Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.
To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.
There is a natural progression to 'Lost,' and as the story goes forward, it's going to change. It's not a static story. The franchise of 'Lost' is not characters sitting on a beach.
A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.
'Indigo Prophecy' already brought a lot of new features to the traditional adventure genre, including the Action system, MultiView, Bending Stories, etc. 'Heavy Rain' will include features like advanced physics and AI, realistic characters and living environments.
Bland writing - timid, antiseptic, vanilla writing - is nearly as unhealthy as the brutal and dark. Instead of sipping, say, elixir, nectar, tequila, or champagne, the reader is invited to slurp lumpy milk or choke on the author's dust bunnies.
The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.
It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.
I love television because it's the most alive, because you don't know how it's going to end. It's a living thing. Sometimes the writers are watching you to see how things will unfold. Sometimes the writers have written it, and you come to it, and they have to change their way of going because of what you've done.
One of the great things about a TV series is that it's different to a movie - in a movie you obviously know the beginning, the middle and the end of what you're going to do. With a TV series it's unfolding, and you're discovering with every episode.
Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.
With 'Heavy Rain,' we're creating something that changes many traditional game paradigms.
It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.
With a movie, the die is cast. It is what it is. With TV, it's a living organism in a way. Fans can have input, with the whole social media thing, and they can track what fans are liking and not liking.
