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. "

Simple answer for me...

It's just a game. I can allow myself to get immersed to the point where I get pulled along with the story, but at any point I can remind myself that "it's just a game" and drop that colossus or harvest that Little Sister with impunity.

Video games can provoke emotions, but I can just as easily remind myself that it's just a game and not feel the emotions.

Shadow of the Colossus

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.

Madden 200x

That game pisses me off so bad when my friend scores more points than me.

You muust Euthanise it!

"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.

Re:You muust Euthanise it!

I would have also pointed to portals.

There are many places where games cross over into other genres of art and can make something of themselves under that category. Via sound, art, cinematics, story, they can become art just like music, paintings, movies, books...but how about art as a game?

Portals defy reality and show us in real-time an impossible world with impossible gameplay. A big part of the wonder in Portal was that your brain now was now wrestling with a wholly unfamiliar phenomenon and this gameplay, most importantly, is interactive. It's a game.

So this distinction of the portals is where I would point to when using Portal as an example of games as art. Because without the idiosyncratic traits of games being art, then it's just looking at already recognized facets of art in the game and then pointing them out as art, which is only showing that games contain that kind of art, not that gaming itself can be a form of art.

Re:You muust Euthanise it!

Hmm:

What Portal has: unique, groundbreaking gameplay (well, aside from Narbuncular Drop, which pioneered the idea), great voice acting, good plot/writing (not incredibly involved, but surprising for what I expected was a simple puzzler).

What Portal doesn't have: flashy new graphics.

Are you suggesting the latter is somehow more important than the former? Really? That's pretty sad, if that's the case.

Hurry Mr Bubbles!

angels don't wait for slowpokes...

Microsoft FTW!

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!

Swat 4 is the only one that has got close...

On a few of the Swat 4 levels with some emotive content (kidnapped female with sicko kidnapper - religious sect who we don't know much about until we go down to the basement in a gruesome environment and find a lot of shallow kids graves) they got close. The first time I played them the were generating relatively sincere emotive responses - of course on replay it is lost because you know what is coming.

Frustration and disappointment ...

... 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 I have something to contribute

Let's take a look at this list of emotions:

fear - implementable, works for many
humor - should work very well
anger - shouldn't be hard (method 1: piss off gamers by making a section very difficult to pass, method 2: [sorry, not my field])
sadness - I think there are many people who wouldn't succumb to sadness (but I don't know very many people, this is just what I may have heard or experienced). I'm extremely susceptible to being moved to tears by romance. I watch a lot of romance anime - I like anime more than real-life shows, and the reasons might be just because the characters are cuter - with real-life characters, you may be prejudiced by their appearance (that girl looks far too promiscuous, that guy looks evil, etc.). In games, however, I haven't seen any really romantic scenes. If a romantic scene comes somewhere near the beginning, you probably won't be able to empathize with the characters yet. There are actually many factors to keep in mind, and it's easy to spoil everything. Adding a lot of comedy works, in my experience, to get the viewer (or gamer) to really like the characters, and wish for them to fall in love and be happy together. Once you're on the right way, it's pretty hard to screw up, but it's not impossible.

mix it up a little

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!

Provoking emotion?

It's called griefing.

Kana: Little sister

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 [mobygames.com], the guy felt the same.

come on

Planetfall!

Don't forget

(spoiler warning)

System Shock 2 expertly held the possibility just barely out of reach of meeting another normal human being on board the Von Braun and Rickenbacker. Meeting Polito, your single human voice of guidance, halfway through, only to find out the truth of what SHODAN had done to her, was a stroke of storytelling so masterful that M. Night Shyamalan should cry himself to sleep at night for sucking by comparison.

Music

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.

Sad Girls in Snow

Take a look at any of the huge number of Japanese Galgames [wikipedia.org], where the focus is on the story and the emotions. Indeed, taken to their extreme, they turn into visual novels like Kanon [wikipedia.org] where the gameplay is reduced to making a few choices, or something like Planetarian [wikipedia.org], where it is essentially absent.

Emotions in games

An emotional response in games is not difficult to achieve any more so than a book or a movie, if anything it is easier because you have a longer contact period with the main character than you do in any other medium, we have many long books but how many are as long as a good Japanese RPG?

People who have never felt any emotions in games should really try to play through a silent hill, while I didn't have any emotions for the characters themselves, the environment is very much a creepy and it's very difficult for it not to provoke a sense of paranoid and a sensation of being unsafe even in the safest areas. Rather than go with shock horror it just puts you in a position where everything seems evil, where you don't know if you should curl up in the corner with a gun and hope everything goes away or continue deeper into the nightmare like world to get out of it quicker. In modern life we rarely come across such situations so in a game it is very disturbing to feel.

