This came from a discussion I was having with a friend the other day. I'm also going to write a final about this so you have the potential to help me out a lot by talking about this maybe!

The best video games-- my opinion-- are the ones that break the player's protective shell. Usually, we are protected from the reality of the game. This is usually a necessary thing for the premise of the game; your typical MW2 player isn't a trained soldier and thus needs the comfort of "this is fantasy" to be able to play the part of one.

However, many games nowadays try to grab the player by the gut. Alyx Vance comes to mind. How do you think this is done? What does it take in order to make us feel emotion for some pixels on our screens?

It's strange to ask why video games in particular cause emotions. It seems taken for granted that movies and books can do this, but video games beg the question? A good story will make you feel something, and video games are interractive stories, so it's probably more likely they can make you feel something. You can feel angry at the injustice of one character getting killed, and then feel satisfaction at the payback you bring to the killer as you gun him down. Or, in games that offer choices, you can feel responsible for a tragic event because you are the one that made the call. Had you done differently, things would be different. That's pretty personal. Then you also have the emotions of the raw action. Fighting for your life, firing panicky shot after shot at the monster coming at you in Dead Space, your heart pounding, and the relief when it's dead. There are simply more avenues for you to get involved and feel something when playing a game, then reading a story or seeing a movie.

Indeed!

But what of the "protective shell" Kazuhiro mentions? I suggest that shell is actually nothing more than instances of poor User Interface implementations. A good UI lets you interact cleanly enough to have your intents manifest in the game world, a great UI allows you to learn to interact so naturally that you do so without conscious thought of it, a superb UI requires little to no training for the person to do so.

I'd disagree. Few things characterize the original Silent Hill quite like "poor User Interface", but it leaves no protective shell in sight.

~J

I guess that most games use the same elements as movies: the story, the pictures and the music.

You've mentioned Half-Life 2 and I think it just uses very basic methods: a good looking female who's obviously interested in the main character is enough to touch most typical (male) gamers.
The fact that she's made of pixel doesn't really matter: comic books or animated movies can cause emotions even if the characters are obviously not real. It just requires a bit of work to make her realistic enough (for example facial expressions and voice acting). I've heard that a lot of work was done in Heavy Rain to get realistic eyes since eyes carry a lot of emotional content. But even then I'm not really sure that it's required: older games such as Dreamweb could also carry a lot of emotional content with low tech and few pixels.
The fact that the main character has no personality (so that it's easier to put yourself in his shoes) isn't exactly new either: franco-belgian comic books often had bland main characters (Tintin or Asterix) to help identification and colorful secondary characters for the emotional content. It's just pushed a little further here.

A few examples I can think of that show some difference with emotions caused by movies:
* In Dreamfall, .
* In Ice Pick Lodge's games, Pathologic and The Void, the emotional content comes from the usual reasons (story, atmosphere and so on) but also from the fact that the player is put in a situation where he has to act, without knowing exactly what to expect or even what to do. In a movie (or even a linear video game), the story would go forward and the watcher will just follow but here the player is the one who needs to take the steps. In 'The Void' you don't know what you should do. There's a tutorial but you're lied to. Or maybe not. Yet you have to act, or you'll die. And you never know if you've taken the right step or not. And even if you think you did, you're still not sure if it was really a good idea. In Pathologic, you often find yourself in difficult situations: once I was badly wounded and found a kid who had what I needed to get health. I looked in my inventory to see if I could give anything in exchange and found that... I only had a scalpel. I couldn't exchange it, but I could use it. If I didn't get what that kid had, I'd be dead soon (and wouldn't be able to save everyone else). A movie could show you someone in that situation, but a game can put you in it.
* Then there are Jason Rohrer's games such as Passage, Gravitation and, more recently Sleep is Death. The first two cause emotions because of their symbolism, just like some movies, except that, especially for Gravitation you can play it differently each time which let you get different aspects of the topic. The difference with a movie here is that the player's action have an impact on his experience which will trigger different emotions. Sleep is Death is even more special but it's just very different from most games anyway.

