On Emotive Games: Q&A with IGF Finalist Daniel Benmergui

In this Q&A, experimental videogame maker and IGF finalist Daniel Benmergui talks about his own approach to making games and the potential of games in eliciting emotions.

How do you make emotive games?

I never set myself the goal of making emotive games. It just happened that both I Wish I Were the Moon and Today I Die where born out of intense emotional impressions.

Something I discovered with those games is that you can build important experiences that involve audiovisuals, text and (weak, to be honest) gameplay, without "telling stories". There are very few of these "game poems", which is shame, because there might be a huge audience for them out there.

Do games have the necessary vernacular to tell powerful stories?

I think Jonathan Blow is right when he said that games are never going to catch up with cinema in telling stories like movies do. Any kind of interaction breaks storytelling horribly, despite the enormous efforts of designers to overcome it.

However, I believe there is a different kind of narrative which is based purely on gameplay. That kind of narrative is very unexplored and we mostly stumble in the dark when trying to "author" that narrative that is constructed between players and gameplay.

For example, take games like Braid: a kind of magic happens, where you being to understand and talk with the game in terms of gameplay, like learning a new language. You watch the game objects, with their sprites and animations, but what you really see is how the puzzle works as a whole, and all the possibilities of stuff you can try with the tools at your disposal.

Is there something important in that conversation, in the way a movie can be important? Or you are just learning to navigate a screwed up universe and have learnt nothing that matters?

Those are important questions, but to figure them out, we have to keep learning the true language of games... we can't expect to write good poetry in a language we scarcely understand!

What kinds of emotions can games generate in players?

Most games I've played involve either a high degree of abstraction (puzzle games) or a high degree of adrenaline. It's difficult to explore a vast range of emotions when you are pumped up or using logic brain functions.

But I think the appropriate question is "What can this game make me discover about the universe and myself?" Answering that question would involve a lot of emotions... both in the player and the game maker.

Is it even important for games to make players cry?

There are plenty of games that made a lot of people cry. Most Hollywood movies do that easily, given the proper audience.

But I would prefer games to shock people to the very core, which is something I know books and movies can do. Then there will be crying.

Experimental videogame maker Daniel Benmergui is the creator of Today I Die, an emotive game that brought him a nomination in the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival. `He can be reached at his blog Ludomancy.

Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part II)

In Part I, graduate student Nick Lalone considers Johan Huizinga's notion of play-character as a pathway to invoke emotions in games. In Part II, he compares how various games use play-character.

Most often, video games invoke the spirit of exploration during the time between World War 1 and World War 2. We, as people, think back on a world much larger than it is now. What is out there? As Uncharted 2 begins,

"I never told the half of what I saw ...." - Marco Polo

A world that is filled with mystery taps into the fantastic hindsight we have now through historical documents. Marco Polo headed into a world that none of us could have ever imagined. What would it be like to head into a culture so unlike anything we had never seen? What would it have been like to walk into a place untouched by Roman influence?

Another thing game designers tap into, something that invokes an emotion we can’t describe, is war.

“War, War never changes.” - Fallout 3

War never changes. The atrocities of war are well known to anyone who has ever opened a book about World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Russo-Japanese War, or any war that has ever been fought. Most of the younger generations in the United States or Europe will never know the horror that war brings. The globalization of world industry means that, as Metal Gear teaches us, wars will be fought between nations through a poor nation. Russia and America will fight through Afghanistan, China and America will fight through Korea, etc etc. The citizens of the “Core” countries will most likely fight less and less as the years progress. However, the idea of war is still omnipresent thanks to things like the media, movies, video games, and all sorts of museums. To participate in a war captures an emotional curiosity that reaches almost all of the target audience of video games. We all grew up with parents or grandparents who were a bit “off” due to war. Why, what, and how they became this way is something of a subconscious curiosity. Purchasing a war game allows us to tap into this curiosity, this want-to-know.

However, these things barely tap the play-character. Where the play-character shines in video games is that of environment. For this case, we turn toward Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City did something so few games, or movies for that matter, have done since the 80s ended: It captured the very essence of vice in the 1980s. Maybe it was the voice acting, maybe it was the music, maybe it was the drug culture, but this game had soul. Playing Vice City meant turning on a time capsule. It invoked emotion simply because of the amount of environmental ooze it managed to move. Since Vice City, each Grand Theft Auto has tried to capture a certain time period. San Andreas captured the atmosphere of the race riots in the 90s. Grand Theft Auto IV managed to capture the essence of resolving the gap between culturally favored goals and current available means to attain those goals (anomie): we usually call this deviance or innovation.

