Video Games: The Interactive Dramas (part 2)

Cage brought a new genre of game that focused not entirely on game play, but rather the story itself. Cage claims the point of Interactive Dramas is to put the player in situations that had actual consequences depending on the decisions the player makes with no idea if the story would have a happy or somber end. In Both his Interactive Dramas, Cage say he took into the littlest decisions the player made into the ultimate end of both games. The performance of Elen Page and William Defoe also added to the immersion of the story itself and made it even more spectacualr. In Heavy Rain there are fourth eight variations in total, sixty eight in Beyond: Two Souls. In his new game, Detroit: Become Human (Set to release in 2017), Cage went more in depth with the Butterfly effect of the Interactive Drama. In the demo for Detroit, the player takes control of an android detective, who searches for defective androids, and as the player walks into the apartment they have the decision to immediately walk over to the android holding a little girl hostage or search the apartment. If the player decides to just walk to the android the player can miss very important information about the android and situation, leading to the girl’s death. However, with enough information the girl can be saved, as shown in the extensive butterfly system shown in the trailer for it. Cage puts the players in a positon questioning whether or not they have made the wrong decision and what they could do to resolve it if they even could. The interactive Drama Cage developed was designed to put players in the situation of not being able to restart at a checkpoint when a character died. Whatever consequence developed from the player’s decision, HAD to be played out.