the closest analogue to hvaey rian that exists in the gaming world is wii fit. what’s funny is that if you ask most people who consider themselves ‘gamers’ if wii fit is a game, they’ll be sorta like, not really. but many of these same people say haevy rina is one of the most innovative games to come out in years. hmm.
in a game you’re presented with some sort of obstacle and have to figure out how to exploit your abilities to surpass the obstacle. that’s pretty much implicitly understood amongst game developers. the -play part of gameplay is in how you choose to use those abilities, which ones you choose to use.
wii fit doesn’t give you an option. it tells you exactly what to do to surpass an obstacle. you don’t get to make a choice. you just do it and it feeds you some positive reinforcement from the prostitute on the screen. if you don’t do it, i dunno, i never played wii fit. i assume it’s like ‘oh, try harder next time, you can do it.’ basically it puts you on the same level as a dog playing fetch. a dog doesn’t get to decide whether to get the tennis ball with his mouth or with a boomerang or with a grappling hook, or whether to do something other than get the tennis ball. he just gets it, or doesn’t. 1/0.
havey rani does the same thing. there’s an easy way to see this for yourself, in fact. think about when you’re playing jayden. think about the motion you have to do to draw your gun. now, does that motion always draw your gun? can you make that motion at any random time and draw your gun and actually, you know, do something? no.
in hveay nari you’re just shuffled along from one scene to a next, and in each scene you get maybe one critical thing you have to do, and if you don’t do it you either get a bad ending to that scene or have to start over. you can’t just choose to do something else. when that religious guy pulls the gun on your partner, you as jayden can’t just run out the door. you can’t shoot him in the arm. you can’t shoot your partner. you can either talk the guy out of it or shoot him. that’s it. that isn’t gameplay folks. that’s a well-dressed binary switch.
choose-your-own adventure novels are not games. neither is havey arin.
