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On Provoking Emotions Via Games
N'Gai Croal, poster at the Newsweek LevelUp blog, moonlights today in a column for Next Geneartion discussing the success games have had in provoking emotional responses. More specifically, he talks about the fact that mostly games are fairly bad at this. Citing a few notable exceptions (Final Fantasy VII, BioShock), he raises again the notion of 'games as art' as they relate to emotion: "Shadow Of The Colossus wasn't a blockbuster, but the frequency with which it's cited in 'are games art?' debates indicates both a medium still in its aesthetic infancy and a videogame that punched above its weight. BioShock won't sell like Gears Of War, but it already feels as though it's going to be one of this generation's most influential games. And if Mass Effect can deliver on its early promise of confronting players with thorny moral choices and the consequences of their actions, perhaps other creators will see that making the player feel bad can be a good thing after all. "
When I first beat Shadow of the Colossus, I'm sure i'm not the only one who thought, "My god, what have I done?" I've never had another game make me questions my actions within the game before. It was wonderful.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
That game pisses me off so bad when my friend scores more points than me.
God spoke to me.
"Although the incineration process is extremely painful, eight out of ten Aperture Science engineers believe your companion cube probably can't feel pain."
If there's been one game that evoked emotion in me this year, it was Portal. From dread and fear when discovering the ratman's nest, to shock when I saw the fire pit open up, and consistent joy in solving the puzzles or hearing GLaDOS speaking. Portal's minimalist beauty, awesome execution, and wonderful writing puts it at the top of my "games are art" arguments list.
Demented But Determined.
I've never seen more emotion evoked from a game console than Microsoft has managed to with their amazing Xbox 360 console.
You may think you've been moved by games before but nothing can top the anger, despair, and even humiliation of having your 360 die right in front of you once again. 360 owners are moved to Shatner level expressions of emotion "Kaaaaaahhhhnnn!!!" "RRRoDDDDDDDDD!!!!"
Mixed with the tendency of the 360 to making sickening grinding noises as it tears up yet another 60 dollar game disc and you have gamers who are now 'filled with emotion' like never before.
Who says Microsoft is nothing but a failure in the console market?
Bravo little Dreamcast 360. Bravo!
... are emotions too. Emotions often provoked by games. But usually when people start to talk about emotion and games it's about emotional attachment to characters (love/hate stuff). But come on... it's virtual reality, it's entertainment, why should I feel anything about those characters, they're not real (just like the characters in books and movies).
I think that's part of the problem we have in communicating games as art. We look at a picture on the wall and easily think "that's art." But we look at a game and we either think "it's a good game, but its not art" or "its very artistic, but what kind of a game is it." Art and games are not mutually exclusive in my opinion. To me, at least, art is a personal experience the artist is trying to impose on the user/viewer. That's really a very big part of gaming; immersion. I'm not talking immersion in the sense of realism or perception of the environment, but personal involvement. Even "simple games" like Pac-Man, or Puzzles have an immersive quality that draws you into them and makes you think about what they present you with; its what makes art and games. What makes good art, or a good game is usually a quality of uniqueness or differentiation that sets it apart from the rest. The Arts don't belong in stuffy museums or to the stiff dialog intellectuals, they belong in the experiences of all people; games seem like the ideal vector to achieve this.
Demented But Determined.
It's refreshing that they're mixing it up a little. The only emotion that 99% of games in the N64 era and before invoked was blind rage :D you know you threw that controller across the room and swore at Bowser for spinning you out in Mari Kart, don't deny it!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
It's called griefing.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Print out the Pac-Man screen 9 times, each time through a different color filter.
Arrange them on canvas.
Sell it to a museum for $millions as an "authentic warhol tribute."
Movie posters are considered "art." Movie boxes are considered "art." So are the movies inside.
How many video games have to come with posters and boxes before the thing inside is viewed as art as well?
Call me a pussy but I have cried 4 of 6 hours I played this game. And I couldn't sleep properly for a week, feeling too much grief (tried to be the perfect brother and got one of the intellectual endings).
Read this review, the guy felt the same.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Planetfall!
