Getting Emotional

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about emotions that a game can evoke in a player, and what sort of games typically evoke emotions in me (and what sort of emotion). To be honest, I can’t remember too many games having that great an affect on me emotionally. Of course, that’s only true if I’m talking about a) long term emotion or b) emotion other than frustration / anger / short term adrenaline-related emotions. If I consider these latter emotions, plenty of games fit the profile: Mario Kart, Donkey Kong (the original)… actually essentially any game gets *some* sort of emotional response, which is why I’m not considering that sort of response, and am instead looking at the deeper side of things – games that evoke / provoke strong emotional responses such as affectionate attachment to characters, sadness (or happiness), or anger (the kind you get when reading a really well written villain who is undermining the extremely lovable hero).

Well, with those criteria, I have to say my list came up blank. I could *consider* Final Fantasy VII, but I don’t think I’m kidding myself when I say that even that game, enthralling as the story was, didn’t draw me in and create an emotional attachment beyond the scope of the game. I think the interactivity created by the game actually serves for me to create a level of detachment from the story that wouldn’t be present if I was reading a book. Or perhaps a book just contains the extra detail needed to really hook me in.

I compare games to books because I frequently develop emotional attachments to characters in books. Almost every novel I read evokes an emotional response from me; if it doesn’t, I rarely finish it. I’ve played some games that have some pretty involved storylines, but I’ve never found a game that can replicate the feeling of attachment that a book can evoke.

An interesting concept was raised in our lecture on designing for effect: the idea of artificial player emotion. Essentially it was stated that “emotion in games is artificial because as a designer, you are deliberately aiming to provoke a specific emotion or set of emotions in your player”. I think in that sentence lies the answer to why games fail to evoke the same emotions in me that a good book would. Emotional response is not something that should specifically be targeted and designed for. It’s something that should emerge naturally from good design. A good author doesn’t (or in my opinion shouldn’t) set out to write a chapter with the aim “this chapter will be sad and will make the reader cry”. Rather, the author should set out with the aim “in this chapter I’m going to tell the story of Sally’s death”. If the story is well written, and the event is sad, the emotion will be evoked in the reader. By specifically targeting the emotion however, I believe something is lost in the purity of the event, and it often places a barrier between the reader / player, and the desired emotion.

Designing specifically to get an emotional response seems to me to be a backwards way to do things. The emotional response should not be the target of design, but rather the proof of good design.