Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast by students enrolled in Film Studies/Gender Studies 404. Students will discuss topics of gender and identity in In Sound Mind, What Remains of Edith Finch, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
Hello and welcome to our first podcast episode. I
am Kyle Lloyd. I'm here with Miranda. Hi, I'm
Miranda Fullman. And today we will be discussing
Heavy Rain, Pain and Petracor. Heavy Rain was a
game developed by Quantic Dream, but published by
Sony in 2010. And is one of the leading games back
in the day. Obviously you have basic control over
your character in most instances. But if your
character wants to do something, there's a quick
time event for it. Our first topic is about how
video games have handled serious topics like
mental health and mental illness. I'm a great, I
love games. You know, I'm a gamer. You know, I
have played video games for as long as I can
remember. And a big theme in a lot of video games
that I've been playing recently has been mental
illness and mental health awareness and stuff like
that. They are very great mediums to express sides
of stories that nobody really can see. And
generally, mental illness is one of the most
important problems that young Americans deal with
today. So often we will seek solitude or seek
refuge from our crazy, busy lives as college
students and dive into our games. And so that we
can, you know, get immersed, you know, get a
different feel, a different experience. A lot of
mental illnesses within these games, especially
heavy rain are brought to the forefront. They are
heavily important and they are depicted in
incredible scrutiny. They are, you really examine
the intricacies of what it means to be depressed,
anxiety written, and any other mental illness
under the sun basically because there's a ton of
them out there. But yeah, and heavy rain is one of
those games that really centers around the
characters and how they feel, especially with
their addictions in mind as well. So today we will
be, you know, making some connections here and
there from what we've learned in class. And we
will be trying to come to a better understanding
of our game through a conversation. And hopefully
you guys who are watching this or listening to
this will learn something. So throughout heavy
rain, we saw a lot of mental illness, a lot of
traumatic events happening, especially with, you
know, each character has their own stuff going on,
their four main characters in the game. Three of
which are, or two of which are officers of the
law, somewhat one of them is an FBI agent and the
other one is a PI as well as a father and a
journalist. So let's get started with our first
character, Ethan, the family man himself. Now
Ethan and his wife and his kids had a happy
marriage until their son's eighth birthday. They
all went to the mall, Jason, Ethan, his wife and
Sean and Ethan loses Jason and Jason, you know,
he's lost and we don't find him. We don't see him
until he's across the street and Jason comes
running across the street and what happens? He
gets flattened. He gets absolutely wrecked. And
then after that, we get a little time jump about
three years, I believe. And at this point, Ethan
has been separated from his wife obviously due to
the loss of their child and is trying to salvage
whatever he has left with his other son, Sean.
Ethan's been going through some crazy stuff. He's
been having blackouts. He's been feeling intensely
guilty for the loss of his son, blaming himself
for it obviously because, you know, there was
nothing, even though there was nothing that he
could have done in that situation to stop that car
from hitting his son. And, you know, ever since
Ethan, Ethan's been having some crazy blackouts.
He has been blacking out when there's a scene
specifically in which he is at the park with Sean
and he blacks out, he completely loses Sean. And,
you know, that's just that's, you know, a parent's
worst nightmare, especially after losing one kid,
you know, you do not want to deal with losing
another. So that's why that's why it makes the
circumstances in which Ethan has to perform so
dire because he's, you know, Sean's been kidnapped
by a serial killer dubbed the origami killer for
leaving a little origami figure on his victims
hands as well as an orchid on their chest. Or
throughout the game, we can see that, you know,
this is a tremendous, tremendous, you know, wall
that's in front of him. And basically, you know,
Ethan's story is to sum it all up, I'd say it is
for like how far will you go to save your loved
ones? Would you put yourself in danger
potentially? Would you put other people in danger
to save your loved ones? You know, and that's the
biggest theme. I think a key thing with Ethan's
story is not only the way in which he uses his own
fear and anger and grief to continue trying to
save Sean, but also just the ways in which he goes
about interacting with the other adults in the
story. He often interacts with Madison, one of our
other characters. And it's very standoffish, both
in part of his fear that he working with another
person will put Sean more at risk, but also
because he has been so put by himself in the
situation with his wife refusing to help or stay
calm with the police refusing to work with him.
That it's a very interesting way of portraying how
mental illness and social stigma around people in
this situation can be depicted in a video game.
Yeah, and just like Miranda said, you know, it is
a very interesting story, especially when we bring
in our other characters. Moving forward, we would
like to discuss mental health and heavy rain.
Pretty much every single main character in the
game suffers from some form of mental illness.
