Quantic Dream’s “Kara” tech demo showed not only the power of their latest game engine, but also the company’s continued focus on narrative and emotion. Creative lead David Cage recently spoke to Edge about the state of the game industry and its future.
Do you think that narrative games are the end goal of the medium?
No, I think emotion is the end goal, and there are many ways of achieving emotion. We can do it using storytelling, which is what we try to achieve. Or you can look at Journey, for example. It’s a very different approach, but the goal is still to create emotion and get emotional involvement from the player. People are trying many different directions, but I think emotion is the goal – storytelling is just the means.
Kara touches on a lot of very relevant themes and the ideas of identity, transhumanism and sentience. What sort of themes are interesting to you as a writer now?
So many things. In games, so little has been made so far [that] it’s like an empty space. You can try something and discover that no one’s ever talked about it in a game. Whereas, if I were a movie maker, it would be much more difficult to find something unique. A movie that’s never been made, or a book that has never been written – that’s very challenging. But in games, this industry has been about shooting monsters for 20 years, and there are so many other things we can do than that. It’s like an empty field. There are so many important, emotional themes that I want to talk about.