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For Love of The Game
A feature from Gamespot this week is an interesting look at gaming moments that moved you as a player. Emotional moments for several of the editors are explored. From the article: "This isn't an article about violence in video games. It's a chance for us to consider some of the moments in our lives as game players that made us feel strongly about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty trivial. These are cases in which games drove us to relative emotional extremes. This is both how and why we play." What would be a gaming moment that drove you to an emotional extreme?
The FMV cut scene that involved the death of Aeris. That sucked, mostly because I had invested a lot of time getting her character leveled up.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
I remember when I was heavily into GTA:VC...long after I had actually completed the game, I would still start it up and tool around Vice City, looking to get into some trouble. Sniping multiple targets from the roof of a building or leading police on a mad chase with a PCJ was very relaxing and thereaputic after a hard day at the office.
After doing this for a while, I noticed certain thought patterns while out driving...like veering toward pedestrians, unconsciously judging the distance to the nearest self-serve car wash, and reflecting how easy it would be for me to just jump out of the car, run to the crotch-rocket idiling a few lanes away, giving the rider a smart rap in the face with my elbow, and jump on...the cop three cars back will never catch me...
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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One I can think of recently is the very beginning of Half Life 2. The woman waiting for her husband. In 15 seconds of interaction, you understand her entire life and feel terrible for her because you know that her husband is never going to arrive, but she'll probably wait for him until they remove her. I'm sad just thinking about it, and she's not even real.
I could name several examples of memorable gaming moments back on my Commodore 64, usually involving the Ultima series. But the most memorable was hacking games with hex editors, and seeing my name "inside" the game ;-)
More recently, getting totally freaked out by the top-notch ambience in Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels.
Finally beating Mother Brain in Metroid, feeling like a god, and then realizing I have a time limit to escape before the whole place explodes, and the rush of getting out in time and winning after so many months of playing was joyous.
And to this day, Metroids scare me. Metroid Prime / Echoes, when I see a Metroid I get the heeby-jeebies/willies/shivers whatever your dialect calls it.
And I'm almost 30 years old. Sad, huh.
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I remember the first time I let that ball slip past me in Pong. I felt like I'd let the entire world down. Man, that was such a crushing defeat for me. I don't think I've experienced anything quite so humiliating since then...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Granted, it may have something to do with the fact that it was 2AM and I was somewhat sleep-deprived, but when I made it back to the starting room of Ico and had to fend off all the little shadows I was...mildly annoyed.
Then I noticed that all of them had tiny horns, just like me, and I put that together with the fact that they were coming out of the caskets I had escaped, and...I didn't want to fight them any more. I wanted to put the controller down and let them take out their ghostly despair on my hide. I felt a profound sadness, pity, but to save us all I had to first beat them down.
That moment will stick with me a long time.
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
"It's a chance for us to consider some of the moments in our lives as game players that made us feel strongly about something that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably pretty trivial."
:)
:-P
For me it's an opposite experience, but still applicable to the article's request, I think
I was playing UO, which is an MMORPG, set in a 2d top-down view of the world. I was in a town called Bucaneer's Den, fighting evil players around the town, and having a good time. Sometimes it can be frustrating fighting people, though; frustration and cursing are trademarks of the town.
Anyway, I was mounted on my horse, standing by a bridge, when suddenly more than three people starting casting damage spells at me! I ran, of course - northeast, toward a cluster of buildings I thought I could hide behind.
I ran behind one of the buildings (in 2d,) and two of my pursuers gave up the chase. But one kept following me, ripping around the building's corners toward me. I ran to the other side of the building.
For *45 minutes* this guy and I dodged around the building, me staying on the far side of it away from him whenever he moved toward me. We were both really determined; he could have given up, and I could have run away, but the chase was too fun. Every few minutes he would get a crossbow shot off on me, but I'd be gone around that building's corner before it really hurt much, and healed up by the next time he could shoot.
It was so hilarious that we both spent so much time playing around that silly building, that I was giggling after 30 minutes, and at 45 minutes I said "LOL" with my character and came out in to the open. He started to kill me, then stopped before I died, and said "lol" too
We both thought it was great, funny and fun, and became friends - what an experience! What I took from it was that while I'm a hardcore gamer who takes games pretty seriously, sometimes interacting with people in a sketchy virtual world can show how trivial the whole thing is-
-Sahrs (Sonoma UO)
Of course, nearly every comment in this thread will be a spoiler, but:
In Thief, when your client for whom you endured legions of undead morphs into the Trickster, and snatches your eye out of your socket and leaves you to die, bleeding. I was absolutely stunned that a game could have such an unpredictable turn of events.
In System Shock 2-- the initial glimpse of a zombie chasing down a Von Braun crewmember behind the fogged, reinforced glass window. Later, cowering and sweating behind collapsed file cabinets, out of ammo with a broken gun and no other weapon-- all the while listening to them call to me "join us... join us... the Many sings to us..."
Emotional games, those.
The first moment of true drama I ever remember in a game was Rescue on Fractalus. I suppose I mean drama beyond the excitement and frustration cycle that keeps people playing any game.
