unit 3 essay- heavy rain and it's uncanny reality
TRANSCRIPT
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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)