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'A Game Has Never Made You Cry'
E306 Videos: Shigeru, Moore and Young
Denver, 12:24 AM
Tue Dec 8
64 posts in the last 24 hours
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'A Game Has Never Made You Cry' |
E306 Videos: Shigeru, Moore and Young |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/14/08
12/14/08
Using FF7 as an example, you could say that yes, it was the narrative and the story it told, and that the game was just the horse on the journey there. But it's the sum of the experience, the music, the story, the closeness of having them be useful and aiding you in battle that leads to the attachments, and not just the text.
12/14/08
12/13/08
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12/13/08
You don't cry because you lost a game of basketball. You cry because you lost the seventh game of the finals after you won the first three, or you cry because you've never won a game in your life and your inadequacy is too much for you to handle.
You don't cry because you lose a game of Clue; you cry because the game reminds you of the night your mother died (yes, all your mothers died or will die playing Clue).
Narrative is, in all aspects of life, what induces emotional reaction. It's the reason the death of someone close impacts most people more than the death of someone distant, or the loss of a dear pet means more than the loss of a spouse. Physics is the analog in the real world to game mechanics, and they don't make any cry emotionally unless there is an impetus, which is equivalent to the narrative in the game.
This argument is nothing more than pointing out an obvious element of life in a single instance and trying expand it into some sort of philosophical gesture.
12/13/08
12/13/08
I shed tears at Chrono Cross, and I know it wasn't a separate cutscene. It was the lines delivered by Schala, whom I was just then finding out was a companion character who had been by my side from the start...it was realizing that I knew her as a little girl in Chrono Trigger, years past...and it was the words she conveyed after the credits rolled which brought me back around to the opening title sequence for total closure:
"I will find you...
Even if I have to search the world over...
Sometime, somewhere...
I'm sure..."
Just as a game can be more than the sum of its parts, I say it is unfair to break it down and tell us that individual parts are not valid at driving us to emotion. All the pieces of Chrono Cross came together to bring tears to my eyes, and the least of them was any kind of FMV cutscene. This writer won't cheapen our emotional memories with our games, and we oughtn't let them.
12/13/08
For many gamers who played FFVII, I'm guessing they, like I did, felt they were taking on the role of Cloud. Cloud's relationships and problems become your relationships and problems, and that strengthens the emotional involvement in any scene that is otherwise "strictly narrative".
Additionally, games are certainly capable of creating these emotional ties without relying on narratives. Take ICO, for example. You spend the whole game running around, helping your friend and companion Yorda, trying to escape the castle together.
Now, I didn't cry when I played ICO, but I definitely felt a strong connection with Yorda, one that wasn't created by any CG scene or script I was reading from. If ICO's developers had wanted to make me cry, they would have been able to.
It's areas like these where games have the opportunity to create emotion, and potentially tears, in a way that other mediums will never be able to.
12/13/08
12/13/08
12/13/08
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12/13/08
This guy's argument is off to me. I don't really see why a non-interactive sequence can't be considered part of a game. Why do games have to be boxed into this definition of only being interactive experiences all the time? Meh.
So even going along with his bogus argument, if something has to be interactive to make gamers cry, then this has indeed happened. Maybe this author is just unaware of it? Why can't someone cry in an RPG battle where one of the party members die? Sure, that's a bit extreme, but does it not count? What if someone cried during CoD4 when the American soldier gets out of the crashed chopper, only to die after the game lets you stumble around for a bit? That's interactive.
How about FFX, having to kill the aeons you've played with the entire game? I think I teared up at that.
To me, if none of those types of experiences count, then what you're doing is saying any story or non-interactive elements cannot be considered part of a game. And that my friends, is a bullshit, dude.
12/13/08
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12/13/08
However, it was that interactive moment at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 that gave me some chilling goosebumps and possibly a tear as well.
[b]Spoilers[/b]:
You're standing over The Boss's body, told that you have to kill her as soon as possible before you can continue to complete the game. Snake is holding her gun, the wind is blowing through the valley of white flowers, the interface is inaccessible, and all you have left to do is pull the trigger yourself. You, the gamer, have to push the button that shoots the gun. You have to do the killing you'd be fine with doing were it in the middle of some awesome fight. But no, this is different, the circumstance is completely different. You've been given the information that The Boss is innocent, that she's letting herself die. She is the baddest of asses and you have to kill her, interactively, no cut-scenes.
As far as I know, this is the only game to have an interactive mercy kill that is so very isolated from the run-of-the-mill gameplay that when you get to the interactive scene, it's so goddamn poignant that you don't want to pull the trigger, even though the game forces you to. So yes, although games themselves rarely make you cry, it's not something that's [i]never[/i] happened.
12/13/08