Invoking emotion, invoking the play-character is a risky way to bring emotional investment by your players. However, the mode through which a game designer can capture this is not replicable as that of a single event. Still and all, going too far or not enough and players will punish you by not purchasing your game.

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.

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Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part I)

In Part I of this article, graduate student Nick LaLone considers Johan Huizinga's notion of play-character as a pathway to invoke emotions in games.

Video games most often use single person events to create emotion. Some examples here are Death of Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, Permanent Death in Steel Battalion, Modern Warfare 1's Nuke Sequence and subsequent single person death. However, a successful event in profit-driven capitalist societies means that you get one shot at it. After that shot, the reproduction of that event becomes nearly ubiquitous. The death of the pure romantic interest, huge dramatic loss of innocent lives, and other circumstances all become part and parcel of the video game, while many of these reuses add something or take it away (Nuke sequence replaced with killing civilians, etc).





In short, all successful events quickly become rationalized, predictable, and a safe way to generate revenue. Invoking emotion becomes procedure. Now, why do things become procedure? First, like all fields of competition, companies have to do what others do in order to even out the playing field. Second, It requires enormous amounts of research to find a new way to generate emotion in a way that will make players want to buy your game.

However, there is another mode of eliciting emotion that many people do not cater to. We will call this mode by a term familiar to most ludologists: "play-character". The idea of the play-character comes from the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. He defines the play-character in an abstract fashion:

It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. (47)

What he means here is that the way we play is the way society interprets the world. To play is to tap into the play-character, to play is to interpret life.

Huizinga continues saying that as culture continues, “the original relationship between play and non-play does not remain static” (47). Essentially, the play-character, culture’s interpretation of “life and the world” is constantly in motion. In monetary terms, tapping into this is to reach an abstract portion of society that has moved on; to find a way to make money on the past. For, while the play-character ebbs and flows, this play-character is only viewable after it has long since regressed or changed. We typically call this the spirit of the age and tend to block it off in decade form.

Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part II) 

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.

Touching Players Emotionally

In this article, game writer and designer Shelly Warmuth explains why emotive games, games that affect players emotionally, involve small ethical dilemmas.

Train changes the rules of gameplay, eliciting an emotional response while causing players to try to change the design of the game while playing it. It makes them uncomfortable, sad, and unwilling to win.

When discussing emotive games, it's important to define the emotion one wishes the player to feel and when we want them to feel that. Certainly, we've all played games that cause us to feel something. A game becomes interactive and "fun" when it elicits a positive response such as laughter, satisfaction, or awe. Consider the last time you caused a huge explosion in a game or laughed at a bit of dialogue. Game designers put in elements to bring forth certain responses on purpose. Most players were touched by Aerith's death in Final Fantasy VII. Insomniac uses amusing quips to obtain giggles and smiles in the Ratchet & Clank series. I found the beggers in Assassin's Creed to be very annoying, while hitting them became very satisfying. Meanwhile, Assassin's Creed touched on my fear of heights and, along with inFAMOUS, created a small fear of water, at least during gameplay. Some games create an unintended emotional response such as anger, annoyance, and frustration. Therefore, for the purpose of this article, it's important to define emotive games as those that involve a player’s emotions, in an intended way, even when they are no longer playing.

To elicit an emotional response, the game must first be immersive. Creating an immersive game is a huge subject by itself but, if elements of the game are jarring players out of the experience, the required interaction cannot be achieved. The player will not suspend disbelief long enough to be affected by the game without being immersed in the environment and story. It must touch them on a personal level and stick with them after play is through.

Immersion is but a small part of the challenge, however. In an age of internet guides and forums, it's difficult to surprise players or sneak up on them. Players don't need to choose whether or not to save the Little Sisters before consulting the internet or guide to see the outcome of the decision. Players hear about the treasure chest that voids the Ultimate Weapon before the game is even in their hand. It would seem that touching a player emotionally then resides in the story, but, it's almost too difficult to avoid word-of-mouth.

One option is to take away player choice. Modern Warfare 2's airport scene is appalling and disturbing. Players walk through a busy airport, mowing down innocent, unarmed people. They can't run or rush the scene. They don't choose the scene, it is given to them and they must get through it. It haunts you long after playing. This uncomfortable scene is a powerful example of what I'd hope to achieve in an emotional response. It doesn't allow player choice, while touching the player's emotions in an intended way once they are no longer playing. It's only one scene, however. Re-creating this response several times in a game would numb the player, dimming the response. This is a fine example of emotive play, but not an emotive game.

