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Can A Game Make You Cry?

Submitted by Charlie Mason on 22 November, 2005 - 2:11pm. Joystick Blog

http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,69475,00.html?tw=rss.GAM

Throughout this article, Clive Thompson discusses the emotional impact of video games on their players. He poses the question “Can a game make you cry?” then continues to give a research study which surveys the impact of video games on emotion. In this study, 535 gamers were told to describe the feelings that arose while playing their favorite video games.

Throughout my personal gaming experiences, I have encountered a wealth of emotions caused by the situations I experience while engaging in a video game. My video game of choice is a role playing game in which I create my perfect family. Throughout my entire experience inside this video game, I have experienced virtually every emotion, though not as deeply, that comes along with being a husband and a father. From the nervous near-regret during the marriage ceremony to the drunken celebration after the birth of a new child, I’ve felt it all. Because in real life I am both of these things, I know these
emotions and recognized them throughout the course of my play.

Basically, what I am getting at is that I agree wholeheartedly with Thompson’s article. Games can and, in fact, do make people cry. These games engage their
participants in much the same way a real life situation could through appealing to our inherent desires for ourselves and our lives (even if these lives are
virtual). The events that happen in these virtual lives create emotional responses much like similar events would create in real life. But remember, this also has
boundaries.

I am not saying that every experience in a video game causes the exact emotions created by real life situations of the same caliber. For example, when you die
in a video game, you are able to come back to life if so desired. There is no fear of death or the afterlife in a video game (unless of course, the programmer incorporates an after life that is something worth fearing into the
game). Hence, the feelings experienced are not the same.

Video games create feelings and trigger emotions in most everyone who plays with them, even if this emotion is hate of the game. The world must be careful in recognizing when a game is just a game and not worth the stress and worry warranted by real life experiences. Also, some care must be taken in the availability of games to impressionable minds.

Play is play. Real life is real life. For some people, sadly enough, this is not an easy distinction to make. The impressionable minds I speak of are embodied by the world’s youth. While not every child is going to believe that because he is allowed to steal cars, run over people, and shoot police officers in a video game he is also allowed to do this in real life, some actually may get this impression. This is where I feel the rating system for the videogames (see ESRB’s rating’s guide at http://www.esrb.org/esrbratings_guide.asp) has provided an extremely useful tool for parents in choosing appropriate games for their children. Through this system, the freedom of choice still exists for those parents who feel their children are not as impressionable as the neighbor’s kids and gives a solid basis for the level of maturity needed for games of every genre.

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Attachment is key

Submitted by Simon Reynolds on 1 December, 2005 - 3:08pm.

It is true that all games illicit one kind of reaction or another, but how much involvement and dedication to a game is the real test of how emotions are affected. Many just casually play games, and while some may be extremely graphic, it's the passable nature of the gameplay time that causes less of a reaction. To others murdered while randomly playing a Bond game, one wouldn't give much thought. Even when a major character dies, if there is little attachment to the game, there will be less of a reaction. But, if you take an avid player, one who sits and plays at every available moment and until the game is completed and possibly continues beyond that, and allows themselves to be engrossed in the story, content, characters, etc. then they will truly feel something. Many were saddened at Aerith's death in Final Fantasy IIV, just because they allowed themselves to get so engrossed in the game.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me

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Interesting

Submitted by Clive Thompson on 22 November, 2005 - 2:37pm.

I like your distinction between the virtual and real -- like movies and other forms of media, games have frightening power to leave marked change on young, impressionable minds. The increasing convergence of what is and isn't real is an issue that will seriously affect generations to come.

What's interesting though is that the more emotion one experiences in games, the less likely they may actually be to carry their experience in a harmful manner into the real world. I think part of the reasoning behind the ESRB rating system is to correctly guage the capacity to experience emotion when participating in a game. What I mean is that a psychologically developed adult playing a game in which an innocent family is brutally gunned down is mature enough(in most cases) to feel shock and disgust at such a perverse act. The chance of the person playing the game, in turn, will probably be less likely to commit the same act in real life because he or she understands how horrible murder is based on the emotion it causes. A person playing the same game with no emotional involvement aside from thinking how cool the victims' entrails look splattered across the screen is much more likely to commit the same crime in real life. Maybe one day, when games are so real one could not possibly play without a large degree of emotional involvement, desensitization of an impressionable mind will be virtually obsolete. Experiences so real that one cannot help but recognize the true horror behind what one sees during gameplay if it were real. Or maybe the opposite. Food for thought.

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