Reason: we already have emotions in games! Lots of them.
You just have to know where to look!
But first: stop crying! (a necessary rant)
To be brutally honest with you: I feel like I’m going to slap the next person in the face asking for games to be more emotional. Just to make him or her cry, since that seems to be the experience they crave for. It’s an argument I’ve heard many times over. And if a game makes you cry that’s the ultimate testament for a game with emotions.
I call that bullshit!
First of all, would you really want to play a game that makes you cry? Would it really be such an outstanding, revolutionary experience? How many “touching” movies have you seen that left you cold-hearted? What about the movies that touched you in ways you’d never expected from a movie like that? Why did you even go see that movie in the first place? Was it because you wanted to cry?
Of course not.
Or what about affection … there are people who want to have more emotions in games because they want to feel affection for a character, feel empathetic towards a virtual character’s plight. If it fits the game, why the hell not? But we all know that games are badly scripted, often have terrible voice acting and the dynamics of a game make it very hard to create the exciting moment that will make you feel involved, will make you feel empathy for your virtual world posse.
Interestingly enough, the games that are actually able to pull this of usually present those events as cutscenes.
So there, you were just watching another movie. It didn’t have anything to do with the game. You had no control over it. Unless you call “Press X at the right microsecond in time or else you’ll lose and have to do it all over again” control.
If you do: screw you!
Emotions in games are aplenty!
Maybe you don’t realize that. Or you dismiss certain emotions as not being emotions. As humans, we have a tendency to only recognize emotions if we have them towards other human beings. But there are plenty of emotions you can have without some other human being being involved. I think games are actually doing a very great job to bring out those emotions!
Here are some of my favorite examples of emotions in video games:
Sports games
My favorite sports game is FIFA. That’s football for you. For you americans, yes, that is still football. Your football is called American Football. I refuse to call our football soccer just because I refuse to accept that you (referring to the americans here) created a sport and called it football even though actually kicking the ball is an utterly under-represented part of the game.
So there, emotions in football. You know the situation, it’s like in real life. Your team wins in the last second: happy feelings. Your team didn’t qualify for the tournament by one goal? Just plain devastating.
But it can be much more intricate than that. How about the situation where you play against a terrible team not giving any resistance but you just can’t get to score that one goal to win. It’s like everything is against you. You hit the post, you miss the shot by an inch, you get a penalty but the keeper saves it. You name it. Eventually, you do score the goal. Relief (yup, that’s an emotion).
Next thing you know, the team you’ve had under control for the entire match is suddenly outwitting you. Everything seems to go perfect for them. You can’t tackle the ball away, instead they play tricks on your defenders. You push and pull the one with the ball but he won’t give it away. They pass through your players as if they weren’t there. Suddenly, a through pass opens up a hole in your team’s defense, the striker moves towards the goal, avoids three defender’s tackles in succession, then shoots from way far out and … goal! The equalizer. WTF?!?!??
That game was cheating on you (yes, I call you: FIFA 2011). You feel frustration, anger, disappointment, and you cry injustice!
Personally – but that is just me – at such an occasion I vividly imagine punching the person responsible for programming the game’s AI in the face real hard. Because that’s what I feel that person deserves for giving the losing team an unrealistic motivational push. Lucky for the poor fellow that feeling doesn’t last long. But just as a precaution, you might not want to sit next to me while I’m playing your game. Just so you know.
The horror, the horror!
Ok, so that’s sports. What else is there? Ah, of course: intense horror games. How about Dead Space?
So, here’s how I play games like Dead Space, ever since I’ve really enjoyed playing Doom 3 so much better because I properly prepped my environment.
My environmental setup for horror games:
- Pitch black darkness. Never play horror games in bright daylight. Even the gloomy light penetrating the shades, or your Xbox’s green power light can be a turn-off. So I put all that aside or cover it somehow. But nothing beats playing horror games at night.
- Surround sound. Preferably using surround sound headphones. The sound volume should be slightly above comfortable levels. Any external noise should be cancelled out as much as possible.
- Lying down. I want to be totally relaxed playing horror games. That way it feels more intense because your muscles don’t have to work, they just do when your body tells them to. Also, much less likely to hurt yourself in a sudden shock reaction event.
If the conditions aren’t perfect, I don’t play the game. If it’s bright outside, if there’s loud noise outside (or inside), or if I can’t play in a very relaxed body position I don’t play horror games.
That’s because if I don’t do that, the experience becomes more like an awful, gory splatterfest that you rush through and you care more about your character’s health than you do about your own mental state. You’re not in the game, you’re somehow just rushing through it, killing waves of monsters.
No wonder so many people dismissed Doom 3 as a stupid, boring shooter game.
Why am I telling you this? Because horror games are the most emotional games I’ve ever witnessed. I don’t cry over the loss of a companion in Dragon Age, I drop my controller in terror and shiver as I try to recover from a sudden and unexpected appearance of the most scary and dangerous creature imaginable. Oh, and I’m almost out of ammo and I can’t run very fast.
