Action versus Emotion

Action versus Emotion

How-do, mortals?

So, it's about time to get a reading post down up in here.

This isn't it, however. This is a post of my own about action versus emotion in games.

Quite often recently, I've been faced with the problem of video game sotrylines and why they're emotionally inept. As I was in the process of reading the article "Triple-A Game for Women? Seriously?" written by Ernest Adams, I have found that I really want to get my thoughts recorded here before I fuddle the mucking things up. It also gives me a reason to have another rant, so let's do this!

So, Adams was speaking to someone he knew at a 2012 gaming event, Brandii Grace, who he learnt is forming a company to create AAA game titles for women.

My first reaction to this was that this is nonsense; women don't play games anywhere near as much as men do, this isn't me being a sexist pig, this is flat-out, statistical fact.

Well, this is where the article gets interesting.

It seems that Grace's line of thought has lead her to the conclusion that women will be more drawn to games which offer emotional conflict as a feature. She uses Twilight and Underworld as an example;

Underworld attracts a more male-oriented audience by using sex appeal and guns to advertise their movie. Twilight, on the other hand, is much less focused on fighting and action, and more on emotional bonds. According to Grace, it seems, games for women need to be more focused on drama and personal and interpersonal emotional conflict than on the kinds of action games currently feature and place emphasis on.

Which brings me onto my point of action versus emotion. Now, I hate Twilight as much as the next male (in most cases), but I can't help but think that some games which feature emotion and emotional investment would be pretty sweet.

I'm going to offer three example games here: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect 2, and Katawa Shoujo. I think these games offer some decent context of the various levels of emotion and action in games.

Call of Duty 4, in my opinion, is a game which is almost entirely focused on action, rather than emotion; I enjoyed playing the campaign, it was shoot-y, it had a storyline I could follow, and I was given a heck of a lot of things to blowup. What more could I want from a game? Well, my problem is that, while all of this was happening, I had no reason to care about any of the things that happened. Oh, so this guy just got shot and killed? Big deal, he wasn't all that important anyway.

I had no emotional investment in CoD4, largely because the player wasn't supposed to, it wasn't created with that in mind. Therefore, once I was finished, that was it, it was over. I put the game down, and haven't played it seriously since. It was fun while it lasted, but I just don't care about anything that happened in the storyline.

Mass Effect, I think, offers a nice balance between emotion and action; the gameplay has a lot of shooting and gunplay in it, but it also has characters I care about. I want to learn more about Tali's people, I want to find out what Garrus thinks about this new situation, I wonder what Mordin is working out right now in his lab.

In Mass Effect 2, when the mysterious Archangel took of his helmet, revealing himself to be Garrus, I was overjoyed enough to shout out with glee. When he was gunned down less than an hour later, I was furious, not towards the developers, but towards the bastard who had just shot my friend. Garrus survived, by the way, thank the Nine.

It's moments like this that made Mass Effect my favourite series of games ever created, and the reason I cared about these moments was because I was emotionally invested; these were people I cared about. not plastic or cardboard nobodies with guns.

And finally, Katawa Shoujo. Ok... this is the game I ranted on about at the end of the Christmas break for about a good page. That was a page of me being an emotional wreck. There's no action, just emotion. The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is literally nothing but reading and making very occasional, but significant choices.

I'm still affected by the thing; just listening to the music is enough to inspire some of the same emotions I felt when playing. I'm practically having flashbacks as I listen to it now.

Now, I fell in love during the course of this game; Hanako is the most wonderful character I've ever met in a game, I care more about her than any other character ever. And if I click on the piece of music from the end of her storyline, when she's spilling out all of her emotions to my character, confessing to everything she's done, falling apart as she exposes her soul...

And I'm suddenly incredibly close to tears, just from listening to it. This game has broken me.

I was so emotionally invested that I'm scared to even open the executable again.

Look, my point is that I fell in love in this game. Not my character, me. And that is enough for me to dub this game a masterpiece of character development and writing. I doubt I'll ever find anything that makes me feel the way a few pieces of artwork and some writing with the right music has.

I can't get this from Call of Duty. Mass Effect makes a good go, and almost succeeded, but it just fall short of the mark.

What I'm trying to say is that action and emotion are two very different things. They aren't in direct competition, but they can be hard to pull off together. Action is easier to create; you're a guy with a gun, here's some other guys with guns, go have fun shooting each other. However, action is a one-off event; it's only important to a player while it's happening. Emotion, on the other hand, is harder to create, and it has the potential to stay with you for weeks, months after the initial experience is over.

I'm going to have to stop here and go and cry for a while. I'm entirely serious, I... I just need to spend some time alone.

Gods damn Katawa Shoujo, and Gods bless it at the same time.

4Chan, you have crafted something incredible.

UPDATE - By all means, leave me a comment about what you think of my conclusions, I'd like to know exactly how botched this post is.

Walk always in the Emperor's Light.