Excellent article on games and emotion

  10 Responses to “Excellent article on games and emotion”

1. Tide's Horizon says:

   August 9, 2006 at 7:38 pm

   attachment in games. In this case, the reference is to seeing ads for external products in games, foreign to the game and the game provider. The post isn’t about producing emotion in games (although that’s tough and interesting topic, via Raph also last week), but depending on the fact, there is emotion in games and how that can relate to advertising. The obvious concern is the jarring feeling of having two possibly incommensurable images coming at you (e.g. the virtual world’s local context and a Miller
2. chabuhi says:

   July 27, 2006 at 2:19 pm

   This was an interesting read (although I seem to remember this from the March-April time frame (you must also, Raph, since you call it a “reblog”). Maybe NextGen is late to the party?

   Anyway, some of my favorite games have been short on gameplay but still quite entertaining because they somehow manage to grab you in an emotional way.

   My most recent experience (self-pimping alert) with that was the “Longest Journey”/”Dreamfall” saga.

   Say what you will, the story sucked me in deep.
3. Iakimo says:

   July 27, 2006 at 7:00 pm

   Probably the best emotional “hook” I have come across in a video game was in Planescape: Torment, when the Nameless One realizes that his floating-skull sidekick, Morte (y’all remember him?), hasn’t quite been completely honest with him about the message tattooed on his back. (Morte had left out a rather significant addendum: “PS: Don’t trust the skull.”) I coulda sworn that Morte’s world-weary “How’s it going, Chief?” greeting acquired a hint of wariness at that point.

   And then, there’s the unforgettable Zerg Queen from StarCraft: Brood War! They let her live just long enough as Raynor’s human love interest to get you hooked on her personality, and then those diabolical devs let her get captured and mutated by the Zerg! And throughout her transformation process, rescue always seemed right at the very edge of your fingertips… but no…. And then she gleefully manipulates all sides in the battle, at one point feigning regret with Raynor for her murderous rampages, only to set him up for yet another betrayal in the end… good stuff. Good stuff….
4. Morgan Ramsay says:

   July 27, 2006 at 7:44 pm

   The last emotional experience I had with a video game was in Final Fantasy VII. I don’t want to spoil the game for anyone, so I’ll just say that the experience was an event that involved the characters Cloud, Aeris, and Sephiroth — who is also the most realistically evil character I’ve ever encountered in fifteen years of playing nearly every computer and video role-playing game. In my opinion, Squaresoft (now Square Enix) is the undisputed champion of powerful storytelling and character development.

   Aren’t anger and frustration emotions too? What is the emotional role of interactive entertainment?
5. Tess says:

   July 28, 2006 at 9:15 am

   I am SO tired of the “can games make you cry” question, which makes me glad that this article is — in spite of its title — sort of answering a different question. 🙂
6. David says:

   July 28, 2006 at 10:18 am

   RPGs and most “adventure” games are and should be a medium for telling a story – just like a book or a movie. A powerful story is going to elicit an emotional response. If I play a game where I find myself getting choked up when a character dies, or angry at the bad guys, then in my opinion the writers of that game did their job well.

   Other types of games that don’t really try to tell a story, so the emotional response in those games come from a different splace – usually from players being competitive and striving to outdo themselves or each other, or simply the joy/frustration of trying to overcome a difficult challenge.

   At any rate, I think one of the thing that game developers should be aiming for is to make their games an emotional experience of some sort. It’s part of what makes a good game.
7. Jim says:

   July 29, 2006 at 11:47 am

   Emotions require downtime.

   If you have to be paying attention to hacking up the orcs that are overwhelming your position, getting a new tank on that bossmob, or desparately keeping the current tank alive, you’re not going to be feeling deep sadness.
8. Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Articles of Interest says:

   July 31, 2006 at 11:03 pm

   […] Via Raph, a nice article: Can Games Make You Cry? It proposes occassionally limiting interactivity (player control) in order to elicit sadness. […]
9. Paul Schwanz says:

   August 3, 2006 at 5:07 am

   What I ask from games is that they make me care. If I don’t care what happens next, I’m not going to keep playing. I think there are lots of different ways for games to make people care, but the emotional aspect that this article touches on is one of the most effective for me.

   One of my favorite emotional moment in a game happened in Wing Commander III. Actually, there were two emotional moments created by the same event. This event (as the article discussed) was completely out of my control, and it evoked sadness, loss, and anger. However that event set up an opportunity for revenge later in which I had to make a choice. So, even though creating some emotions may require moving away from interaction and control (and, because of this, could be said to be outside the formal game), in my estimation, these events can help provide needed context to the rest of the experience.