The only thing I haven’t done yet is to pee in my pants. But I’m sure eventually horror games will get there, too! I can’t wait.
The moral of the story
If you actually allow yourself to experience emotions in games, you will experience them. I think the state of emotions in games is merely a matter of your state of mind while playing a particular game. If you don’t get mentally involved and allow yourself to be sucked into the virtual world, you’ll wait forever for the game that makes you cry. No game will make you cry unless you allow it to happen. And once you do, you’ll realize not only is crying over a loss of a companion’s life possible, there is actually a great variety of emotions in games other than that.
Here and today, with the games you know and love.
You might not find much emotions in the way of desire, attraction, love, and loss. But you can if you really want to. Players have cried over many RPGs and I understand why. On the other hand, I don’t play Fallout because it might make me cry, and I don’t play it because I might feel attracted to that cute Brotherhood girl because she’s voiced by gorgeous The Guild actress Felicia Day.
In fact, at one time I enjoyed killing her. That was comical relief. We just were not meant to level-up together, I was sick of her buggy behavior.
What I really want to say
I think it’s time we cut the crap and stop talking about emotions in games. Games are already capable to deliver a great variety of emotions to players. But they’re just better suited to a certain kinds of emotions that are not related to deep human or social interactions. Why?
Because games don’t have fucking real humans in them! Or, in other words, if you had the choice between watching a low quality amateur porn and one that was entirely rendered in high-definition on today’s supercomputers using 3D models – which would you find more … ahem, pleasing? Of course, the one that has real humans in it.
So, emotions arising from human interactions, emotions that require social context, that’s for books and movies. Games are much better at presenting emotions not involving the human factor, and they may even be much better in that regard than books and movies due to the interactive involvement of the player.
Especially if you consider multiplayer games – you still won’t find that $$$N00bSh00t3r89%%% in Call of Duty has an enjoyably cute way to knife-kill you up-close while everyone else gets a bullet, then fall in love and be happily married ever after or so. Well, that does happen sometime, but that is because of real human interaction with the game only giving the context. And within that context, you won’t get more human reaction than those in sports games. You win, you lose. You hate, you fear. Games do get pretty emotional, as everyone who has ever played online knows:
“You suck … AAAAghhh
..ill you, I’LL KILL YOU!!! MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
Her words, not mine.
In the early days of this blog i picked on Mass Effect because i so much wanted to be in love with the Space Opera which it wasn’t. I decided to pick this game to pieces and blog about each aspect of the game i didn’t like, in order to further my understanding of why exactly i didn’t like it even though i had played through it. After 3 blog posts each going for some nervewracking detail i made a list of things i would still have to write about – and the list was over one page of bullet points – so at this point i stopped writing because given the level of detail i was looking for, i’d probably still be writing about it to this day.
Plus the ruptured anterior cruciate ligament (Kreuzbandriss) i had just 9 days after the last post stopped me from pursuing my blog at all for months. So i never picked up Mass Effect again. Neither did i pick on it again. That is, until now but fortunately, i can just redirect you to the best ranting about Mass Effect i’ve read and two follow-up posts Back on Mass Effect and How to have fun in Mass Effect, all by Krystian Majewski. He says what i’ve been saying ever since the game came out – it’s an unfinished, rushed product, period! Krystian puts it this way:
“Mass Effect is ALL filler. You can clearly see how the developers were desperate to create just STUFF in order to get their checklists done. So even in rather polished missions like Feros you get 4 fetch quests which can ALL be solved in ONE big room. You can clearly see how initially, there was a much more complex environment planned which had to be slowly reduced to this single room simply because there was no time for something more complex. In the end, there wasn’t even time for some basic tutorials.”
Fully agree! Plus i’ve worked on complex role playing games, so i know how this stuff comes to be and why it ends up like exactly that. You usually don’t cut out content that’s been done or is “almost” complete, maybe you’ve written the lines or even had them voice acted already. So you just put it wherever you can just so it stays in the game. On the other hand, maybe you’re bound by contract to deliver 4 side-quests on each main mission or having so and so many sidequests overall and in some cases that only leaves you with the option to just throw this stuff in. I’m not sure if that had to be the case with Bioware given their “perceived status of the RPG developer” but they too have to fullfil contracts and none of us knows their publishing partners and all the other business issues that create a pressure to deliver even if it’s not their best. What really, really astounds me is that Mass Effect is such an obvious unfinished product but it still ranks as one of the highest rated games on the Xbox 360 (#15 with 91%) – in my opinion undeservedly so. On the other hand it’s a good example of effective marketing!
