects to their benefit, and if

‘Heavy Rain’ was a horror game we would

accept it, possibly assuming Lauren was

some kind of supernatural being, perhaps a ghost. However, Lauren ‘leads back to what is

known of old and long familiar’ she is just an average female in an average home dealing

with the event of her child going missing. We accept this in our laws of reality so when this

happens in the game we have come to accept realistically this acceptation crumbles

resulting in an uncanny reality because this glitch is frightening to see. If it were in our

reality- which we had come to accept ‘Heavy Rain’ into we would find it extremely hard to

find a reason for it and so are alienated from the reality.

This also follows theorist Tzvetan Todorov’s work on the fantastic. ‘The fantastic

occupies the duration of this uncertainty… the fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a

person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.’

(Todorov: 1975) We are uncertain of Lauren’s realism because of the unexplainable event

occurring and this uncertainty is the fantastic taking place. We do not see people move at

this incredible speed and appear suddenly in places in our reality, it just doesn’t follow our

conventions and laws archetypal to our reality and therefore we start to view ‘Heavy Rain’

as atypical.

Figure 7- Lauren Winter uncanny activity.

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Conclusion

‘Heavy Rain’ is an example of a videogame whose producers were extremely

attentive on achieving a high polished realistic looking game which would make it more

accessible to an audience because it was something they could relate to. However, in the

attempt to achieve this they have paid so much attention to trying to achieve this realism

that it has in ways such as strange glitching resulting in events of the fantastic and

characters being too perfect that they cross over to the uncanny valley, lost its realism.

Instead it has become a videogame which tries too hard to be realistic overlooking key laws

of what is common place as realism in the process and the end result is a game that has

components that instead of making it more accessible to an audience, alienate them from

the game more because there are parts such as reality-effects that unsettle them and make

them question what reality this game is and this isn’t something someone enjoys

experiencing while playing a game. It is not our want to experience the strange and

frightening through uncanny reality instead and audience likes to ‘relate directly to what

they know’ and unfortunately ‘Heavy Rain’ just doesn’t achieve this.

Bibliography

Barthes. Rolande, Howard. Richard (1989) “The Rustle of Language”, University of California Press,

U.S.A. (Accessed 16/01/2012)

Barthes. Rolande, (1972) “Critical Essays”, Northwestern University Press, U.S.A. (Accessed

16/01/2012)

Cage. David, (2006) Edge Magazine, No. 50 (Accessed 16/01/2012)

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Collins English Dictionary. (2012). Dictionary.com.

http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=ambiguous&ia=ced (Accessed 16/01/2012)

Freud. Sigmund, (1919) “Essay on The Uncanny”, Penguin Classics, 1st Edition, London (Accessed

16/01/2012)

Holmes. Eben, (2010) “Strange Reality: Glitches and Uncanny Play”, Eludamos, U.S.A. (Accessed

16/01/2012)

Surman. David, (2008) “Gaming, Uncanny Realism and Technical Demonstration”, Swan Quake, U.K.

(Accessed 16/01/2012)

Todorov. Tzvetan, (1975) “The Fantastic: A structural Approach to a Literary Genre”, Cornell

University Press, U.S.A. (Accessed 16/01/2012)

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. Heavy Rain (2010) Poster From: Heavy Rain Directed by: David Cage. [game poster] On

defunctgames.com http://www.defunctgames.com/pic/covercritic/covercritic074b.jpg (Accessed

16/01/2012)

Fig. 2. An example of one of Heavy Rain’s loading screens (2010) From: Heavy Rain Directed by:

David Cage. [game still] On blogspot.com

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_u1us0XNe7yc/SyqlkZT828I/AAAAAAAAANw/8gd9uZT52M0/s400/HR1.JP

G (Accessed 16/01/2012)

Fig. 3. Typical layout of characters in a realistic but not uncanny game, Battlefield 3 (2011) From:

Battlefield 3 Developed by: EA Digital Illusions CE. [game still] On gamerant.com

http://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/Battlefield-3-First-Gameplay-Trailer.jpeg (Accessed

16/01/2012)

Fig. 4. Uncanny perfection of Heavy Rain character Madison Paige (2010) From: Heavy Rain Directed

by: David Cage. [game still] On nfamousgamers.com http://www.nfamousgamers.com/featured-

blogs/arcee-blog/820-heavy-rain-to-feature-nudity.html (Accessed 16/01/2012)

Fig. 5. Interactive apparatus in playground (2010) From: Heavy Rain Directed by: David Cage.

[game still] On mahalo.com http://www.mahalo.com/heavy-rain-walkthrough/ (Accessed

16/01/2012)

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Fig. 6. Apparatus in playground not possible to interact with (2010) From: Heavy Rain Directed

by: David Cage. [game still] On mahalo.com http://www.mahalo.com/heavy-rain-walkthrough/

(Accessed 16/01/2012)

Fig. 7. Lauren Winter uncanny activity (2010) From: Heavy Rain Directed by: David Cage. [game

still] On youtube.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzCNau7WQDE (Accessed 16/01/2012)