I find my emotions being toyed with via the music more often then anything else. As well crafted as the plot is in planescape, Deionarra Theme did more then any words. FF6 may have had a nice interesting story but it would not have been ass successful with a lesser sound track. I find thats what fails about other games for me. Oblivion never moved me at all because of it's rather generic sound track. ditto for the fallout games.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
*burst fire*
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
*bangs keyboard angrily*
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I learned to use my ears as much as my eyes when going through the single-player levels, and there were certain creature sounds on Doom that would just send shivers up my spine whenever I heard them.
:-) :-)
Some of them still do.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Going to nitpick your nitpick a bit, I think: Story != presentation. Story is how you would summarize the game to your friends. Presentation is how the game tells the story to you.
$50,000 cutscenes are one way of presenting story.
So are in-game events.
So are random notes you find in the game environment that hint at what happened.
So are NPC dialogues.
Games that have $50,000 budgets for CG doesn't mean that they have $50,000 stories. It just means that they thought the best way to present their story was with massive FMV. (hint: They're usually wrong.)
I know the moderators will punish me for this one, but people always say Half-life had an excellent story.
In my opinion, these people are on crack. Half-life's story sucked. Seriously. Think about it. Story: "We accidentally made a portal, and it kinda goes to the world of evil aliens, so they invaded. Hooray! This guy in powered armor killed an implausible number of them, and ended the invasion! We're saved!"
Where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah. Doom. Which people seldom accuse of being the height of literature.
What Half-life DID have (and had in spades) was PRESENTATION. It presented the story extremely well by never breaking first-person view, and "showing, not telling". So even though the story was utter crap, it was fun to have told to you, because they were telling it in a way that was completely novel at the time, and that you could explore and trigger at your own pace. The story didn't feel like it was being TOLD to you, it felt like it was HAPPENING to you.
So yeah, games can be art because of the interaction, but they can also be art because of the story they are presenting, through the interaction. I think I basically agree with your point - if you take a game, and just throw some unchanging story in between levels, then you have Final Fantasy, or, as I like to call it, "graphic novels punctuated by minigames". But there are also games that have been art specifically BECAUSE of their story, and the way the game made you feel like you were in charge of it and calling the shots, and that it felt awesome.
Planescape:Torment is a good example of a game that was like this.
Games can also be art when they present a story that is mostly static, but that is presented in a way that lets the player explore it and all the ramifications. Mind Forever Voyaging is a good example of this.
Heck, games can even be art based purely on their visual presentation. I think you could make an excellent case for Okami, purely on the grounds of its graphical style alone.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit far afield here. Back to the point: Games can be art because of the story. Or just about anything else. The interaction isn't the art in itself; the interaction is the "special sauce" that lets you explore the aspect of it that IS art, and makes it more than it was originally, due to the personal connection. Whether that aspect is story, graphics, or who knows what. Just because some studio dropped $50k on trying to make some flashy FMVs as a misguided attempt to cover up the fact that their story wasn't good, doesn't mean that games can't be art because of story.
Like the game says: What if you could live your life over again?
;-)
If you make it all the way to the end of this game and you don't feel anything, you're not really a human being.
(Full disclaimer: I ported AE to the web from the Commodore 64.)
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
A month after I paid off my house in each Animal Crossing game, the emotion of realizing that my actions are futile came upon me: "Why am I still doing this?"
I think this is one of the dead ends. What I want to be able to do is make moral choices that affect the entire world. I want to be able to decide that the cost of saving the world is just too high and leave. I want to have choices between different courses of action and have a consequence to whatever I choose to do.
If the cost of saving Spira is allowing Yuna to die, why the hell isn't it my choice to make? Why does the game present such a moral dilemma just to have the game decide for me? Why is it that after discovering that Kohint will disappear after I destroy the Wind Fish, the game presents me with no alternative? That isn't realistic, at least not to me. It's never me playing the role or connecting with the characters. I might like them, but considering that I have zero power to decide what happens in the world, I may as well be watching a movie.
I think games will become more emotional once you get the power that video games promise. That you and only you can decide how and why you want to save the world. Or even *if* you think that saving the world is a good idea. It's supposed to be me playing the role -- let me play in the sandbox and decide that some actions are right and some are wrong. Put up a consequence, make me suffer for a bad choice. Just let me choose.