The "are games art" argument is a difficult one but one again I think Silent hill addresses, It does not have the best graphics, it does not have the best acting, but all the small details pull it together to make an entire product that expresses things, tells a good story and invokes ideas and thoughts in your head. There is much argument about what art is, but to myself art is something that provokes thoughts you would not have thought otherwise in a styled medium of some sort. I feel games can be art, but games like Halo and Bioshock aren't where I would look got art in games, I would look at Mario and Zelda, where the style of the art is clearly defined in a set way rather than just trying to make it look as real as possible.

Dogmeat!!! Don't get between me and the....

*burst fire*

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

*bangs keyboard angrily*

Obligatory Silent Hill reference...

For a chunkfull of emotions on a videogame, I sugest the Silent Hill series, specially Silent Hill 2. IMHO, it's the most well crafted piece of "videogame art", simply because every component fits so nicelly, and because it can generate real emotions in the player (at least in me, and in the handfull of people that I know that enjoyed it).

From the (doomed) main character to the twisted monsters, to the secondary characters to the antagonists to the story, to the setting, to the music, it all comes together in such a way that you can't avoid it: you'll feel moved by it, enraged by it, frustrated by it. You'll be sucked into that world, and you'll be in front row for the emotional events that will be unveiled. Yes, it's "just a game", but then again, Shakespeare masterpieces are "just books" too, and that doesn't detract a bit from their geniality.

Single-player Doom was great for this...

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. :-) :-)

Am I the only one?

I don't know about you guys, but I cried the first time playing through final fantasy VII after I had spent probably 6 hours leveling up Aeris to get her lvl. 4 Limit break, only to become so abruptly aware of what a waste of time it was.

Alter Ego

Like the game says: What if you could live your life over again? [theblackforge.net]

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.)

What compromises immersion

I think a key factor that compromises immersion in a game compared to a movie is the lack of permanence. When Johnny Protagonist eats a bullet in a movie, there's no going back. When you in a video game, as Pacman Master Chief Protagonist the Hedgehog, eat a laser blast from a Zerg, you wait three seconds to regenerate at your last save point and try again. You're never more than a reboot from undoing your last stupid deed.

I commit emotionally to a tattoo. Less so, a haircut.

white chamber

The White Chamber [studiotrophis.com] was the first Adventure-style Game that honestly scared me

Animal Crossing: Futility.

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 Robot

Perhaps its just me, but the reason I have always felt that emotional response is not a requirement for something to be considered art is that a great many things that are considered art don't bring out any emotion in me; its pretty rare for a painting or photo to elicit emotion in me - some do, but for most its just "oh, that looks nice". While music often brings out emotions there is plenty of music, including some I quite enjoy, that don't bring out any emotion.

Meanwhile there are plenty of things that are not art by any reasonable definition that do elicit deep emotions (for example, particular sporting events).

So I don't know if I'm in the minority, but to me it seems like emotion is a poor criteria.

It's a false front

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.

Art is orthogonal to emotion

It is neither necessary nor sufficient for art to evoke an emotional reaction, although that may suit the artist's purpose.

It is neither necessary nor sufficient for art to evoke an intellectual reaction, although that may suit the artist's purpose.

To be art, it has to evoke an aesthetic reaction, which in turn sometimes evokes an emotional and intellectual response. It is perfectly possible for art to be cold, austere, and so abstract that it is beyond the realms of human experience that can talked about meaningfully. Often an overwrought emotional or intellectual response is a sign that person responding has missed the point.

ICO

I can't believe he forgot to mention ICO. That is quite possibly the most emotionally affecting game of all time. The last stretch of the game from the bridge back to the throne room and then the ending was chock full of so much feeling that I wanted to burst. Never have I felt so sad, vengeful, and happy all at the same time. I definitely suggest ICO to anyone who wants an extraordinary experience. Oh in case you didn't know, this was the debut game of the Shadow of the Colossus guys.

Silent Hill

Finishing the original Silent Hill, with the bad ending, was the first real emotional response I ever got from a game. "Holy shit" comes to mind as being spoken aloud, alone at night. It's endings didn't screw around with 'moral choices' and 'ethical dilemmas.' If you were able to unravel enough of the nooks and crannies to actually save the others, you got the 'good' endings. I should say 'successful' endings since that first, 'bad' ending was the best I'd ever seen.