I've seen two basic tools used in games.

The long-plot - pre-scripted events that create a set plot for the game (the woman is kidnapped, the hero falls, etc.) These are really the core of what works in movies and books. The problem in video games is that a video game is better the less it limits your actions. Every time there's a scripted event, it pulls us out of the video game, because we say 'hey, I saw that trap from a mile away' or 'I had that shot' or whatever, and we have to walk into it anyway (Deus ex Machina) or alternatively, the action is far away so we can't interfere, and therefore lacks a personal connection (the princess is in another castle). Because we're pulled out, we're no longer emotionally invested, and the scene loses power.

The only really good example I can see of this being done well is in Silent Hill 2, where the crises the character faces is actually embodied in the monsters and locations he's interacting with. Even though we have full freedom, we are still being forced to submit to and suffer how the character suffers.


Tugging the heartstrings - cheap, brief scenes used to create an emotional bond. This is the 'spooky little girl', the 'girlfriend dies', the 'my city and parents burn to the ground', the 'doll left in the corner'. It's short, succint, stand-alone, static items which are meant to evoke an emotional response. They're cheap, they're shallow, and they're cliched.


I think it's a mistake to think of a video game like a movie. If you do, you're going to get a frustrating video game, because you keep failing and having to reload, and in the end, you've just enjoyed someone else's adventure. The best games for a story right now are, IMO, where you are thrust into the character's conflict in such a way that the symbols you interact with lead you to that emotional bond, without relying on scripted scenes with other characters, etc. Fighting monsters representing psychological neurosis is a fantastic example. Stories where we're fighting against the environment also work (because we're literally doing that) and make games like Fallout fun. Until AI gets better though, it's going to be difficult to get a human player to feel an emotional bond with a digital character, except through giving her some fine curves. The best you can really do is a very, very large conversation tree.

For what values of "actions" and "limit"?

~J

To put it succintly, if I could do it five minutes ago, there ought to be a very good, non-metagame reason why I can't do it now. And if I, as a normal human, can engage in a basic activity with absolutely no training (such as 'jump'), the plot should not spin based on the inability of my character (who we are otherwise lead to believe is also human) to do the same.


Something I forgot to add in my previous list... Music does make a *HUGE* difference, with little in-game cost.

I mean a much more encompassing definition and purposed measure of UI. EDIT: Although I don't entirely share your assessment of Silent Hill. It is more the brilliant parts overshadowed its problems.

Careful there—by video game standards, the normal human indeed cannot jump


Do you have an example? The only thing that comes to mind right this instant is that annoying habit of characters to mysteriously get exponentially more awesome during cutscenes.

~J

I think nezumi was referring to this

That certainly is a good example. I don't mind if a video game character can't jump. However, pinning the story on that fact stretches credulity.

However, I'm talking more about, when they can jump in some cases, but not when it's plot important. I remember playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in the day, which has two modes, side-scrolling mode for beating a level, and bird's eye view for navigation. At one point there's a very narrow river between two sidewalks, separating me from saving April and the rest of the world. Even though you can regularly swim and always jump in combat mode, you can't do either in navigation mode, and so even though it's maybe four feet of water, my character, who is a ninja, and also a turtle, is incapable of getting across.

Another minor examples of this. In Half-Life, there's a room which is clearly a trap. You enter, the lights go off, and you're captured (to move on to the next chapter). How come when I go into that room, now my flashlight doesn't work? My flashlight worked for all the rest of the game, and will work again until the end of the game. Why not then? Until that point, I was really into the game. But at that moment, right outside of the room, I stopped and said "wait, you're expecting me to believe I'm in a labyrinth of a compound, but it only has one route I can take, that there's a trap which I know is there, but impossible to defuse or sidestep, and I literally have no choice but to walk, willingly into a trap? Why didn't the bad guys set that up at the beginning and save all those peoples' lives?" It completely ruined the experience for me.