SOLO

Can a video game change you?

Can it move your spirit? 

Take you from one state of mind to a new state, a new condition, a new emotion, a new way of thinking?

This isn’t a question that professional developers ask very often, at least not in public discussions. But there is a related question that does get asked quite a bit in public forums: Can a game make you feel an emotion other than the adrenalin rush of anxiety, the pleasure of victory, or the disappointment of defeat? As far back as 1982, Electronic Arts, which was just getting started at the time, asked this question in an ad for its games:

“Can a computer game make you cry?”

Darren Gladstone, writing in 2004 for Computer Gaming World (now Games for Windows Magazine), picked up on this idea.

“Most games,” according to Gladstone, “just scare you.”

But he goes on to talk at length about the subject with then-VP and General Director of EA Los Angeles, Neil Young. Young’s belief was that games have to be able to move people in other ways than simply scaring them. According to Young, “The next big step is being able to move people emotionally versus purely adrenally… The truth of the matter is that the game industry has yet to create its equivalent of Citizen Kane.”

David Freeman, author of Creating Emotion in Games, recounts a provocative experience he had while working on a game development team. He was sitting in on a brainstorming session at the Game Developers Conference and the round table participants were discussing ways to put emotions into games. The moderator leaned forward and posed what he thought was a sure-fire question to get the group humming with ideas: “Who here has had a profound emotional experience while playing a game?” According to Freeman, he then sat back and waited for the discussion to erupt with excited responses.

No one in the group had a single response. In fact, the silence that fell over the room was akin to a Buddhist temple at meditation time.

“The subject of emotion in games is a new continent,” Freeman concludes. “An uncharted continent.”

But that was back in 2003. Since then, much has changed in the gaming world because of three events: WarCraft 3, Half Life 2, and Bioshock. Although the idea that even as recently as 2003 a roomful of gamers and game developers could not recall a single significant emotion they had experienced while playing games is mind-boggling. Had I been present at that conference, I would have had several significant events to share.

For starters, way back in 1998, one of the first emotional experiences I had during a game occurred while playing the original Age of Empires. There’s a scenario in the Babylonian Campaign in which you must build a city starting only with a priest unit. This requires you to capture at least one enemy villager, so that you have a unit with the ability to construct a storage pit, harvest wood, and eventually build a town center where more villagers can be trained. In time there will be enough resources to construct military buildings, an army, and you’re off and running.

The first step, though, is getting possession of a single villager.

In Age of Empires, priests had the ability to convert enemy units to your side, by essentially casting a “spell.” The spell took several seconds to work, however. During that time the rest of the target’s team were alerted that one of its members was under attack and came swarming to kill you. Game over. Reload.

An additional complication was that all the enemy’s villagers were hard at work in the center of their most heavily-defended area, well protected by clubmen and, as the enemy’s technology advanced, axemen. I remember the whole delicate process of converting a clubman first, then having my priest stand behind him, healing him, while he fought off the other clubmen who invariably came to kill him. When I had enough clubmen to protect a villager, I located a stray target, a villager who had wandered off to chop some wood, and turned my priest’s conversion spell on him. There was a characteristic wo-lo-lo sound made by the priest while he worked his religious spell that I’m sure many of you recall. Needless to say, after a bit of wo-lo-lo-ing, I was finally able to add a villager to my growing band of followers.

My little city was started at last and my empire soon would follow.

Then, about forty minutes into game, my priest got killed in a battle.

What happened next was completely unexpected: a wave of sadness came over me. That priest, after all, had founded my city. He was the father of my civilization. And when he was killed I experienced a genuine moment of loss. Due to his singularity (I hadn’t created any more priests yet), he had become a character in my mind, a personage endowed with identity and significance. He was no longer an important part of my overall strategy. I had enough soldiers to kill and slash and burn my way to victory. The old priest used to just hang around in the center of the village in case someone needed to be healed. But he was someone I had become attached to, and I experienced an emotional moment when he was killed.

Even now, ten years later when I teach game design and game writing to my students at New York University, I talk about this essential event. I call it the “experiential moment,” or the “transformative moment,” or sometimes just “the moment.”

It is the moment of change.

The moment when the spirit is altered.

It’s worth noting that this was not a pre-planned event. The scenario designer hadn’t scripted a story that would unfold in a specific way and culminate in a specific event. Nevertheless, it was a story. In a sense, it was a randomly-generated story — yet, considering the specific limitations that had been placed on me by the scenario designer, how random was it? Was there not in fact a very great chance that an experience like this would unfold?

One alternative is that my priest might have lived and when I was declared winner of the scenario, I might have scrolled over to find him and get a smile one last time, remembering how it had all started, before I moved on to the next level.

Yet another alternative: Were I the type of player who likes to build large numbers of priests and attack the enemy with lots of conversion spells, I could have been left with a throng of priests at the very end. Would I then have had a moment when I recalled how it all started, with just one of them?

I’m sure that at least some other players who took on the Babylonian Campaign had moments like the ones I just described. If we all met, we could sit and share accounts of how our experiences played out in that particular scenario. But it’s interesting that we had been left to discover these experiences ourselves, without being guided or forced to make obviously scripted choices.

Again, I say “obviously scripted choices.”

The choices were, after all, scripted. We had only one priest to start. That meant we all had to solve certain problems with him, and we were all liable to become at least a little invested in him.

However, the hand of the storyteller — the scenario designer — remained hidden. A narrative event would unfold, even though it was not what we normally consider to be a narrative. There was no pre-determined set of events culminating in a fixed outcome. Yet of all the multiple outcomes that were possible, there was a very great likelihood we would experience something we did not expect.

Can a video game change you?

I believe the answer to this is self-evident. If games didn’t change us in some way, we wouldn’t be excited about them. I think if the average gamer reflects on his or her experiences playing games, and asks the question, “When did I become excited about games?” they will find themselves describing that exact, elusive, unforgettable moment — the moment I call the “experiential moment.”

A moment when they felt something that they hadn’t felt before.