If someone doesn’t defeat the monsters in the cave, the villagers will be forced to abandon their ancestral homeland, but you only care about what’s in it for you. Why are you such a heartless bastard? In real life you might feel sympathy for their plight. Perhaps these villagers are too unreal, too much like animatronic cyborgs. Real people aren’t made of polygons and pixels, don’t have three repeating lines of dialogue and don’t wait around in the town square for strangers to show up. Their cyborg skin is so thin the X-ray eyes of a sophisticated gamer see through it to the crude machinery underneath, simple buttons and levers, dispensers of missions and rewards.

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of columns about why it’s challenging for games to be Not Fun instead of Fun, to be meaningful and compelling in ways more akin to history’s great dramas and tragedies. Plenty of unanswered questions will remain, but the last major hurdle is emotional investment.

Bad news: Han Solo is a big fat trick! Someone named Harrison Ford has been wearing a costume this whole time. What is it about Solo that makes him easier to care about than the villagers? Well, Ford’s skin is far more lifelike than the cyborg skin in most games, and he so rarely strays into the uncanny valley. Furthermore, the underlying machinery is sophisticated and subtle; there is a rich texture of authentic details surrounding him that obfuscates the artist’s hand, the structural reasons this character exists. And despite all the outer-space stuff, Solo’s dilemmas are resonant, with bits you can relate to your own life. By comparison, this monster cave business is pretty absurd. Now, most of us were clued into the unreality of Star Wars early in our first viewing, and yet we willingly bought into Solo’s existence, permitting ourselves to think of him as a real person. Han Solo is a symbol, just an idea that we can choose to bind to aspects of our real lives, and the adhesive force that does the binding is emotional investment. How can we make it work better in our medium?

Games strive for thicker, more convincing cyborg skins, but once we reproduce human actors faithfully in rendering and animation, then what? What design tricks can weave emotional investment into interactive play? BioShock leverages the ‘exploration’ approach, in which a character’s non-interactive story is doled out in increments as the player discovers them. Games do ‘creation’ well, too, and if players could build a relationship with a character, that would be unique to our medium. KOTOR and Fallout 3 aggregate your small, local actions into a reputation, a relationship. Obviously, emotional investment stands to be more powerful if concentrated in personal, individual relationships. Maybe an emerging trick I call ‘transference’ will succeed some day. Players already get emotionally invested in their own progress, so instead of a level-32 barbarian, you have them embellish a relationship with another game character, gradually unlocking pre-authored behaviours and abilities, in hopes that their attachment to levelling up spills over into the relationship itself.

Here’s how these ideas might appear in Hospital Director, the theoretical Not Fun game we’ve been designing. The hospital is populated by patients, doctors and such who are believable characters, well-drawn with authentic details. Like the pregnant lady suffering from severe complications who maintains hope that she’ll make a great mother despite being bankrupt and single, their plights resonate with our own fears and dreams. In exploring them, every player unearths different facets of their personality and invests time differently into forging relationships. A tough call at a board meeting might earn the trust of the frazzled, secretive doctor, and subsequently you learn he takes pills after every shift to calm down. Dynamic character arcs could take it even further. After getting to know the pregnant lady, do you help her learn to cope with loss? Or do you tread on her insecurities, triggering a tragedy that leaves her emotionally scarred? It’s a landscape dense with characters and relationships instead of dungeons and swords.

All that plus every design technique we’ve built up over these columns. But when the mother loses her baby, do you actually care on a personal level, or do you wonder what variable changed the wrong way? You might care if you trust that, as you try different choices and actions, the game will always respond with character reactions which add up to a consistent message that resonates with you. In other words, if you are swayed by the artistic merits of the possibility space the designer has crafted. Once again, it comes down to that game system running under the hood, and everything else we covered amounts to little more than ways not to mess it up once you’ve achieved that. Innovative game systems that simulate emotional topics: maybe this should have been the topic of these past four columns. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if all game design writing were about that for a while.

Randy Smith is the co-owner and game designer of Tiger Style, whose first title, Spider, is due for release in June.

This article originally appeared in E202. Like what you’ve read? Buy your copy of Edge now for £4.50 and get it delivered to your door (UK and Europe only).
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