Hi David,
>> Basically, you seem to agree with the key point
>> that games are emotionally immature.
Designers have aspired to emotion from the beginning, but it's proven to be the toughest challenge, bar none. Even today you will find people who say that the most emotionally poignant moment they've ever experience in a computer game occurred in Steve Meretzky's Planetfall. The problem is that that was a text-based adventure game with no functioning simulation/interactivity.
>> But it sounds like you think there is a structural
>> fix on the development side.
I don't know whether we'll ever lick the problem, but it's clear we've only sporadically tried using professional writer-designers in crafting narrative elements and context. Imagine using amateur artists on a computer game and you get the general idea....
>> What titles would you point to that you think are
>> at least prototypical of the kinds of games that
>> do carry emotional force.
I can't think of any game where it's carried through from start to finish. Basic concepts like suspension of disbelief and empathy just get ground under the wheels of gee-whiz design decisions or blatant ignorance.
I have, however, experienced snippets of these effects, which means they're possible, and reproducible. We simply need to spend more craft time focusing on the problem to see if it can be licked. (Check out the doc on my site called Transparency in Interactive Entertainment if you want more.)
>> Second, how do gauge "emotional content" in
>>the first place?
I use the same standard as in any other entertainment medium: did I care?
Did I care about what happened, who it happened to, etc? The idea that most of what we create takes place on a monitor instead of inside the user's head seems like such a waste to me. My goal is to try to involve the player's imagination more: to put them In the world, not merely have them observe or orchestrate the world.
>> Anyway, thanks for the great article. It did get
>> me a thinkin'
Glad to hear it, and thanks for the kind words.
Take care,
Mark
Mark Barrett
Freelance Designer & Storyteller
http://www.prairiearts.com
Recently I posed the question as to whether or not video games might be a limited medium for carrying emotion--at least compared to other art forms.
And fair enough, you know? It's extremely hard to ask when we will fall in love with a computer simulation first when we don't know if it will be possible at all. (As an aside, it <i>did</i> seem that 'love' was the emotion targeted throughout the night, as opposed to the other oft-quoted 'sadness'.) But credit again to Warren Spector for giving some anecdotal evidence that we might be traveling the correct path.
He related a story about some 'spiderbots' in <i>Deus Ex: Invisible War</i>, which operate with a 'very simple AI'. Certainly not an AI designed to induce caring or concern in the player. Warren told us about a time that one of the spiderbots got caught on a stair (in game), and how he spent almost an half of an hour trying to figure out a way to get the little guy up to follow him. A range of emotion was experienced as an incidental effect of the actions of the bot in the context of the game.
In the future, it might be that we won't become emotionally attached to our simulations until we actually create friends, lovers, and enemies within (or of) the machines. At the very least, we may have to create AI so far past our targets in capability that we stop judging them to be simulations and start considering them as actual entities.
Fortunately, this does not preclude the ability of gamespaces to use more traditional storytelling (and simulation/story hybrids) to evoke emotion, and the points being raised about the quality of writing being a heavily-neglected aspect of game design are spot on. Unfortunately, from the simulation side, there is (and likely never will be) a clear answer to 'how?'.
- Lev