Ethan, I would probably classify him as both
having major depressive disorder and also general
anxiety disorder with bounce of paranoia. And I
don't know what we would classify his blackouts
as. I think that is a harder symptom to trace back
to like the grief. It is one of the focal points
of the game. The blackouts are a serious indicator
and they have a lot of illusion within them to the
main story. And they provide that Ethan is central
to this story. He doesn't want people to believe
that he's the person that they think he is, which
is a bad father. Moving on from that, we have our
two detectives while one of them, who is our PI,
doesn't exude a lot of mental illness comparably
to other characters in the game. He more deals
with physical ailments
and stuff like that. He is asthma. He gets a lot
in the way of his job. There are multiple
instances in which we have their fights with other
characters that involve quick time events. And he
is just dying at the end. Another one of our other
little FBI man, he is one of those people that has
high anxiety, we feel. And he struggles a lot to
operate under stress as well as having his own
drug addiction, which greatly interferes with his
work as he cannot go a certain amount of time
without it, without shaking, getting dizzy, the
whole nine miles. And our last character has some
crazy dreams. She is probably an insomniac. So are
these depictions good depictions? I'd say so. To
get a little academic in this, because this is a
class project, in one of our research articles
called graphic depictions, portrayals of mental
illness in video games by Samuel Shapiro and
Merrill Rotter, they quote another group of
theorists, Heiler Gabbard and Schneider, proposed
six predominant stereotypes of mental illness and
cinema, the rebellious free spirit, the homicidal
maniac, the female patient as a seductress, the
enlightened member of society, the narcissistic
parasite and the zoo specimen. I think a very key
thing in this game is that they aren't necessarily
depicted as tropes beyond our main antagonist, the
origami killer. He's obviously being portrayed as
a homicidal maniac because he is a serial killer,
praying on children, particularly. I would
classify most of our characters in the rebellious
free spirit in a way because they tend to go
around the standard link on enforcement, like our
FBI agent, he tends to work with the police but is
willing to step in when things aren't going the
way that he wants them to. And our PI completely
circumnavigates the law, the entire game, because
he believes that he can find the killer better and
faster than the police can. And now, after we've
covered this, we will be moving into our second
part covered by Miranda, our sub topic too, the
narrative and aesthetic sadness in Heavy Rain.
Heavy Rain is a game that is filled with ambiance
and small little pieces of just sadness baked into
it. It's very aesthetic in its approach. The art
style is very gray and gritty and dark, almost
akin to film noir. And at the same time, its story
is centered around both real issues and somewhat
popularized issues in film and media, specifically
like a murder mystery or a killer investigation. I
think truly where Heavy Rain shines is in its
approach towards sadness as a narrative aspect. In
one of our other articles, narrative design of
sadness in Heavy Rain by Nelson Zagalo, he is
quoted as stating, saying, sadness emerges as a
response to the ending of a relation with
something we cared about. The more we care about
something, the more intense the sadness will be.
The death of a loved one being the most intense
because of its irreversibility. In Zagalo's
opinion, Heavy Rain utilizes the attachment,
rupture, and passivity method in order to evoke
sadness in players by getting players attached to
characters through empathy, rupturing that
attachment through harm and or death, and then
forcing the player to face the event passively,
removing their control from the situation. It is a
story game first and foremost which allows you to
pull yourself back and sit in the emotions.
Another quote from that article is the rhythm in
Heavy Rain is slow due to the emotional objective
of the game. The action is fully paced by the
interactivity proposed by the game. Everything is
balanced to take the player down to passivity, to
almost non-activity, obliging him or her to take
the time to feel the emotional experience the game
is proposing. I think that this passivity aspect
of the method pulling control away from the player
adds and detracts from the experience because
modern games tend to really focus on maintaining
immersion and I feel like pulling control out of
the player's hands in order to make them
facilitate and feel the emotions tends to break
the immersion, at least that it did for myself
while we were playing. I also really quickly want
to cover other smaller things that are in the
narrative such as depictions of religion and
mental illness. During our playthrough we came
across a character who was very much religious to
the nth degree in a way that is almost stereotyped
by depictions of schizophrenia, the religious
fanatic essentially. I think that that was
probably the worst depiction of mental illness in
the game because of the fact that you had two
opposing viewpoints of the situation being the
police lieutenant that your character is working
with and the FBI agent who is helping the
investigation. And the entire time you have two
options of either trying to work with this suspect
in order to keep him from snapping essentially or
egging him onto the point of doing something that
would warrant his arrest. And I feel like that is
a horrible narrative arc but I feel like it's
extremely common within police style games.
Overall heavy rain has been a very interesting
game for me to experience. I had heard many
wonderful things prior to this project and as soon
as I was handed the game I was told many horrible
things about the game. And I think getting to play
it for myself it was just a very enjoyable
experience especially when I could take some
things from the very sad dark story and narrative
that this game has and turn it into a little bit
of a laugh.
I completely agree. I remember watching this game
a lot when I was younger I would watch
walkthroughs especially by people like PewDiePie,
you know, just the classic Let's Players. And I
was intrigued by the game. Obviously I didn't
really understand the major themes at work seeing
as I was only 10, 11, something like that. But
overall, you know, I have really enjoyed playing
the game and working on this project. So yeah, I'm
Kyle Lloyd. I'm Miranda Fulman. And thank you so
much for listening. We'll catch you guys later.