The only grievance i have with Krystians argumentation on how to have fun with Mass Effect is that he says cranking up the difficulty to Insane makes the game more enjoyable. Having just pulled through the badly reviewed Terminator Salvation on Hard difficulty i would generally agree that playing even a “not-so-good” game on a hard difficulty – even if it may be unfair at certain times – makes it more enjoyable in general for a select group of people we tend to call hardcore. There is an innate satisfaction to be found by overcoming difficult obstacles and doing something very few people will even start with. However it has nothing to do with the game or it’s quality per se, in my opinion. It’s the sense of accomplishment that you feel when you advance past a difficult part of any game, and when you eventually finish it. It works in both directions – the excellent Call of Duty 4 on the hardest difficulty was a frustrating stretch a lot of times and on the hardest difficulty level it’s no longer about the game mechanics, level progression, story or scripted events – it becomes a game about the lucky shot, finding good spots the AI can’t get to, and other such trickery but mostly about pulling through no matter what. I grew up with games that WERE this way for a loooong time. So from time to time i can pull through such a game because it reminds me of the “good old days”. You know, just like your grand dad tells that same war story over and over again – even though he wouldn’t ever go back there again … or would he?
Oh, just in case you want to pick up on my own posts, they were about Mass Effect’s Manual Override, 3rd Person Camera and the dreaded Mako and can be found by clicking on the aforementioned links, obviously. The popularity of the Manual Override post specifically showed me that i’ve hit a nerve with that one – much to my surprise after several months that this blog didn’t see any updates there was frequent traffic going to that page. Currently, it ranks second on google for the search term Mass Effect Manual Override. This really surprised me given the no-effort and it did motivate me to pick up on blogging again. Now just see for yourself where it got me!
And speaking of Terminator Salvation, and playing through it on hard: yes, you can call me an Achievement whore but actually i think it’s not THAT bad if you don’t expect a Gears of War – which i happen to not like either … hmmm, i wonder, given the choice, would i rather play Gears of War or Terminator Salvation? I would have to give that some thought …
Krystian also posted his insights about GTA4: Devolution and Story to which i fully agree. We don’t need bicycles in a GTA which i’ve casually touched on in the only post i did after my soccer accident. Anyone who’s asking for frickin’ bicycles in a gangster game doesn’t know squat about good game design – ok, admittedly rude but that just had to be said because these are the people – given the chance – who will feature-creep your project into a heavily delayed, feature-laden, cryptic mess of a warthog (pun intended) no one really wants to play – except for the designer himself and a few like-minded people. That’s how Saints Row came to be. Well, maybe not, i don’t really know but as gamer i noticed the lack of vision with which this game got made (better, bigger, more is NOT a vision). Saints Row 2 is still a fun quick fix but it hasn’t nearly the depth that GTA offers.
I want to enjoy a game and i haven’t enjoyed a GTA as much as GTA IV – and i’ve been a fan from the start of the series which i bought after reading a 6/10 Grand Theft Auto review because i just knew that that’s a cool game. Boy was i ever right. I haven’t been so damn right since i first layed eyes on the DooM shareware game at a friend’s place and my immediate reaction was “Quit the game NOW, copy it, then you can get back and play it, i don’t want to see any more of this – i HAVE to play it!”. Ten minutes later i was on my way home to enjoy this pearl of a game – it also started my game development career but that’s for another post.
Ah yeah, it is always inspiring to read up on John Carmack’s work. He has written about his experience converting Wolfenstein 3D to the iPhone, including how the project came to be.
In case you don’t know who John Carmack is — no, i’m not going to tell you the obvious story about the dark side of the moon where you must have been living for the last 20 years — rather i’m just going to state that John Carmack is the master mind behind Wolfenstein, DooM and Quake. If you have ever enjoyed any of these titles you will be delighted reading this book:
I know i have been.
You see, i got started with game development … no, that is not correct, my intention to get into game development got started the day i first connected to Compuserve. At that time an expensive service – a monthly fee plus (in addition – can you believe?) an hourly fee depending on where you spend your time on, plus the regular phone bill. I still went to school back then and everything had to be payed in US Dollars, which compared to German currency (Deutsche Mark) was strong and fluctuated a lot. There was always the possibility that next months bill was 20% more just because of the change in exchange rate.
So i logged on to Compuserve and after some orientation time i found the Compuserve Action Games forum – that was the place for me. Eventually i became a voluntary staffer there and later got recruited by Joe Siegler of Apogee/3D Realms as Sysop for their Compuserve forum.
But the real decisive moment was when i scanned the list of online users on the first day i logged on to Compuserve. And there, among two dozen other users, was … John Carmack. Or “jcarmack” i think his forum name was. I’ve exchanged two lines with him and was stunned – i just chatted with my hero, programmer of DooM, mano a mano! Ok, i could never proof if it was really him but the fact that he didn’t put on a show and answered in short, concise words was enough for me. From that day on i called myself “DooM Addict” (you see, with all the weird characters but not 133t speak) and having been so close (if only virtually) to one of the heroes of DooM i knew i wanted to be one of them.
Ok, eventually i realized that working for id Software isn’t ever going to happen but that realization eventually landed me a job at a small but local Gameboy Color developer. On a related note, i also got to know my long-term girlfriend on Compuserve.
And that’s how i got started in the game industry. In case you want to learn more about me… <– click here!
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