Original Comment by: Graham Smith
I agree with John on this one. Has a game ever made me cry? No, but they've certainly made me care, and care all the more because of the interactivity. I feel empathy for the characters in a movie when I see them suffer, but games can - and have - made me feel a greater sense of pain because of my complicity in the situation.
The offered KoToR scenario is a good one. More recently, Oblivion has put me in a lot of similar situations. The paranoid man who approaches you and asks you to investigate his neighbours, as he's convinced they're conspiring against him? You can ignore him, tell him the truth, or confirm his worst fears - and then you can either kill his neighbours for him or turn him over to the guards. Whatever you do effects how he reacts, and effects whether people get killed or not.
And one of the great things in Oblivion is that people do live. People get up, eat, go to work, come home, eat, read, train, sleep. They have lives and routines. So if you interupt those routines with a rusty sword, then that person won't have a tomorrow. That's a tremendously powerful thought, and no film or book has ever made me feel guilt before, or a sense of sorrow so strong.
I can't tell them about my day, but my ability to interact with them - be it with weapons, words or otherwise - nonetheless informs my feelings about them in huge ways.