The next option involves creating ethical dilemmas in games. While I found Bioshock to be one of the most immersive games I've ever played, choosing whether or not to save the Little Sisters was not really an ethical dilemma. It didn't change the game significantly and it actually becomes a strategy for some. If you save them, you get the better ending. If you harvest them, you get more weapons upgrades and more trophies. Instead of being ethical, it simply becomes a matter of what's important to the player. Likewise, in inFAMOUS, being good or evil fails to significantly affect play or ending. It, more or less, changes the visuals of the game. Fable II, however, creates decision-making that does affect the game without the player being completely aware of the changes they are making. To get an emotional response from this device, then, the designer must design ethical dilemmas into the game that actually affect the gameplay and story. The problem with this lies in the previously-mentioned word-of-mouth. If we create decisions, how do we keep the player from looking up the outcome prior to making the decision? And, how do we keep the player from changing that decision when they get an unexpected response?

We could make it a timed decision, but word-of-mouth means they'll know about the choice before they get to it. We could take away decision, but, we've already shown that, while this creates the intended response in the short-term, it will ultimately fail to keep the player immersed in the experience. We could make games that involve an ethical decision which is merely the lesser of two evils. Again, though, the guides and forums rear their ugly heads allowing players to make an informed decision. Complicated, branching story lines involving many decisions would seem the only, albeit expensive, option, then. In this way, player choices would lead to other choices making them unsure of the ultimate outcome.

In the final analysis, the answer would seem to lie in creating a game that offers small ethical dilemmas. The player should be making decisions with little thought to the outcome. The decisions should seem so insignificant that they are invisible to the player, making them unaware of how they are affecting the game. And yet, the decisions should be significant enough to affect the player in a small way even when making them. Saves must be automatic and seamless so that the player cannot undo a choice. The game should be immersive and the outcome of the story should shock or surprise the player in some way so that they become aware, in the end, that their choices caused that outcome. The designer retains control of the intended emotional response and outcome while giving the player the illusion of control and decision-making. In this way, not only will they be touched by the story and the game, but they will continue to consider the choices they made long after they have finished playing.

Brenda Brathwaite created a game with all of these elements in Train. Players make choices based on the rules of the game without being fully aware of the outcome of those choices. When they suddenly become aware, the game itself becomes an ethical dilemma that touches players long after they have stopped playing.

Shelly Warmuth is a freelance game writer and designer. Her games, Dance Class and Coach's Corner, won top honors in HG4H's InsertCoin. She looks forward to the release of these great games on Project Natal in the near future.

Exposure as a Risk Variable in Game Success

In this article, graduate student Nick LaLone argues that another factor, exposure, affects game design decisions and whether or not players feel a game is unnaturally short or long, or just right.

Exposure is something that everyone thinks they want and need when selling a product. You see this in every aspect of game publicity: interviews with designers, advertisements in magazines devoted to people who would possibly play a game, discussion of a game in blogs, websites devoted to the game, advertising from console designers, and more. More exposure to a game through playing it will equal more sales, more or less. Video game demos can be seen as part of this strategy of exposure.

The downside to exposure is that it isn’t measurable. While a game might have more exposure, it might be popular for players who aren’t on that console, using antiquated design techniques, or is not a game about a topic that popular culture would consider. There are just as many reasons why a game would fail as there are for a game to succeed. However, being exposed to a product is ultimately beneficial to sales, even games that do not turn a profit. This consideration, consciously or unconsciously, finds its way into design decisions. It often does this through considerations of content, length, and sustainability. Abusing one of these items can theoretically hurt a game’s sales.

Given two other variables within a game, art and mechanics, exposure means more possible sales over time, greater likelihood that a gamer will remember and purchase a follow-up or sequel, and that the game will be talked about on social media / the internet longer.

If we were to take the art and mechanics of a game and add exposure, the equation for a game’s success could be represented like this :

Here, exposure equals to the average length of time for completion of central narrative. However, this equation is still a little too easy to manipulate. Through increasing each variable, a game could ensure success. Also, making up for one portion of a game by heightening another would ensure success despite bad performance in central part of a video game (bad art design, good mechanics or vica versa).

There are constant trends in video games that are always being mimicked. Video games that sell well, like movies, will be imitated. There is some logic in this. A product that consumers want and enjoy will have a certain “built-in” consumer base. However, it is necessary to create a product that is similar enough to feed off of that success while offering something new enough to be considered “special.” Through this, the possibility of simply spending more money on a game to ensure success comes under control.

But even this is not enough of an equation to truly predict video game success. There is, of course, a number that indicates the possibility of being “too” exposed to a particular part of a game (Not enough innovation, too far of a departure from design norms). The term to denote this possibility is Overexposure.