Rescue on Fractalus is a 3D flight simulator, in which one lands on fractally-generated terrain to rescue downed pilots from hostile territory. They run up to your ship, knock on the door, and you open the airlock and let them in. As the levels advance, the defenses become stronger.
At a certain stage, you find that the astronauts you're rescuing start to have green skin. If you let them in, they start sabotaging your ship. because they're aliens. The ideal way to deal with them is to turn your ship's systems back on before they reach the airlock, as the shields will kill them.
If, however, you don't open the airlock for them, instead of knocking politely, they jump in front of the windshield in brilliant full-size animation, scream at you, and scare the bejeepers out of you if you're seven years old.
Or, as it turns out, fifteen years old.
I think that no game, nor any character, has managed to so deeply touch me as the character of Deionarra in Planescape: Torment.
I was therefore pleased, recently, to read an article on the site Gamer's With Jobs expounding on the virtues of the same character and game.
The episode "Longing," particularly, discussed in that article, and ultimately the character herself are kept just far enough from total exposition to be maintained as a tragic mystery whose explanation will be kept eternally just out of reach.
There's nothing quite so tragic as the loss of memory. You need only ask someone who has had a very dear loved one succumb to Alzheimer's disease to know this is the truth. And though it may seem a strange connection to draw, Planescape: Torment evoked for me the very real tragic quality of memory loss better than anything else I have experienced. And so yes, I do believe that games can speak to profound realities in our every day life.
I was in high school and going through the usual geek/teen problems, stumbling home depressed at night to play Wasteland. I'll never forget the scene where, after gathering chemicals and other inventory items, you help those two guys with radiation sickness back to health (Metal Maniac and I forget the other's name).
The NPC sits up and says, "Let's go kick some ass!"
I remember thinking, "Yeah, it's about time for that, isn't it?"
That's one of those moments that really changed me: tenacity and humor after near-total defeat.
But yeah, there are so many moments in Torment that are incredibly memorable. One of my favorites is from right when you are about to enter the Fortress of Regrets, and Morte tells you that he had been there before, and knew all along that the portal was right where you started the game:
Morte: The other YOU, he... he didn't care very much for anybody. For anyone. We could have ALL died in the Fortress, and he wouldn't have blinked. So... I just want you to hold on to your differences, because... well, I like this *you* better. A LOT better.
The Nameless One: But that's not all you want to say, is it?
Morte: No...There's one other thing - I may not have liked that *other* you very much, but he was one smart basher - the smartest basher I've ever known; he always had every angle covered. If he died at the Fortress, that means... well...
TNO: You don't think I can succeed, do you?
Morte: No...It's not that, chief. Because it's not always who's smartest, or who's the most powerful, or who's the toughest... sometimes it comes down to who you are and what you *really* want. I mean, once you wanted to become immortal - but in the end, is that *really* what you wanted? Just be sure of what you want this time, is all I'm saying.
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
and the realization that games could be that well written. And without further ado, here's the three stages of playing Torment:
Stage 1: The aformentioned realization, and a desire to write my own Planescape stories.
Stage 2: The realization that I suck as a writer, and can't come close to Torment.
Stage 3: The final realization that the game more or less bombed, and that they'll probably never be a game with that much effort put into writing again.
It's the kind of game I wish I'd never played so I could go back and play it again.
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- A woman who was severely ill from cancer thanked me for making her husband laugh. Those moments were few and far between for her family.
- I had several people professing their love, not for me but for one of the NPCs.
- There's a moment in the game where the player experiences a deep loss. A few people reported they were actually moved to tears.
I've decided that the best measure of success for a game is seeing how far I can emotionally draw players into the story. Emotions such as hate, joy, greed, and love are things core to the human experience. Even after all these centuries, the things that Shakespeare wrote can still move us.I have to admit that I'm not immune to that sort of thing. I remember playing GTA and then driving around afterwards. Things like curbs and stoplights seemed so unnecessary.
#3 - Deus Ex -- The death of Paul Denton. (If you're not careful.)
#2 - While playing in an RP-heavy text MUD. Take any of dozens of moments when the GMs or other players pulled at the heartstrings, as rarely happens in a modern MMORPG.
#1 - And weighing in at #1, the death of Floyd in Planetfall:
Steve Meretzky's like a tiny god. (To paraphrase Penny Arcade.) His game is one of the reasons I entered the industry.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
For me, the most emotion I've felt while playing a video game was playing the first 'Deus Ex'. I'd been playing the entire game with some kind of moral sense - I tried not to kill people (even if they were "bad" ... I only killed less than a dozen people the entire game), I chose "sneakiness" over blazing guns, and I tried to do the "Right Thing" (including not stepping on those damn alley cats.)
I remember the end of the game - you're presented with 3 mutually-exclusive options for the mission that will end the game. After I uncovered the 3rd option and I realized the choice I had to make, I actually stopped playing the game for about a week while I made my decision. It really was that hard for me. How to best benefit "society", and is the cost worth it?
In the end, I decided it was best to destroy the communications hub and plunge the world into a 2nd Dark Age. Man, what a decision! But I figured I couldn't trust the HELIOS AI or Morgan Everett.