There are many people who believe that emotion can’t be conveyed in interactive entertainment, and thinking back on all the games I have played over the years, I have to say that these people are simply wrong. Now, before you go “Oh, this guy is simply promoting his opinion as fact,” just hear me out. Every person has differing emotional triggers, for example: I can’t stand romantic movies. I tend to think of them as the corniest, stupidest movies on the face of the planet, but I have known people who, when you simply mention the title “The Notebook” will start crying like babies, talking about how beautiful a movie it is. Personally, I’d rather see a movie about the dynamic between best friends. I can’t say I’ve ever had a strong romantic attachment, but I’d kill for my best friend.
Whenever I get to talking about story or emotion in interactive entertainment, one name always has to come up: David Jaffe. Not because I have some illogical rage and hatred of the man, but because he’s the most recent person to step out against everything I believe in regards to this industry. But, I have to point out something ironic in his speech about the “dangers” of story in video games. He starts talking about how games can not convey story like movies, books, or even commercials on TV. He said “I cry at almost everything, ok? So, I cry, there’s a commercial every christmas where the mom takes the cookies out of the oven and she, and the narrator says… I’m gonna cry right now because I’m thinking about it… she says ‘childhood quickly slips away…” and over the end of this you hear a response of laughter from some of the people in the crowd to which he responds “Fuck you all, I can’t help it, ok?” then he continues to say that this commercial reaches him because he has little kids, and he loves them so much. Then he continues to ponder why when a guy like him who is so open to be emotionally effected by things, why do games only effect him by 1/100th of the amount the cookie commercial does.
Does anyone notice the irony there? Can anyone pick out where his logic fails? It’s in the laugh. The laugh he received about his emotional reaction to the cookie commercial. The evidence of his flawed logic was there, staring him in the face when the people laughed. It showed the fact that they don’t share his feelings about the cookie commercial, that it doesn’t reach them the way it reached him.
I can guarantee that every single one of us can describe something that effected them emotionally, that does nothing for others of us. It could be a song you love, or a book, movie… and yes, even a video game. For me… I don’t want to drop any spoilers, but I played a game relatively recently in which a character I had grown to genuinely care about got shot. That effected me, I cared when I saw him fall to the ground, and the blood pool around him. Hell, I won’t lie, I cried when that happened. This is a character that I had grown to genuinely care about, and suddenly he was gone, shot in the back… and it wasn’t just because he died, but he left a friend behind, a close friend. Being a guy who has a best friend who I care about dearly, that got to me. The idea of anyone losing such a friend is horrifying to me, and here it played out in front of my eyes… and it wasn’t in a movie, or a book, or on TV. It was in a game.
The point I am trying to make is that things effect different people differently. This can work not just for interactive experiences, but for books, or movies, TV, comics… Cookie commercials at Christmas time. In the end, no one is an emotional template for the entire world, not me, not my best friend, not… (who’s the woman who wrote Twilight? Stepheie Meyer?) not David Jaffe. No one. And to say that something can’t convey emotion is to set yourself up as an emotional template to which the rest of the world has to adhere to. That simply doesn’t work, because we all have different triggers that bring about different emotions.
mythicera 