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GDC Europe 09: Keynote of David Cage (Quantic Dream)

August 18, 2009 on 4:00 pm | Tags: Games, gdc, heavyrain, quantic | In General | No Comments

Second keynote for today was David Cage from Quantic Dream, which one might already know from Fahrenheit or from their title in development Heavy Rain. He made – unsurprisingly – a good chain of arguments against the mainstream game insdustry. In his opinion games are more or less build on primal emotions and feature no or only a very simplistic story. The sequence of narrative elements is constantly interrupted by action sequences, an people just play it for the action scenes …. just like a porn movie (David’s word )

He outlines a way to create games for a mature audience featuring more social and complex emotions. According to the figures he presented (which looked valid according to the studies I’ve read) 75% of the people buying games are 18+ years old, in average 35. This indicates that there actually is a mature audience. His propsed tool for this is interactive storytelling. You might now go and see a video (from E3 2009) of Heavy Rain, so I can stop writing :)

Byline: I found my seat beside the editor in chief of a major german game magazine, which I won’t mention but rhymes on games-car. By trying to communicate I found the complete absence of humour and small talk ability in  this guy. I’m again impressed by the selectiveness of journalists towards people they don’t know.