Quantic Dream Gearing Up to Engage in Self-Censorship

Coming hot on the heels of my last post on Quantic Dream’s upcoming adventure title Heavy Rain is this interview with executive producer Guillaume de Fondaumiere, wherein he plays through a few previously unseen scenes from the game for the audience and also possibly contradicts what I said on Saturday.

The comments in question occur at about the 5 minute and 7:40 mark, where Guillaume breaks from talking about the game features and instead addresses its content, saying that the title revolves around serious and disturbing events and yet the company “didn’t want to create a game that would shock audiences, but we wanted to tell a story for adults.”

What this entails comes to light near the end of the video, where Guillaume reveals that the title will be “slightly adapted” for releases around the world (with specific mention of the Japanese version due to the audience being addressed in the interview).

“I don’t think the changes make a big difference, those are really marginal things.  We felt the need to adapt the content to the culture,” Guillaume says, before going on to back up Saturday’s post and say that Heavy Rain could continue to battle against the public perception of video games as merely toys instead of a serious medium of expression.

Exactly what these changes will be are not addressed or even hinted at, but this bit of self-censorship could be motivated both by events like the Australian Left 4 Dead 2 debacle as well as a way to appease Sony’s attempts to appeal to a wider audience.  The issue Sony had with the title several months ago concerned a sex scene that occurs over the course of the story, which game writer David Cage stubbornly refused to compromise.

Heavy Rain Will Turn Video Game Sexuality on its Head

Madison Paige, one of the playable characters of Heavy Rain, as depicted in the trailer

It’s a slow news day, so I decided to dedicate this post to something that serves as food for thought due less to content control in video games and instead on how the medium’s being explored as a platform for expression and as an art form.

By which I mean I’m going to be writing about a woman performing a striptease.

Kotaku.com got their hands on an article covering an interview with Quantic Dream, the developer of the upcoming adventure title Heavy Rain. Described as an “interactive movie,” the game centers around four separate protagonists who are each pursuing a serial murderer known as the Origami Killer. During the course of the game, journalist Madison Paige is forced to strip for a mob boss in a way that is decidedly not meant to titillate the player.

 While the Kotaku article is merely commenting on an article that, itself, served as commentary on a separate article, it still picked up on the excellent subversion Quantic Dream is engaging in compared to the rest of the industry.  The original (male) interviewer said during the course of his discussion with Quantic Dream employee David Cage that he felt distinctly uncomfortable performing the striptease, despite the fact that he was doing so through a video game character.  Cage’s response was an ecstatic “Fantastic… if we managed to make you feel uncomfortable it is because at some point we made you believe you were Madison.”  Kotaku’s take on the article was that its writer, G. Christopher Williams, is saying that “the breakthrough lies not necessarily in a mature depiction of sex, but in delivering a new perspective on how it is understood, even if it means forcing someone in an opposite gender role to see its more degrading side.”

This is a far cry from how sex and sexuality is treated in most video games.  Readers who have played the God of War series should spot the difference immediately, given how the games treat its own depictions of Kratos’ conquests (mildly comedic as they are)–the scenes in question are played to appeal to a male audience, with an explicit reward given for participating.  Meanwhile, the upcoming Bayonetta incorporates the female main character’s nudity into basic gameplay.  Due to her “clothing” actually being formed from her supernaturally mutable hair, which she uses as part of her attacks, players are rewarded for stringing up combos (and thus dedicating more of Bayonetta’s hair to punching enemies in the face) by exposing more of her skin.

(Warning: pixilation)

Then again, these are all examples of the effect of video game sexuality on female characters.  I don’t remember reading any complaints when one of the in-game rewards for Devil May Cry 3 was the option to have pretty boy protagonists Dante and Vergil run around with their shirts off the whole game.  Perhaps we simply haven’t advanced yet as a society to be raising a stink about objectifying the male figure?