Issue 41 - Suspend My Disbelief

[The Escapist Staff]

Dana Massey"The benchmark of a good film or book ? for me ? is if it evokes some kind of emotion. As an industry, we?ve got excitement down. It?s time to rethink some basic assumptions if we ever hope to grow beyond that." Dana Massey looks at a wider gaming experience.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Justin
http://parttimegamer.blogspot.com
I think as far as games go, their are two parties that need to be willing to invest some emotion for players to be able to get some back. There is also one looming feature in games that will keep them from attaining movie-like status. But first I'll start with the subject of the article.

Of course, the most important party in creating an emotional invironment would be the developer. When your comparing games to movies, there are two crutial elements that are drastically different: the actors and the script. I just finished playing Black a few weeks ago and was really suprised at thier use of real video and good actors. I think games have come a long way from showing a graphic image of the character and an "All your base are belong to us" to the full productions of games like Black and Grand Theft Auto. The good development houses pay for the actors and pay for the scripts.

This is where the second party comes in. If your not willing to sit down and play a game as if you were controlling a movie, your not going to get a good, emotional experience from it. If you run everywhere in GTA and constantly steal cars and shoot people, your not really living in the shoes of the character your playing. You have to be your own director. You have to remember that you wanted to buy GTA because it was open ended and you could play how you wanted...so if you want to play it real, you have to make it real.

Now, that all said, games are also going to have to get away from point-to-point modes of completing tasks. There does need to be better structuring of the game to make transitions more smooth. The king of all mission games, GTA, seems to be getting better, but in the end you still know your playing a game and you know that in order to make things happen, you need to press a button. You can call it "talk to people" or "steal the briefcase" but it's still pressing buttons and loosing "health" and retrying the same thing over and over again.

Games will never be like movies as long as there are infinite lives. That's the key. You should either live or you should die. You should also be playing in a virtual world that doesn't depend on whether you live or die to move the story along. If we want games to draw us in to an alternate reality, reality being the keyword, the most funamental structure in video game history will have to go out the door: lives.

There. I said it. Pacman, Frogger, and Mario are all rolling over in their ROM chips. How can a game be a game with out "lives". (o o) x 5. 1up. The idea is ludicrous. Blasphemous. But is it really that farfetched? Wouldn't the idea of a game where every decision you makes determines how long you play the game? If you die, that's it. You start over? You throw the controller against the wall?

Or do you sit back and morn the loss of your character that almost survied a terrorist threat in his city. It was a good run, Bob. Butter luck next time. Maybe you should have waited for the bomb disposal team instead of pulling the red wire yourself. The security team was doing fine keeping you from being shot at. There was really no danger for you at all. But man, that was a fun game. You almost had it.

See, the revolution in gaming isn't graphics or controllers. It's the game. It's the perception of what a game is and how it's played. Emotion is tied to things that we know the best: life and death, critical choices with grave consequences. We do it in real life everyday because we know that life and death, while certain, aren't likely. We get upset with things like co-workes and "PC LOAD LETTER" in the real world.

If we want realistic games that make us emotional, we need the same problems to solve in our lives that we already get emotional about. Maybe not printers and fax machines, but certainly like things we see in the movies. We know the character isn't going to die 30 minutes into the movie. They always find away out. Games should be the same way. We should know they aren't going to die 6 hours into the game. There should be away out somewhere.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mike
http://www.mike-knecht.com
While it was a flawed game, Indigo Prophecy brought me closer to what the writer is talking about than any other game I have played. There was a compelling story (it kind of feel apart at the end) and relationships that could be ruined or patched up. The atmosphere of the game was amazing and the ability to do pretty much everything (open door, take a pee, eat some food, drink some wine) made it a very immersive experience. I hope the game?s success will encourage others to go down this path and create new and even more compelling games where the story and the characters matter the most.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Dana Massey
http://www.mmorpg.com/
Indigo got cut on my final edit, but yes, I agree. The flaw for me here is that it had brick wall challenges that you needed to do over and over until you passed them. That was the only hurdle between what I was describing and what they gave.

