(*SPOILERS ALERT*: If you plan on playing the game Heavy Rain in the future, please avoid looking at the diagrams included in this boot camp. You can still follow my discussion spoiler-free in the first part, but avoid the second part of this boot camp.)

Part I

First to explain the basic concept that lead me to Heavy Rain as an object for actor-network theory, here is a trailer of the game:

I apologize for the highly dramatized sequences and the sentimental soundtrack, but I wanted to present the game from a gamer’s perspective, rather than from its creators’. The basic concept of Heavy Rain is that you are in control of four different characters, who start out as strangers but who become (if you are able to keep them alive) intricately connected. In each scene you are allowed to control only one of those four characters, which are: Ethan, a father who is trying to save his kidnapped son; Scott Shelby, a private investigator independently working on the case of the Origami killer; Norman Jayden, a FBI agent working on the case; and Madison, a journalist who gets entangled in this mess by stitching up Ethan, who sleeps in the motel room next to hers.

If you picture this cast as part of a murder-mystery video game, then you get a feel of how important each those character’s survival become. While there is the possibility to ‘retry’ achieving the desired outcome in each scene you play, the experience of the game is more intense if you strictly follow through the narrative you have set out for yourself (by making certain choices, and/or failing at certain tasks).

In order to ‘draw’ a network from the characters in this game independently to my own experience, I found a very detailed “FAQ/Walkthrough” written by Thundaka.

Thundaka wrote a full narrative with all the scenes available to play, which explains how to access such scenes (by having, for example, a certain character survive an event) and reveals how such modifications in the plot will alter the ending you will be granted at the very end of the game.

Thundaka is obviously very much taken by this game to have taken such care into compiling all the narratives possible, and here’s part of the answer as to why:

The traditional seperation (sic) between story and gameplay is almost completely absent, as nearly every moment of the game is under the player’s control.  Even your characters’ survival is up to the player, since the game will continue without them if they die.  All these choices lead to a great many possible endings: some determine whether the killer is stopped and his victim saved, while others influence the ending in subtler ways. (Thundaka)

The illusion of agency is a powerful tool to enhance the experience of a game, as it heightens the intensity of the ‘immersion’ within the world or narrative presented in the game.

The impression that choices are not only available, but also leads to drastic diverging directions gives to the player the illusion that the game was not ‘scripted’ but is in fact very close to being ‘real’ or ‘personal’ even. This may be why games such as “The Stanley Parable,” a narrated game in which “the story doesn’t matter,” but rather is “an exploration of story, games, and choice,” which “might not even be a game, and if you ever actually do have a choice”.

Here’s a trailer of “The Stanley Parable” if you are curious to know more about it:

Part II

Now let’s return to Heavy Rain, and look into the consequences of the choices, and interconnections between its characters. Here is my first attempt at trying to draw a network from the plot-driven possibilities in the game:

Heavy Rain (1st attempt)

I apologize for the shameless branding that aggressively competes with my diagram of the different elements interacting in Heavy Rain. I’ve added color (red signifying death, and blue being the main cast of characters) in order to lessen the confusion, but as you can see, this network is a beautiful, orderly-looking, big mess. And yet when compared to the dense ‘narrative’ version offered by Thundaka, certain patterns are made visible, even if their compete and/or counter others. You could say that what is present and what is absent are competing for dominance in this first network, in which we ‘see’ how the characters die and how they may solve the case of the Origami killer. Originally in playing the game you can only ‘see’ one of the two outcomes, and compiling all those different outcomes in a narrative becomes a sizable project.  So I would like to add video games to Moretti’s question, “But if you work on novels or plays, style is only part of the picture. What about plot – how can that be quantified” (Moretti 2). In order to try Moretti’s answer,  here’s a second network I’ve crafted from the first:

Heavy Rain (Figure B)

The network is simplified since I’ve focused on the interactions between the characters that truly advanced the case, rather than drawing all the choices given to the player. Here you can see patterns emerge more clearly, but what kinds of patterns, and what do they tell us that wasn’t mentioned in Thundaka’s narrative?

One of the first choice I’ve made to draw this network was to remove the character Scott Shelby (the private investigator) from the network for a very obvious reason. I’ve also discovered that the character Paco, who appears to be highly irrelevant during the game, is the only one who can make Madison and Jayden solve the case. Furthermore, if Madison never makes it to Paco (she died), then Ethan’s chances of surviving at the end of the game drastically drop, since Madison is the only one who can not only solve the case, but also communicate its solution to another character (be it Jayden or Ethan). By tracking Madison throughout then, you can see that while she is part of the main characters, she is also an edge—a connector—between Jayden, Ethan, and even Scott in the first diagram. Madison thus, creates ‘clustering’: she is the dot that connects two lines in a ‘V’ shape. This network is still a bit too messy to see where this ‘V’ shape or “triangle closes” (Moretti 6), but Madison reveals to be in this diagram more essential than the cops solving this case, and is much more than just a plausible ‘love-interest’ for Ethan.

Hence, my networks of Heavy Rain allowed me to “see” Madison’s role in Heavy Rain, which was invisible in the narrative of the game, and in Thundaka’s rendition of it. Ironically, I, too, needed  networks to see how  “visualization: the possibility of extracting characters and interactions from a dramatic structure, and turning them into a set of signs that I could see at a glance, in a two-dimensional space” (Moretti 11) benefits research by granted access to what is made invisible in narratives and storytelling.

Works Cited:

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” Literary Lab Pamphlet 2. May 1, 2011. [Orig. pub. New Left Review 68, March-April 2011]. http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf

Thundaka. “Heavy Rain A FAQ/Walkthrough.” November 8, 2013. http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps3/933123-heavy-rain/faqs/59975