{"id":197,"date":"2005-08-01T15:50:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-01T19:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=197"},"modified":"2006-08-18T22:09:20","modified_gmt":"2006-08-19T02:09:20","slug":"can-games-make-you-cry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2005\/08\/01\/can-games-make-you-cry\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Games Make You Cry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s the question asked by consultant Hugh Bowen over at NextGen<\/a>. In a survey of over 500 gamers, about a third suggested that they found games to be an emotionally compelling medium. He seemed to accept a very wide definition of “emotion” since both “competitveness” and “frustration” appear in the list. This probably explains why 39 per cent of gamers thought that “fighting games” were emotionally powerful.<\/p>\n

Though the study is interesting in many ways, it really does very little to help clarify the question of what makes a game emotionally provocative.<\/p>\n

While playing Rome<\/i> over the weekend, I had my own personal Metaurus. My Carthaginian invasion of Italy was stalling and I needed major reinforcements to finish the thing. So I built a huge army in Carthage and decided to sail it to Rome to meet the armies already in the vicinity. I had naval superiority, but a blitzkrieg of Julian and Scipionic fleets ambushed my navy and wiped out the entire reinforcement force.<\/p>\n

Did I react emotionally? You’re damned right I did. A huge investment in time and manpower was eliminated through my own foolishness – an underpowered fleet and no escort. These are the moments that make strategy games great; unexpected failure and determination to play through. Never reload. Well, hardly ever.<\/p>\n

But frustration and a desire to overcome are native to all games. I get pretty jazzed up playing Literati<\/i> too, though I’d hardly describe it as an emotional experience. If we want to understand what in a game makes us laugh and cry, or identify with the electronic images in front of us, it doesn’t help to consider the usual frustration of competition or adrenaline pumping of shooters as the emotional equivalent of the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The fact that gamers at large ranked the hobby low in the list of emotionally powerful media shows that most of them think that there is a qualitative difference here, too. Movies, music and books all trumped games though none have that competitive element and I’ve never been frustrated by a book.<\/p>\n

To answer Mr. Bowen’s question, yes, games make me cry. But only on the inside. And mostly when it’s my fault.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s the question asked by consultant Hugh Bowen over at NextGen. In a survey of over 500 gamers, about a third suggested that they found games to be an emotionally compelling medium. He seemed to accept a very wide definition of “emotion” since both “competitveness” and “frustration” appear in the list. This probably explains why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-3b","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}