   And make care about what happens next.

   –Phin
10. Grimwell Online :: says:

    August 9, 2006 at 6:21 pm

    […] David Eddery, who’s always worth monitoring, posted some some interesting info last week on “involvement” or supra-emotional attachment in games. In this case, the reference is to seeing ads for external products in games, foreign to the game and the game provider. The post isn’t about producing emotion in games (although that’s tough and interesting topic, via Raph also last week), but depending on the fact, there is emotion in games and how that can relate to advertising. The obvious concern is the jarring feeling of having two possibly incommensurable images coming at you (e.g. the virtual world’s local context and a Miller Lite ad). Now, I’m not fully comfortable with the idea of advertising in games, and what I feel about RMT is open to the public record. But I liked how Eddery suggested that certain games have different degrees of “involvement” required and produced, and that advertisers have to be sensitive to this fact. That pretty much translates into certain games that require a specific level of cognitive load to play, but maybe that they also bring with them a emotion import and create an emotional appeal to play. But I wonder as well if some games also don’t require a certain emotional state in order to be successful within them? That is, in order to finish certain games or decode the authorial intent, you have to accept certain designs made to create emotion. For instance, in Lost in Blue you have to feed another character through the whole game, and if the female NPC starves the game ends. Regardless of how far along your own character might be in the story. Or another one: you have to shrug off getting ganked in battlegrounds in WoW. You have to accept being killed repeatedly, often by the same people. Still don’t believe me? I argue that people who played Jedi in pre-CU SWG could not get over being killed by Bounty Hunters since they were forced into combat without warning. People hated the run to Frontier castles in DAoC and losing them in RvR, and were frustrated by having to be in all places at all times to maintain RvR balances. Look at any forum board and there’s always “nerf X” or “restore Y” — always some balance argument, which really is only about getting providers to disprove bias. While there is no argument there’s emotion in games and produced in games, I wonder if there are not some emotions that are better than others to have in order to succeed at a game. The designer’s challenge evokes “emotioneering” (I’m sort of kidding with this term), so they seem natural and actually enable continued gameplay. That is, fostering the right reactions in players keeps them playing. The challenge for in-game advertising is then obvious. You’re potentially disrupting the scene with an ad for a product and a provider that evokes different emotions than what the designer intended. It’s supra-information, where you can only interpret and reconcile the emotions to something far outside the game by leaving the intellectual and emotional context of the game (e.g. “I guess ProviderX has to this do for extra revenue that ultimately helps me as a player”). It’s not just that the Benjamin aura or the magic circle of the game is broken by a potentially badly created ad, but also the risk that whatever emotions a designer intended to enable player success are interrupted. I mean, can you imagine a horror RPG which suddenly has an ad that just dissolves the tension of a scene and stays with a player as he moves on? The conflict is exactly over that feeling of the ad being “out-of-place,” because the advertisers attempt to blend the “stickiness” of their ads with the game. This concept of “stickiness” is key (cf. The Tipping Point) for advertisers, because it’s basically the idea that an ad has both appeal and resonance long after it’s encounter. An ad conveys its message, and the message is internalized such that sometimes even a bad reaction is preferred because it continues publicity for the product. But I’d argue advertising stickiness is a replacement for the emotional scene in a game. Designers need players to not remember everything, but in a virtual world or a title with a set of linear, sequential challenges, designers don’t want the stickiness of objects with external references replacing any of their work. It interrupts the emotional and information context, possibly making future scenes and other content difficult to introduce. But there are also the risks of players not finishing a title, or worse, coming to see the title as not worth finishing. I don’t mean to be entirely negative, but it seems either/or. The stickiness of the ad is what remains, or the stickiness of the scene in a game. As Eddery points out in another article, there’s a need for advertisers to be senstive to “where” the ad is placed in the game as much as what the ad is and what it portrays. What I wonder is if the “involvement” in games marketers depend on expects too much of players. An ad is always going to bring with it the cognitive and emotional payload of 1) its product’s brand, and 2) the product’s company brand and reputation, but it’s also going to invoke an emotional and then cognitive response to 3) the game provider’s role in allowing the ad, and maybe most importantly, a similar set of responses to 4) what the ad means in the game itself. If designers have to work at emotioneering for continuity and for ornamentation in a game, I just can’t see how including real-world advertising makes sense, unless the game is wholly contemporary and those extra signals add to the overall design. I’m not down on advertising in games; I just think, like Eddery, it’s far more complicated than people might prefer.Let us know what you’re feeling. _uacct = “UA-389212-1”; urchinTracker(); […]

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