Coincidentally, a post popped up on my news watch today with a typical testimonial to crying due to a game. It seems pretty clear this was brought on by cinematics – in fact, the ability of the reviewer to tell someone else what the ending *will* be like indicates that the part of the experience they reacted to was linear and predetermined. It does seem that some types of interactions might tend to heighten the attachment to characters (and thus the stake in cutscenes), while others might reduce attachment – how strongly should we distinguish the examination of interactions that build investment from interactions that deliver emotional dynamics themselves?

Let’s give players more than a controller, mouse or stylus pen…! Language, anyone?

Does anyone think a controller, mouse or stylus pen could ever be enough?

The PC and its keyboard have a bright future, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! (Speech recognition that works in gaming, when the player is yelling, mumbling, etc. is still a ways off…)

In the sentence you quoted, the emphasis should be on when playing games — which is intended to be in stark contrast to being told a story for which minimial interactivity (e.g., solve a puzzle) is required to unlock the next page of the story.

As I attempted to describe in my post above, what we should be concentrating on in these discussions are the actual interactions the player has — the things the player says and does — to be the primary device eliciting emotion, accomplished by making those interactions truly affect the characters in the story — requiring a truly non-linear plot, more than multiple choice dialog menus dictating my expression, etc. etc.

You make an interesting point that another reason few people cry when playing games is a perceived stigma in taking games seriously, that in a sense, we’re not used to crying over games.

However, sadly I think the stigma as this point in time is a valid one, because besides the good-ol’-fashioned storytelling (GOFST) techniques that have been making people cry for millenia (nothing new there…), there’s little to nothing inherent to games worth crying about yet.

If your point is simply that we shouldn’t be afraid to cry at the GOFST in games, well, okay. But that’s a critical distinction that needs to be made.

[Update: King Lud IC recently posted an informative writeup of Planescape: Torment, which John refers to in his further comments at The Escapist.]

actual interactive experiences where you are having a true, significant effect on the events in virtual world (aka agency)

You really should play Ico (or read up on it) if you haven’t (or mention it if you have!). Note that it involves agency only in a low-level sense (in the sense of Freedom, Agency, Story, choose 2): the story is still linear so there’s no large-scale freedom, but your interaction with Yorda on the standard action-game-playing small scale, where you have freedom + agency and no story, is where a lot of the emotional attachment arises.

Of course, this is pretty much a singular exception–it was quite noteworthy and inspiring, yet nobody else has followed up (including Ico’s authors, who moved the boy-girl relationship in Shadow of the Collosus entirely out of the gameplay).

I add this reply further to the response on the Escapist site. I find this sentence bewildering. Are you similarly arguing that “almost no one” cries when watching films or reading books, which allow absolutely no means to express ourselves whatsoever? How can we feel affection, friendship, regret or loss in return to these media?

I think it’s fairly evident that films and books make people cry in their millions. There are very simple reasons why few people cry while playing games: few games contain content that would make people cry, and admitting crying during a game is still unacceptable where blubbing at the cinema is entirely accepted.

You argue games that reduce people to teary wrecks simply use the methods of storytelling to achieve this. I argue games that reduce people to teary wrecks work extremely hard to use the methods of storytelling to achieve this. It seems odd to then dismiss the various means by which passive storytelling achieves an emotional response.