Hi, I’m Hamish Black and this is Writing On Games. The term ‘emotional experience’,
used when referring to games, is something that I have trouble with. Whenever I hear
it (whether it be from reviewers who lack the critical capacity to explain what emotions
the game is attempting to extract from the player, or publishers and developers who are
trying to market their game to a specific audience), I think back to those ridiculous
times around the late 2000’s where every game was referred to as a ‘cinematic’
experience, and I cringe just as hard as I did back then. It’s a shorthand that at
best explains nothing, and at worst signifies that a game is going to be incredibly heavy
handed in its attempts to elicit that coveted single tear from the person playing it. I
should say that I am far from one of these people that thinks that games should eschew
narrative altogether and just focus on being all fun all the time. Quite the opposite,
I love games that exude effective narrative delivery, or more generally, I enjoy worthwhile
artistic works of any medium. Therein lies my point – as stated in other videos on
this channel, games, due to their relative youth as a medium, have consistently and desperately
trying to equate themselves to other media, saying ‘LOOK AT ME I’M JUST LIKE A MOVIE!’
or ‘MY NARRATIVE IS BASED ON A BOOK THEREFORE IT’S AUTOMATICALLY HOT SHIT!’ My point
is that games, whilst we still require a critical language to be developed that is truly our
own, shorthand like ‘emotional experience’ really brings nothing to the table, and only
serves to perpetuate the idea that games are still trying to catch up to other media. In
what world would a book or film be referred to as an ‘emotional experience’? What
emotion is it you’re trying to elicit from me as a player? THERE ARE LOTS OF EMOTIONS,
YOU GUYS. WHEN YOU USE THE TERM EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE, THE ONLY EMOTION I FEEL IS INDIFFERENCE.
Let’s examine this idea further – when games are referred to as ‘emotional experiences’,
to what games are people referring, and what emotions, in all seriousness, are these people
talking about? Usually, as previously stated, this term is used to describe smaller indie
games, or bigger triple A games that are trying to cash in on that sweet indie dev cash pit.
David Cage constantly speaks of his games (which, for the most part, are considered
to be interesting, if majorly flawed experiments with storytelling in games) as ‘emotional
experiences’, to the point where it has become a phrase he doesn’t even think about
anymore. In an interview with EuroGamer in 2013, he spoke of his game Beyond Two Souls
and stated that ‘We want to use the camera to say something. If we're talking about emotional
experience through storytelling, you need cameras to have a sense of emotion. What's
interesting is this is something cinema did a century ago or less with Citizen Kane - he
used the camera to tell the story, and not just to show the story. That was hugely inspiring
to filmmakers, and that's where we are with games now." WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THAT
MEAN? THAT MEANS QUITE LITERALLY FUCK ALL. It’s either cases like that, where developers
spout meaningless, pretentious (and I actually mean pretentious in its truest sense) nonsense
about their own games, or it's reviewers speaking of games like Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons
or Journey (Journey, I should say, is one of my favourite games, but we’ll get onto
Brothers right now). Reviews from outlets like Gamezone, Polygon and Gamespot all referred
to Brothers as this nebulous ‘emotional experience’ and heaped praise upon praise
on it as a result. Now, I’m probably going to get lynched for
this, but I was severely disappointed by Brothers, and whilst I generally don’t give a shit
about how highly other people rate games (people can like what they like), but seeing the praise
heaped upon this game when I found there to be severe issues with pacing, mechanics and
the heavy-handedness of the narrative in general for some reason made me feel a way. You could
say I had an ‘emotional experience’. What were my problems with this game exactly? My
first and probably most prominent of my problems with the game came with the way it handled
mechanics as narrative – the idea that the narrative of the game is delivered through
the way in which you interact with and control the experience. This is not to say that games
cannot do this effectively – quite the opposite, there are many examples of this done well
(some that I will come onto later), and experiments with this have been prevalent since gaming
began (for a breakdown of this, I implore you to check out Extra Credits’ episode
