Opinion

It's Been Emotional

Steven Poole didn't shed a tear over Apocalypse Now, so why, he asks, do we have this strange ideal of crying at a videogame?

Since at least Final Fantasy VII, an argument has been abroad that ‘emotional’ content is what signals (or will signal) videogames’ ‘maturity’. But this idea, lately rampant in the mainstream coverage of Chubby Drizzle, often conflates two very different processes – depicting emotion (in the game’s ‘characters’) versus evoking emotion (in the player). When such discussions do explicitly centre on the player’s response, meanwhile, we find a crude unreflective hierarchy of emotion built in– at the top of which sits, for some reason, crying.
 
So, wait, why would crying at a videogame represent the summit of player experience? One may cry at the most meretricious and manipulative Hollywood scene featuring a dog or small child, but that doesn’t prove it’s a work of art. Conversely, I did not weep while watching Apocalypse Now or reading The Master And Margarita. Why is crying thought superior to, or more authentic than, laughing, or feeling terrified, or joyously triumphant, or experiencing what I have argued is the central emotional territory of many of the best videogames, the emotion of aesthetic wonder?
 
This strange ideal of the sobbing gamer is perhaps ascribable to a mystifying anxiety among some of gaming’s promoters. A mainstream newspaper review of BioShock 2, for example, contained the cringeworthy claim: ‘There is an ongoing argument about whether games can be considered as literature, and this one presents by far the most compelling case yet for “yes”.’ Here, the term ‘literature’ is presumably being used synecdochically to mean ‘culture’ or ‘art’, because otherwise the claim is absurd. But it is probably from literature – and specifically, from some vague memory of the “pity and terror” that Aristotle says spectators should feel on witnessing dramatic tragedy – that we derive making you cry as the acid test for deciding when games are good.
 
The 36-hour animated movie that ends Metal Gear Solid 4 tries very hard to be a tear-jerker, but for me the most emotionally powerful moment in that game was more rarefied and elusive. As Snake returned to Shadow Moses, the combination of the 16bit interpolation from the original game with the fact that, while I was later playing around with the camera, Snake sighed, “Ah, overhead view. Just like old times,” evoked a nagging nostalgia for a world that never existed. This happens to be a highly literary emotion (think of the pastoral genre in increasingly urban early-modern England), but here the game intensifies it by exploiting the fact that the player has actually experienced the nonexistent utopia. The unscripted wandering of the jungle and savannah in Far Cry 2, meanwhile, was more affecting to me than the drama of ‘buddies’: the game provides a world so gorgeously crafted, and so successful in creating a sense of place, that it lingers in the memory, but not in a way that can be captured by a single term of crude emotional taxonomy, and not in a way the designers could have deliberately engineered.
 
Simlarly, my recent sessions of local co-op Special Ops in Modern Warfare 2 have been far more ‘emotional’, in terms of the pleasures of friendship, tension and triumph, than the pseudocinematic narrative twists of the singleplayer campaign. One of the most ‘emotional’ singleplayer experiences I ever had contained no photorealistic 3D characters but stick figures in an isometric wasteland of grey blocks haunted by the horrible noise of giant ants: no game since has better evoked the bittersweet melancholy of romance in the face of certain doom than Sandy White’s Ant Attack. Rich emotional response, as that game proves so brilliantly, is an emergent byproduct of fierce and merciless design; it doesn’t come magically through the more accurate modelling of facial flesh in semi-interactive cutscenes, or via some new chip or peripheral.
 
We ought to have learned, at the very least since Sony’s trumpeting of PS2’s Emotion Engine, to be suspicious of claims that some technology will increase ‘emotion’ in games. Such promises often smack of an aspiration to psychological dictatorship. A while ago, a Peter Molyneux-inspired comedy Twitter account shared a monstrous thought: ‘Natal can tell if you’re crying. Imagine if for some reason you had a mission where you were REQUIRED to cry to pass a gate. Interesting…’ It is indeed interesting, but you might not want to go there. Imagine, for a start, how it would ruin your makeup.
 
In a way, this is the logical culmination of a misguided emotional authoritarianism in some strands of game thinking. Instead of worrying about the kinds of emotion a game can or cannot induce in – or even demand of – the player, we ought to be more concerned about how games construct a rich and deep world in which unpredictable and variable emotions will arise naturally.