The Risks of Overexposure

There are a variety of trends that video games employ, things like control schemes, setting for certain types of games, moral choices, agency, and length. Through these equations, as we’ve thrown in more and more aspects of game design, most of these things have come under control. Overexposure could be called a “risk” variable. In essence, doing too much of one particular thing takes away from a video games possibility of success. It would look a little like this:

Exposure = Exposure = Average length of time for completion of central narrative.
Art = Budget of Graphic Design / Budget for Mechanical Design
Mechanics = Budget for Mechanical Design / Budget of Graphic Design
Current Design Trends = How closely the game mimics current popular games of the same genre.

It is an equation that few games manage to balance. Too often, a game is seen as too short and is quickly forgotten (Mark of Kri) or too long and is lambasted for it’s unnatural length (MMOs, GTA IV). Within this framework, overexposure can be seen as the average departure from the currently accepted video game design norm that a video game takes:

Manipulating this variable is a risk: Stay safe and remain inside the bounds of design and you end up with a positive number that will subtract from the probability of success; go too far and you unbalance the equation, creating a probability of success so high that whether the game succeeds or not is more of a chance of fate, than a calculated risk.

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.

Respect Thy Player

In this article, gameplay programmer Nels Anderson discusses the responsibility of game developers and designers to honor the precious time players spend on their games.

"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend." -Theophrastus

We entreat customers of our games for their money. But in reciprocity, they entrust us with that most valuable thing: their time. Ultimately, it's the only thing we have that's wholly ours and completely irreplaceable. It's a bigger responsibility than many, across all entertainment industries, realize. And while games may be the only place where we can try again forever (and dammit, it's good to see Duncan again), the time we spend play games never comes back. We ought to make that time well spent.

It's something I've been thinking about a bit lately, in terms of making games with smaller scopes. We should question the seemingly prevailing wisdom that more is better, and not just because feature creep will kill you slowly and painfully. I'm interested in finding ways to create games of smaller scope that still have enough substance to carry meaning. When players invest their time in your game, they deserve you having spent some time asking "why are we doing this?"

It's a bit concerning, in that creating smaller games seems somewhat antithetical to the way the best games are made. Prototype, iterate, test, repeat is much harder on a shortened schedule, with all the other dependencies of core tech and pipeline setup, production considerations, manpower, etc. I'm sure these issues can be overcome, but they are not trivial ones.

This isn't a ubiquitous call for shorter games, don't get me wrong. I have no desire to trade my ~80 hours in Fallout 3. But we have a somewhat clearer idea of what that success looks like. And it requires excellent people, a steady hand and flawless execution. Aside from Valve's Portal, we haven't seen as much emphasis on smaller scoped games. Seems like fertile ground to me.

My marked hesitation toward social games is largely rooted in this. Much as with other casual offerings from PopCap et al., these games seem to be setup exclusively to kill time. They don't have any expressiveness or intended meaning and rarely even any craft worth admiring. And it doesn't help that the most successful ones are basically pyramid schemes that exploit the human psyche. While the same charges can absolutely be laid for many AAA games, there have been plenty that have demonstrated it needn't be that way. I have yet to see such offerings from social games and am skeptical their business climate will allow otherwise.

I actually feel the same way about a lot of MMOs being structured as digital Skinner Boxes. And that's not even considering how much of a markup $10 is to model, texture and rig a single character. Now I'm a big believer in person responsibility and don't think these games should be banned, monitored or any similar nonsense. But wow, I can't imagine being okay working on such a thing.

Steve wrote a similar statement a few days ago and it encouraged me to move this from the back burner. While his claims are a little more structural than mine, it seems cut from the same cloth. The time people invest should come with good return, be it meaningful cognitive exercise or time well spent with others. My Left 4 Dead 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii sessions with friends provided many good times.

It can even come in ways most unexpected. My wife helped me solve the final puzzle of Machinarium, a musical tone puzzle that I have a poor ear for. I tried for about 15 minutes, making an overly complicated graph until finally succumbing and requesting help. She solved it on the second try. Obviously it's much harder to design for those things, but it was still a fond moment.

That's a long-winded way of saying players give us their trust that we will not abuse the time they spend with our labours. Respect that they are choosing to spend some of that most precious time with us and make it time well worth spending.

Nels Anderson is a programmer at Hothead Games. He's probably the only game developer in Vancouver (and maybe all of Canada) that was born and raised in Wyoming. He writes about games and game design on his blog, Above 49. A version of this article appeared there.