David Cage blows own trumpet but has some good points

David Cage, the CEO of Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream has been speaking to NowGamer in an indepth interview when he states “As an industry we make games for teenagers and kids,” This led to a few sites picking up on this quote and seemingly – perhaps – taking it out of context. On reading the entire interview I got the feeling Cage was instead speaking about sales models presently followed and how sometimes you need to think outside of that and come up with something different.

I know Cage has a habit of talking things up (in this case it’s Heavy Rain again), but despite that being the obvious nature of what he’s saying in the interview (at least that is what I got from it), he also touches upon some real issues within our hobby.

Cage discusses the interactivity of gaming as an artistic medium and rightly suggests that new media is generally there to tell stories, but gaming is presently falling short, instead opting for the shallow adrenalin rush. He states “I mean, how many monsters can you kill? How many zombies can you shoot?” and he kind of has a point doesn’t he?

Cage states “it’s related to the fact that we as an industry think that we make games for teenagers and kids, so we try to make things very casual and as clear as possible. The bad guys have to be very baaaaad [sic] and the hero has to have big muscles and look fantastic, and the women have to have big boobs and be very sexy because to a teenager, this is what women are. Well, I think we’ve passed that stage and we can go to the next one and say, ‘You know what, you can be a very evil character, but it’s not written on your face’”.

Despite Cage once more blowing his own trumpet, he does have some good points in what he is trying to say. what do you guys think, are video games maturing, should they and if that’s the case, what does that mean for the gay gamer? As games become more socially engaging, more deeply enriched with characters that are regular people, will we therefore see more gay characters in video games?

Via [NowGamer].