As that horn whispered into the fog, you realize that Silent Hill beat YOU.

Silent Hill 2 has so far been the only game that I've played where about 2/3 of the way through it I actually began to feel like I (the human player, not the character) was being manipulated by some demon they'd cursed my PS2 disk with at Konami's satanic factories.

Torment, anyone?

I think it's one of the few games where I realized the game ended when the credit rolled. I mean, I knew it was a game but the story was so involved that when the game really ended (one of many endings, from what I hear), I realized this is it. Then awe and sense of completion followed. And desire for more that never... I should get back to it one of these days.

Photopia, Blue Chairs

Yes, they are both text adventures. But they also happen to be two of the most moving stories I have read, played, or watched.

Photopia [wurb.com]

Blue Chairs [wurb.com]

provoking emotion is easy

There's a tried and true way to provoke emotions via killing people off. Assuming the characters you developed are actually any good, killing them off will most likely provoke some kind of response.

Another easy way like some described with Shadow of Colossus is that it turns out you were just going around killing babies or whatever all this time. That has been used at least as early as Terranigma where most of your effort in the game was help to revive a mad scientist who once wiped out the entire Earth. And yes it's easy to provoke some kind of emotional response when you found that you were just commiting crimes against humanity all this time without knowing it.

But more importantly, the question is did you have a choice? If the game is like 'you must kill 100 babies to get to next stage' then no I don't think it means anything. It's sad that Aeris died in FF7 but she did not have a choice. The game pretty much indicated that she must die for the story and the game to continue. There is no remote indication that there was anything you could have done to avoid her death. If you want to provoke emotions without just being cheesy, there has to be at least the illusion of choice. Terranigma, with its openness, was a game where it seems like you can delay the doomsday scenario forever if you wanted to. Sure nothing will happen but it was fun just exploring the peaceful version of the world. When you pick up the Hero Pike and the Hero Armor and accept the responsibility of being the hero, that's when your comrades start to fall one by one, ending with the death of the hero himself. The hero questions whether saving the world is really what he wanted to do if it meant the death of all his close friends. In the ending you're shown that you could have just ran away and live out your life as a normal boy if you simply didn't open the Pandora's Box at the very beginning. Although there is no actual choice for 'run away and never do anything', the game clearly shows you that could have been your choice. That's why giving that world up is meaningful.

This applies to character dying, a common way to inject emotion into a game. Unfortunately I can't think of any game where I actually have any say, or even the illusion of having a say, on the death of a character.

Re:In soviet russia

"games as games" has always been more important to me than "games as art". Maybe it's just me.

Here's an idea.

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?

Re:Games don't have good story

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.

Mod parent up!

Very well said, I agree with AC's thoughts entirely. I'm sick of the same old, tired, thoughtless discussions surrounding the 'can games make you cry?' topic. Good video games have been provoking powerful, meaningful, life-changing emotions in games since the beginning of their existence - not just 'omgz this is fun'. The reason your standard media journalists and filmmaker types can't seem to understand that is because they typically only understand 'emotion' in a strictly cinematic or narrative (ie, passive) sense, keep trying to 'read' games as typical story-driven movies or novels. The whole innovative potential of videogames is for the player to create his own emotional moments through actions that generate epiphany and aporia, success and failure.

Sure, you can keep clamoring for more immersive, story-driven 'emotion' in games, and the game studios will keep cranking it out for the masses who still depend on a passive, linear, developer-babysitter experience because they can't generate emotion for themselves through their own creative play.

Games don't make you feel ashamed about something you've done? Surely this guy must have heard of hentai games? (snicker)

Seriously though, because games depend on player action, they tend to provoke emotions that correspond to the real world rather than a fictional fantasy. Take your typical multiplayer game-world, there are tons of ways to lie, cheat, steal, hack, or just generally be harmful and even hurtful to other players. While getting a teammate kicked out of a guild forcing him to find a new group of friends to play with isn't quite as horrid as slaughtering innocent children, the former actually happens in real life while the latter is simply a harmless fiction.

If the games this guy plays always end up making him feel 'good', then he's probably just wasting money on mindless mass-market entertainment, you can easily read pulp fiction or watch hollywood blockbusters and get the same result there. If a game manages to transform your experience of the world, of others, or of yourself and your own real emotions, then you don't need a storyline to tell you what to think or how to act, you're already truly at play.

Link

The Baron (by Victor Gijsbers) [springthing.net].