Realism vs Believability

(Quoted from Artful Gamer: Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?)

I think Michael puts it best when he writes, “The game is at odds with itself from beginning to end. It persistently reminds me that neither I nor my avatar possess consequential autonomy. In Heavy Rain, the game itself controls the game, and that doesn’t feel much like interactive drama to me.”

When a game attempts to “simulate” rather than “express” an experience, it loses its ability to artistically exaggerate or highlight some aspects of the experience over others.

Not only that – but Heavy Rain tries to go one step further – it does not only want realistic visuals, but realistic kinesthetics. Instead of having the player direct the character at emotionally important moments crucial to the development of the story, the player is required to puppeteer every banal minutiae of everyday life, from pulling out a wallet to checking a watch. None of these micro-actions express anything important about the character’s personality or her/his plight. As a result, I cannot distinguish between what’s important and what’s window-dressing.

Stephen Biesty accomplishes a feat of artistic consistency that any comic book artist could hope for: when I’m standing on the orlop deck watching the deckmates go about their business, I look at the mast and think, “Hey, that mast goes way down into the ship!” My imagination makes the transition between each deck of the ship for me; Biesty completes the image by showing me the next section of the mast, just as my imagination hoped. Stowaway! gives me a sense of agency by allowing me to help imagine parts of the scene for myself.

The surgeon’s amputation feels more real to me than any murder scene in Heavy Rain, because Stowaway! boils the experience down to its essential elements.


Imagining Makes It Real
That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of how talented voice acting can turn a boring and hackneyed character into a lovable rogue. Without stylization that highlights certain features of the character/scene over others, and allows the player to complete the rest of the image, your game will be profoundly tedious at best – and totally unbelievable at worst.

--- From the Comments

[ Guttertalk ]
Whether or not “Calvin and Hobbes” is real is a banal question, one not worth asking. The fact is that we connect with it in a way that is not real yet still terribly meaningful. Yet, I think that some game developers are too focused on experience as the real rather than as the meaningful. Part of that stems from an obsession on immersion in gaming. Yet, identification is more important than immersion and doesn’t require as much overhead and extraneous detail.

IMO, control is a more meaningful differentiation for games than immersion–to control what a character does, looks like, and behaves, to control a story.

In a sense, then, games that emphasize realistic details have a harder time creating a game that gamers can identify with. It might be counter-intuitive to some, that an emphasis on realism makes immersion and identification more difficult to experience.

[ Chris ]
Identification – to me – happens through affective (feelingful) dialogue and memorable characters – that’s a quickly disappearing art.
[To clarify one thing - I am tempted to quibble over language (ie. I think that anything meaningful is experienced as 'real' to us) but that won't get us much of anywhere. The fact is that simulation is no replacement for good storytelling!]

That is pretty much the same argument that I’m making: a good artist knows what to accentuate/exaggerate and what to drop completely.

[ Andrew ]
... besides the fact that most of these interactions are not required, they do connect us to the character. I have a sneaking suspicion that when I drink some coffee with Jayden it actually helps him battle the addiction, and I’m quite certain that avoiding taking any drinks as Shelby is the best approach. I even tried to show caring for Ethan by having him wash up a bit and look out over the motel railing in between trials, just to keep some sanity. Did that matter? Probably not, but I enjoyed my ability to bring some pensiveness and consideration to the characters if I so chose.