To be clear on one thing, I am hardly suggesting all games are flawed and need to follow the above model. Only that some games should be created that do. The underlying argument is for veriety.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Chris

I think the basic problem with your argument is that you are trying to change the way a person plays a game more than you are trying to change the game itself. To be precise, gamers (and non-gamers, too) have a preconception of what a game is and how you play it. If I am playing a game where my sexy coworker just got killed and I didn't like that, I will just reload my save game and make sure she doesn't get killed. If I fail a second time, I will try again. I think most people would do this. So I have completely circumvented your idea consequence. I think this will be a hard problem to solve because to have a story of a compelling length, you will need to allow the player to save. Games by their very nature are of a variable duration due to the variations in how different people play them, and if someone has to put it down because they need to go to class or pick their kid up from school and can't pick up where they left off... well that's a recipe for disaster. But there is one way out of this trap- failure inthe game can immediately force a save, and a game only has one save file. There you go- progress saved, no going back. But will people accept this form of gaming? Will it cause more frustration than elation? Now we come to the real question your article poses- do people WANT to play games the way you want to present them? To that question I have only one thing to say:

Let's give them the option and find out!


Good luck finding a publisher to take that risk, though... dang.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Andrea Appel (a.k.a. Alexandra Erenhart)

I don't know, I might be weird, but I did shed a tear or two playing final fantasy VII. Most of the games doesn't give us any kind of emotions besides excitement or boredom (or something in between), but I honestly think that the final fantasy series go beyond that.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Nikudada

I wanted to add that, for me, the greatest insult to me is that we gamers are still treated like babies. What I mean is that developers are so afraid of loosing their audience if they make something bad happen, if the character looses that special item they just worked towards, if they have their guns taken from them, that the player will revolt. And to an extent yes, that will happen. Make a thief class in WOW who is capable of stealing the L337 players fancy boots and the forums will explode with hardcore gamers complaining about their lost equipment. But, and here is the kicker, players don't know what they want either. The hardcore gamer complaining like crazy about his stolen boots is also the guy who probably has three accounts, buys $100 worth of gold a month, and has seen less sunlight than dracula.
For immersion games should try and mimick life in the sense that not all things that happen to you will be good, helpful or even, dare I say it, exciting. Forgive the cliches but you really do need the sour with the sweet, the good with the bad, the ying with the yang.
But I think Justin overextends his point with the life death consequences. I believe that is just what is wrong. You either kill and npc or you let it live - those are our typical choices. The example of GTC is, for me, wrong in principle because, although the story is open ended, the options with which we can tackle our tasks are singular in nature. How do I manage to stop that person from squeeling? Kill him. How can I take over a block? Kill my rivals. How do I get transportation? Steal a car. How do I deal with the Cops. Kill them.Certainly GTA is progressing and we now have statistics but there is no perpetual nature to the game, no warrent for your arrest after you blow up 32 police cars with the tank you stole. I think a better example would be elder scrolls IV, a game I have only had the opportunity to play for four or five hours. At least in that game when you are caught stealing there are permanent consequences. Want to steal something important - get good at it first. Want to be feared? Kill a bunch of people. Want to get something done without killing? Try a bribe.
The only problem is that I have no emotional attachment to the characters in that game. For every option I am given I feel like the developers had to take out something important to my immersian. The dead pan camera zoom to the characters face is so reminscient of the early film days before we learned how to move, pan, and zoom that it drives me insane. The fact that I brake into a npc's room and intitiate a conversation seems so unbelievable since the npc never asks how I got into a locked room. The fact that every single NPC is rooted into place is ridiculous. Basically every progressive 'door' the developers opened in elder scrolls revealed an unconvincing empty room.
These problems are one of the reasons why I play mostly online games. Granted an FPS never makes me cry but it does have me ducking from side to side in my seat as some guy who's spraying bullets. In fact, the FPS genre has been so sucessful because it has best captured a raw emotion in its players -excitement. Sadly it has never expanded much farther than trying only to satisfy that inital adrenaline requirment hence the FPS multiplayer model has pretty much been stuck on the counterstrike/battlefield ideal. What would happen, though, if you populated that counterstrike village with people. Would you feel bad as a counterterrorist if your stray bullets shot a fleeing child? Would you feel remorse, as a terrorist, for taking a female hostage. Would you be ruthless enough to strap a bomb to an innocent person just to escape and win the level? Granted you can't for much of an attachment given a five minute round but I still think those momentary decisions can affect your emotional 'ride'.
I'm sure many of these games have restirctions given their ratings. Sorry mate, can't design a game where a kid gets shot. Can't have woman being executed. Can't have suicide bomers. Can't have dismemberment. Can't burst into a bathroom as CT and see two people going at it?
If Rosseau were alive today, he'd tell the game industry to stop staring at their shadows and release themelves from those chains...at least thats what I think.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Dana Massey
http://www.mmorpg.com/
Chris: You're right. The save-game issue kept popping up and I admit, I took the easy way out and ignored it. Nonetheless, I think the core issue is that the current gaming model has broken you as much as it is itself broken. Honestly, I see no reason not to give people saves. You cannot force people to have fun, but if you promote your game properly and make sure someone - *cough* reviewers *cough* - play it as intended, then hopefully word of mouth gets around and people actually play it the way god - the developer - intended. Now, any product that requires re-wiring people is in trouble, but really, worst case they have a pretty decent action game that they do not fully experience.

