Over at next-gen.biz, there’s a piece up by N’Gai Croal about evoking emotions via gameplay. But not just any old emotions.
What he’s after is discomfort. Unease. Or, in another word, guilt. The feeling that some (or maybe most) of what you’re doing isn’t right. He gives as an example his experience with the Little Sisters of Bioshock.
He already knew about the harvest/don’t harvest choice, and had decided beforehand he was gonna go for the harvest. Only when the time came, he suddenly felt some unpleasant emotions about it and hesitated. Later, for another reason, he felt even worse.
As he says, this type of emotional content is rare in games, and for good reason. We like to be the “hero” most of the time. Being made uncomfortable about our choices doesn’t fit in with that role.
Of course, there are those games that allow for “evil” play, but again, it’s rare for players to report feeling especially bad about this or that action.
The question to consider is whether it’s a good thing to have such feelings during a game. Do we, as players, want to experience doubt or guilt over what we’ve done?
If the idea of playing a game is “fun”, having a “good time”, do such emotions fit in with that? Or would they take the edge off? Would they make you worry and hesitate over choices?
Or would it not matter too much? After all, there were some players of Bioshock, for instance, who had no qualms about harvesting the Little Sisters. And besides, isn’t this “just a game” after all? Nothing is real in it.
While you consider that, check out Ngai’s post.
didn’t we have this discussion last month?
much like the ill feelings we were supposed to have as the good guy avatar in Britania where we stole from every poor farmer?
Nope, why should i felt ill about it? the game(s) were designed for me to struggle thru looting these carefully hidden away items. thus i’m only doing what was expected of me.
wiz 7, had a choice of killing the sailor for the password or giving him some looted object. give him the object and by the time you got out to some hidden treasure he had beat you there and gotten it. kill him and it was yours. option three due to faulty programming logic was loot the object and not give it to him but use the password from an earlier save position. and by the time you got there without the object needed he still beat you there… nope i felt no pangs over killing him.
Sounds like Bioshock is a step in the right direction.
In my opinion unless the Dev’s give you a choice, a true choice, to be bad or good then it isn’t going to illicit guilt for following the bad path. Most games the bad path is the easy path.
In Oblivion the quickest way to good equipment is the bad path, to steal it. The good path takes forever. No remorse there. Now if Oblivion had given consequences and shown children dying in the street, with no loot worth taking in their pocket,) because you stole the food from the storehouse then it would be a moral choice. But in most games the only consequence is fighting some pathetic guards. If you are labeled a thief you either go to jail or pay a bounty then everyone forgets your mis-deeds. No one holds your past decisions over your head.
No remorse, no regret because the game doesn’t give you a reason too.
Bioshock sounds like it is tripping down the right road to fixing this.
I guess there’s two things that need to happen:
#1 - You have to suspend disbelief and get yourself emotionally invested in the world / characters / fiction. Unless that becomes more than numbers, more than just a metaphor for the game, no amount of tough moral choices are going to make a difference. Someone once explained that at an abstract level, the gameplay of Grand Theft Auto is not that far off from Pac-Man. And I think most people who play GTA aren’t involving themselves in the story or characters, but rather playing from a “gameist” viewpoint with the added visceral thrill of performing illegal / illicit activities.
#2 - The choices have to be fair and true choices with consequences that appear to have been fully in your control (if not fully understood at the time you made your choice). Being partly responsible for Alagnar’s death was pretty cool… but it would have been even cooler if it had truly been my choice that brought him to his end. But since it was required in order to complete the game, there wasn’t much feeling of personal responsibility. Instead, as in reading a novel, the negative emotions were directed towards the villain (and maybe a little towards the author / designer).
Bioshock went to great lengths to tell you that the little sisters were no longer human, so the moral decision was whether to kill something that appeared like a little girl. Would it be immoral to kill a little girl vampire? It’s also not a cut and dry problem. The little sisters are symbiotes, so to save them you have to remove the symbiotic organism inside, which kills them. So even if you decide not to kill them, you haven’t really saved them - they are still slave to the symbiote, which some might say is a fate worse than death. I had to take the high ground myself - I couldn’t kill them.
I will admit, there are very few games where you can get emotionaly involved, unless you count anger or frustration, so it’s nice to see something that can pull those strings.
Coyote, ah yes, I remember that Alagnar business in Ultima. It did make me feel bad the first time. As you said, though, it’s forced on you.
And there, I think, is the rub. Should you feel guilty over something you have to do, even though an innocent person will die?
Vag, too true. Games seem to follow the “money can fix anything because it’s all superficial” model. Time to get away from that.
Xian, yeah, the usual emotions when playing tend to be screaming (unrepeatable here) words and phrases during the game. As I know all to well ;)
While we may become attached to our characters, it seems that caring about any NPCs beyond their utility to us is a difficult thing to achieve in games. Or perhaps the designers aren’t really trying.
This is actually an interesting concept. I would think that you would have to have a game that is compelling and really draws a player into a different world.
The hardest part about creating emotions is that it is a game we know it’s not real so it would be hard to get caught up in another experience / character. Hey if this can be done that would be one awesome freaking game.
Yeah josh, that’s what it comes down to for most: “only a game”. Then again, this is where some role-playing could come in. The “how would I act if I were really this character” sort of thing.