This is the question that Heavy Rain asks, not only of Ethan Mars, the tortured father who watches his son get spirited away right before his eyes, but it is also described as the overall theme by creator David Cage. It's been a long time since I've thought about a game well after I've turned it off, let alone pondered the theme.
It's a hypothetical that actually gets thrown around a lot. It might come up in one of those "what-if" games that are popular at parties (well, not that kind of parties I go to, but that's not the point). You might think about it during a thriller where everyone gets a butcher job. You may have told your significant other or a good friend "I would do anything for you!" You hear about the moms who lift a car off of their trapped baby or like a recent news story, where a husband had to choose between saving his wife or child in a car accident. Funnily enough, I am almost never honest with myself when I encounter these situations that make me think. Even if I never say my answer out loud, I still lie to myself in my head to make myself feel better. I do this because I know there would be people who objected to my answer (no matter what it was). Vicious cycle.
For example, with regard to the story above about the husband and the car accident: who would you choose to save? Your significant other, or your child? I don't want to get into the arguments for one or the other. If a gun was being held to your head and you had to pick one, which would it be? The first answer that comes to your mind is probably the most honest one, but if you are like me you will quickly wipe it from your memory and pretend that you need to think it over more. Let's add one more variable to the equation: What if you had to chose between yourself, your significant other, or your child? Does the answer change?
Heavy Rain makes you think about all of these decisions. Of course there is a safety net in the fact that it's just a game and that whatever decision you end up making will have pretty much no effect on you in real life, but being forced to confront the decision in even a virtual world can be taxing on the soul. In my first play through, I was determined to go as far as I needed to save my son. I drove the wrong way on the highway, crawled through a tunnel of broken glass and through an electricity field, cut off my finger, killed a man, and took a poison that I was told would kill me. Your fingers shake with desperation as you fill in the blank letters of the hangman to find Shaun's location, letters you earned by committing unspeakable acts. By the time the credits rolled, I was mentally exhausted and felt as if I had just been through an ordeal on level with Ethan's. As I laid in bed that night, I asked myself the inevitable: Would I do any of those acts for the one I loved? And then I smiled as I thought about all those morbid scenarios, because it had been so long since a game affected me on that kind of level.
My soul is still drained though. I'm on what will be my final play through of the entire game, in pursuit of the Perfect Crime trophy. So far it has involved a lot of murder and despicable decisions and more are to come. It's funny, but I do hesitate the closer I get to the end. I find myself thinking "At this point, you can still save Shaun...he doesn't have to die...the killer doesn't have to go free..." It's so crazy. I'm going to need to play something much less depressing after this. But I have at least been assured that I still have a shred of humanity in me.
No comments:
Post a Comment