Also, all roads lead to a conclusion, thus game should have a decent story for each route. Thus, the game you do by saving and reloading could be the game someone else does first try. To them, the impact will be higher, but hopefully to you it is still a neat story. And when the save-loader goes to whine on the boards, people have a good argument to yell at him with

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Jare
http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare
In truth it's a simple problem and Dana touches on it with great insight: most games rely on being a series of challenges that HAVE to be overcome. The attention of the player is forced into success or failure, where failure interrupts the narrative and emotional experience. In a way, it's like having to pass a test after each chapter in a book. Would you be so immersed in the issues of the characters and situations if you always had that concern in the back of your head? "I'm sorry, you can't experience Act II in Hamlet because you haven't truly grasped all the implications of what happened in Act I." Your enjoyment and emotions would turn into an academic study of the play, which is why so many "forced readings" in teenage literary studies fail to transmit the beauty of the art (sometimes it works, and it's an important part of general education, but I'm sure you'll recognize the feeling).

Total Annihilation won't be remembered as a pinnacle of emotion in games, but it's interesting that Chris Taylor decided to experiment in that area: if you fail a mission, you can still move on to the next one. You don't need to feel stuck, you don't need to be anxious and concerned about your success, you can let go of your worries and just play the game as comfortably as you can. The missions themselves played in the standard manner, but I found it a really interesting and engaging concept.

Another experiment, this time self-imposed, was playing Unreal 2 in god mode. At some I had become so annoyed by the long load times, that I just went ahead and used the cheat. Woah! I still tried to outplay the enemies and puzzles, but the attitude change was astounding... I was experiencing the game rather than fighting against it. The game had no subtle emotions to transmit, but I'm damn sure I would have been much better prepared to experience them in this fashion.

Those two examples come from the leftfield because neither was aimed at improving the emotional or "higher art" elements in those games. As dynamics, they are also quite pure. Taclking the whole problem of what to do when you remove the requirement for success in the challenges is, as you say, a very compelx topic and one that easily brings production nightmares. That's why I like to isolate aspects like those I described.

The classic emotions elicited by games are: fear, anxiety, frustration, surprise, attention, desire, and the usual range of sensory or thought overload. You are too busy for anything else to take place inside your head.

Games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus have all of those, but they cue in other ideas like empathy, awe, mistery, concern and devotion. They do so probably more through what they don't do: they don't keep you necessarily busy and overloaded with activity; They don't explain every little bit; they surround you by an environment and a pacing that oftentimes lets (encourages!) your mind roam free to ask "Where did all this come from? What happened here? Who was here before me? Why does this have to happen?" While you play, a part of your is left alone to think, wonder and create a unique internal experience which you can relate to, because you created it.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Iscariot

I am absolutely thrilled to see that somebody else has thought of these ideas...that the death of a character does not necessarily require replaying a segment of a game. This is a fairly strange game to mention in relation to your points, but look at the branching level structure of StarFox 64. Your actions, successes, and failures in one level determined what the next mission would be. Now envision that rather than a new level, you're revealing new characters within the story.

Indigo Prophecy breaks some amazing ground in my opinion in creating situations where the player controls characters with contradictory goals. Imagine if you will, the first level of the original Perfect Dark, in which you infiltrate an office building. Now, what if you inadvertantly killed a civillian character in that mission, and rather than failing the objective, it unlocked a new story arc...a revenge story in which you take control of that NPC's father or husband in a vendetta against Joanna Dark. Perhaps midway through that level, a player would be forced to take on the role of a S.W.A.T. team member called to that office building? What if Joanna Dark were killed on that mission, who might the story follow next?

The powerful feelings of excitement created by games occur most noticably when you're afraid of dying, even if the time it takes to reload the level is the only thing at stake. How much deeper could that be if death meant the end of a likable character's timeline? I see no problem with forcing saves on players, if games are to be considered an art form. An artist should be able to determine how a viewer or player experiences a piece, and there's no reason why after 1 or 2 playthroughs of a game couldn't unlock a state save or god mode feature, letting players freely experience all of a story's possibilities.

Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir, or regurgitating the ideas already expressed here, but if nothing else, I'm extremely encouraged that other people feel the way I do about the potential of some of these ideas in games.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark

Positively brilliant article, and I think I managed to find something like a solution.

Emotion must come from the suspension of disbelief - sadness, from the belief that when bad things happen, they stay happened. Aeris dying in FFVII was corny, yeah, but it was a more powerful scene than the rest of the game because it was permanent. She stayed dead and her role was not replaced.

The problem, therefore, lies in how to make a game's consequences feel permanent. You can't actually make them permanent because then you're taking control away from the player, which is bad.

I think - and I am going somewhere with this - that the assumption that the player is their avatar, or that the player feels what the avatar feels, I think that's a bad way to think if you want to make a game have a strong emotional appeal. It's excellent when you want to make the player feel empowered (see also: Mr. Gillen's article this week), but that is a limited pallette.

I've been playing X-Com UFO Defense a bit lately. It's an old game, sure, but by all accounts it's one of the best ever made. There's an emotional appeal there, if even if it's a bit weak. There are no characters to speak of in that game. Each soldier is randomly generated and expendable. However, there is one important element that can't be overlooked: it gives each character a name. When a soldier dies there, it is because you (the player) killed Dmytri (or Yoko, or Jacques, or whoever). Just giving the characters names causes the player to identify with them. I think that giving them personalities would diminish from it. The player is allowed to fill in all the blanks, and the tendency will be to make them likeable.

Games are fundamentally about control, which is why conventional storytelling isn't the way to make players cry. You can make them laugh this way, make them feel like a badass, make them feel anything good, but the only way to make them feel bad is to work within this framework of control. For this reason, I believe, it is best if the player is not the hero, but is rather God. Put the player utterly in charge of the world. Then, everything that goes wrong in the world is the player's fault. And there's no better way to make the player cry than by making him feel like a real heel.

Granted, the cynicism that a person must attain from growing up makes it difficult to create an emotional attachment to the world. In GTA people go out and run over the NPCs for fun. This isn't because the player has too much power, but because the world is too shallow. Presentation creates emotional attachment, and so if you can make the player feel like they've done something that's really, actually bad, even uninentionally, then you will be able to play their heartstrings like a fiddle.

This raises a problem: if the player has power over the world, then how do you make them do something bad in the first place? Two ways, the first of which is already widely implemented. Games are no fun if the player can do anything. So make rules. Things that the player can't do. You can't jump higher than your Acrobatics stat will let you. You can't make a Lemming smart enough to get to the exit on its own.

The second is to create an illusion of freedom. The end of Shadow of the Colossus really struck me as an example of this, though it wasn't carried to its fullest. The player is presented with something that looks exactly like the freedom they always had, but in fact it will always turn out badly for the player. This is a step above the cutscene, in that the player still has control, but there has yet to be a really good implementation of it - the unwinnable battles in your average JRPG come to mind.

The notion of an avatar, I believe, is really more of a hindrance than a help. It's distracted us from making truly emotional games. The goal, it seems, is not for the game to affect the avatar, but for the avatar to affect the game. Nothing that happens to an avatar is permanent. For an avatar, there is no such thing as consequences. And the fundamental nature of gameplay means that you can't have an avatar with permanent consequences, because the player will just reset if anything happens that will mess them up permanently.

If the character is an avatar, then by the conventional definition of "avatar," that means that the player is a god. We should not be asking how to make an audience feel sad, as with storytelling, but rather, "How does one make a god cry?"

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Olumide Edu

I agree with you more than any other person I have ever agreed with... EVER! This is something I have been thinking about alot recently for some reason.

There are some flaws in your idea but overall it feels good. I believe that all those problems could be solved someone got off their asses and experimented a little. If we can actually reach a stage where the problem is a real one as opposed to something sorta hypothetical then dammit, a solution will be found.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Dana Massey
http://www.mmorpg.com/
Mark said: "I think - and I am going somewhere with this - that the assumption that the player is their avatar, or that the player feels what the avatar feels, I think that's a bad way to think if you want to make a game have a strong emotional appeal."

I have to disagree. I think this is the thing that seperates games from the other forms of entertainment. In a movie, I am watching someone. In a book, I am reading about others. In a game, I am doing something. That is key.

