Technology equals engagement? It’s not that simple.

November 23rd, 2013, 09:46 Posted By: wraggster

David Cage, Quantic Dream’s CEO, sounded just about the only bum notes at Sony’s PlayStation 4 unveiling in February. After showing off his studio’s latest technological leap forward with a tech demo of an expressively wrinkled geriatric face, Cage drew a straight line between player emotion and character polycount. Heavy Rain’s Madison, he told us, was made of 15,000 polygons; Beyond’s Jodie Holmes comprises a whopping 30,000. “In a medium like ours,” he said, “technology is very important. It is what we rely on to get the player emotionally involved.”It’s a line that says much about the way Quantic Dream makes games, and why Cage is so often criticised for not understanding what makes players tick. In the days that followed his turn on Sony’s stage, he was the subject of a predictable glut of angry posts claiming that it’s mechanics, not processing power, that inspire emotion in players. Yet you don’t have to look too far in order to find a host of games that fly in the face of those players’ claims while also countering Cage’s argument that processing power is king.Take Gone Home, for instance. The Fullbright Company’s debut opens with a girl returning from a trip overseas to find her family’s new homestead empty, and she spends the game’s slender 100-minute runtime piecing together the story by examining objects in the many empty rooms of her vast new family seat. This is a world almost entirely bereft not only of mechanics, but also of animation. You can move and look, pick up objects and rotate them, doors swing open, lights flicker into life when cords are pulled, and that’s about it. Yet this is a far more emotionally resonant game than not only Beyond, but almost every other game you’ll play this year, a feat it achieves by simple virtue of a story that is sweetly told and intelligently dispensed.

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