Quite honestly, the game that fires my imagination - if not my emotions - the most is NHL Eastside Hockey Manager. Why? I am playing the role of NHL General Manager and in that game I get to do everything a GM does. This means I sometimes sit there and day dream about my next trade or - as absurd as this sound - catch myself mumbling fake press conferences.

Most games could learn from manager games in that they perfectly throw you into a role. Obviously, the format (text-based) is much easier, but it is still the first step.

For those not familiar with sports-sims, think about The Sims. It does this a bit too.

Once in that role, if you present the story in a way where you and your character come to know and care about others, then you have the basis for emotion.

The common link between all these totally addicting and engrossing games? No save and reload puzzles. If my team misses the playoffs, they miss the playoffs. If my Sim burns the house down, they die. That persistence is what is missing from other kinds of games and keeps them very much artificial games as opposed to totally mind-bending experiences.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Rob

Mark: I again disagree with the notion that 'the player isn't the avatar' for the same reasons Dana states, and because of an idea you touch on that I think is crucial: that the player is responsible for his own actions. If you want to affect a player then they need to become the avatar more than ever so that they feel no distinction between 'the avatar's actions' and 'my actions'.

Good games do this often - when someone walks in on me playing TES: Oblivion I'll recount that 'I've just been to the Imperial City...'. In contrast, Halo 2, which I'm a big fan of, doesn't do this. I don't think I've ever described Master Chief's actions as my own, I've always recounted the story from the third person. Two reasons for that are that Master Chief is a character that I've been placed into, and is such an obvious HERO CHARACTER that it becomes hard to think of him as me when I'm not playing the game. Secondly, Halo 2 uses cut-scenes, and although they're dramatically executed they're still breaks in the key factor of any game, which is the playing.

You also raise the idea of rules, but I think this contradicts the idea of freedom - stats limiting how far a player can jump are ridiculous, because I can think of numerous times playing games where an insignificant sized hole or a tiny wall is rendered unpassable just because of some stat. However if there's some logical reason why I can't jump (my legs are damaged) or some logical reason why I don't want to go that way (a sign reading: there is no game content over here), then I won't attempt it. Logical obstructions are okay.

Dana: I think that you're right on the money when you talk about the concept of failure in games. ((I too have been talking about this recently - I hope that the fact that we're all talking about these issues elsewhere already means that future games will evidence this critical climate!) The things you talk about in your article are well implemented, of course, by Deus Ex. It's a shame that it remains such a potent example and that there still hasn't been many others to replace it. I guess Ion Storm's only failures with Deus Ex were that the world they drew was relatively small, even if the actions (and reactions) within it were many.

If nowadays there is scope for relatively massive worlds, then I wonder if the limitations are based even more heavily on the development teams producing the games. If the player is to be introduced to failure, and multiple routes of failure, then the world has to be massive. Even in Oblivion, I'm frequently reminded of its limitations - the lack of characters, the lack of dialogue, the lack of, generally, is highlighted against the vastness of the world itself. You discuss the idea of shifting around scenes and dialogue, but this is already implemented in games with limited effect. I can recall titles that seemingly offer you conversation choices but rather opaquely only have limited dialogue recorded, meaning that all roads lead to Damascus. Still, it's a challenge that I'm sure the best of the bunch will be upto, and it will be interesting getting there.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Cody K.

One game that stands out from my childhood videogaming days is Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. It had a very simplistic mission/story branching system based on how successful you were on your missions (you could fail certain aspects of the mission, but the failures had significant story weight through out the game). Your victories and failures served to shape the story and it was reinforced by the game characters acknowledging these events? and in some cases, things came back to haunt you.

Also, the way you interacted with characters affected future plot developments and relationships. The use of real actors (Hamil, McDowell, Rhys-Davies, Bernard) in FMVs gave each character such believability and conviction that you were able to associate with them personally on some level. Even the banter over the communication channels during flight missions was immersive and significant.

There were many times where I wanted things to work out differently, but that was the beauty of the game. It rewarded your failures and triumphs equally with a compelling story. There was no +5 sword to lose, or 500 gold coins to cry over if things didn?t go the way you wanted them to. It rewarded you by progressing a story depending on your actions and words. Hell, even when I got the girl I wanted at the end, it was bittersweet. That?s the flavor of an emotional game, if you ask me.

Maybe I?m giving WC3 too much credit, but I honestly think that game was ahead of its time? and has yet to be surpassed in many aspects that closely echo the ideas put forth by this article.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Pat M.

Perhaps one of the most defining moments I've ever had when playing a videogame was failing so many missions in Wing Commander III that I got stuck with the you suck, game over mission. (People who have played the game should know what I'm talking about.) I didn't have enough saves to backtrack adequately, either.

That was one hell of a game.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: TrueTallus

Those interested in seeing how a game would work out using strict saving/death penalty mechanics (as Chris suggested) should check out the origional Way of the Samurai game for PS2. It creates a very strong emotional connection to the players character and actions by combining a fairely nonlinear narrative with a save system that doesn't let you relaod.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark
http://www.frontal-lobe.net
Rob: I think, in mentioning Master Chief, you actually helped to make my point (although I do concede that you and Dana make excellent arguments about truly immersive games).

I think that giving any sort of personality or identity to the avatar (save that which comes directly from the player) wrecks the emotional immersion factor. That's not to say that the story can't make you cry, but it does mean that the emotion now has to come through the story. It is precisely as you say: Master Chief dying isn't as touching as an Oblivion avatar dying because Master Chief has a personality and a story to tell. (Master Cheif dying isn't as touching as a Sims character dying because Master Chief can reload from the last checkpoint - but again I believe that this has more to do with casting the player as a controlling force rather than an interacting force).

It would be foolish to overlook the importance of what the player wants to get out of a game, naturally, and I'm probably biased in that respect (being the sort of player who prefers to give orders to the characters rather than actually control them). An issue raised in in a prior article, about the lackluster quality of writing (both dialog and plot) in games is also relevant - it's much harder to feel the drama when you're puzzled at awkward grammar or annoyed by flat voice acting.

There are as many ways to increase the emotional appeal of a game as there are developers willing to try it times the number of emotions that the human mind is capable of experiencing. I don't think any one way can be the best. I just wanted to present a viewpoint that I hadn't seen before. Stories may well be the best way to make the player feel grief, but what about regret? What about more complex emotions still? Some gameplay styles will exclude the possibility of certain emotions being conveyed effectively.



The ability to relaod from a save point is without a doubt the biggest impediment, but the question must be raised of how to get rid of it? You can't very well force the player to play iron-man style, because what if there's some technical failure and he has to start from the beginning? But, at the same time, how do you make an emergent narrative (that is, one composed of player actions) compelling without breaking immersion? How do you create a situation whereby the avatar, who some player is going to make extremely powerful, is forced to experience something traumatic, without robbing the player of some choices? How do you take Half-Life and make it possible to shoot the G-Man without breaking the story? Whoever finds a way to do that will be remembered well. Whoever finds a way to do that and create a compelling and cost-effective method for augmenting the emotion through presentation may be sitting on a gold mine.





But now I have one really hard question.

Is this really what we want?


People enjoy sad literature because it causes them to empathize. They are crying at someone else's misfortune. But in a game, where the player is theoretically capable of feeling like s/he is the avatar? It's possible to make a person enjoy (in an artistic sense) someone else's suffering, but how do you make that same person enjoy their own suffering? Tragedies are powerful stories, but I submit that nobody wants to be Hamlet. If nothing else, they'd see the bad thing coming and try to stop it.

Just some food for thought.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Dana Massey
http://www.mmorpg.com/
I think that giving any sort of personality or identity to the avatar (save that which comes directly from the player) wrecks the emotional immersion factor.
Agreed. All the examples I quoted were games that give you a non-specific personality. Civilization is a good example. Sure you are some leader, but really, you sit there plotting world domination as you. I totally agree the goal should not be to create Splinter-Cell style strong characters. Then it falls into the same trap as books/movies. The goal should be to create strong personalities around the main character, but as much as possible make your character do what you want and thus... be you.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: christian

I just wanted to share an experience I recently had playing Oblivion - I'm sure some of you will remember this . . I took a quest from an older man in a tavern, he said that his two sons needed help ridding the family farm of monsters, and he was too old to help them. Being a heroic sort, I walked down to where the lads were waiting and followed them to the farm, where we were attacked by goblins. In the ensuing melee, one of the two sons was killed.

After the goblins lay dead on the ground, the remaining son turned to me with a grieved expression and said "You could have saved him! Why did you let him die? Now you must tell our father." I turned back for the long walk to the tavern, knowing that at the end of that walk I had to tell an aging father that one if his sons was dead due to my negligence.

That was a long walk, and the brew of complex emotions I experienced on it was a rare treat for me - Oblivion gave me responsibility, and when I biffed it, it gave me emotional consequences. I think this and some other games are headed in the right direction.