on Narrative Mechanics and Missile Command – that game is unbelievable in its narrative
depth and delivery). What happens when you fundamentally break this, however? Well, as
I would argue, a game like Brothers happens. Now, this is all down to personal opinion
and feel free to disagree with me and discuss this idea with me, but the key component of
the game, and the source of every puzzle and enemy encounter in the game, is that one player
controls both characters simultaneously with one controller (both sticks and shoulder buttons
correspond to both Brothers). The thought that pervaded my entire experience with this
game as a result was as follows – are these brothers fucking morons? The idea was clearly
that the player had to view these brothers as one in the same, and the clumsiness that
came as a result of controlling both of these brothers at the same time, like I say, is
the key component of every puzzle in the game. That said, they don’t LITERALLY share the
same brain, do they?! As I was having to co-ordinate moving the brothers away from danger and I’d
accidentally run into a wall with one of them as I moved my focus to one brother in particular,
only for the other brother to either keep running into a wall or stand still and await
death, the only real emotion it elicited from me was hysteria, as I laughed at the idea
of this wee prick just standing there as a monster approached him and the brother shouting
‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY’ before remembering that they were both morons, and that this
was probably natural selection at work. This was my main problem with the game – the
idea that if it were a two-player game then that would counteract any dissonance created
by the fundamental mechanics, but it would also remove any of the challenge from the
game. This idea, to me anyway, fundamentally broke the experience – I obviously get what
they were going for, the idea that the brothers have a figuratively symbiotic relationship,
but the mechanics make it out as if their relationship is LITERALLY symbiotic, which
is a BIG problem. The heavy-handedness of the symbolism of the narrative (‘LOOK THEY’RE
ESSENTIALLY ONE IN THE SAME PERSON’) also correlated, in my mind anyway, with the hokey
narrative itself – if you went into this experience at any point thinking that both
brothers were going to make it out alive after the game smacking you in the face with the
idea that this story is sad time and time again, then your IQ is probably within the
single digits. It should have come as a surprise to no one, and therefore it elicited none
of the tears from this particular player that it clearly wanted to drain from my eyes with
vampiric enthusiasm. My point? Just because a game is ‘emotional’,
does not automatically make that game effective. And when people refer to games as ‘emotional
experiences’, what they typically mean is that a game is sad, and this usually involves
a close relative or friend of the player character kicking the bucket at some point in the story.
What I’ve been trying to get at through this entire piece is that ‘emotion’ is
SO much more than that. Look at a game like Journey, for instance – as previously stated,
this is another game people constantly refer to as an ‘emotional experience’, but this
is totally meaningless as the wealth of emotions that game elicits from the player is not done
justice by this phrase. My most memorable experience with that game was welling up at
the famous ‘sliding scene’ – this is not a sad scene, in fact it is quite triumphant.
The fluid movement makes the player feel empowered, and the idea that you can be experiencing
this with another player whom you do not know, combined with the side-on angle as you pass
the mountain, and the absolutely gorgeous lighting… urgh. It’s an experience that
I will probably never forget, and to boil that down to simply an ‘emotional experience’
feels unbelievably reductive to me. Visceral excitement from the movement, anxiety and
curiosity as to what will come next in this world, courage as you and your companion feel
like you can take on the world, mixed with a subtle remorse and sadness as you remember
that you and your companion are alone in what is hinted to be a former bustling metropolis.
This is just one example of many set-pieces that permeate the experience, and all deliver
equally conflicting emotions – to simply describe this game as ‘emotional’, then,
is to do the game a grand disservice. Developers, publishers and reviewers alike – eschew
this reductive language. Begin to develop a critical language that allows us to examine
these emotions in depth, and why and how they are elicited from the player, rather than
just stopping at the word ‘emotions’. Don’t think that ‘emotional’ just means
sad. Don’t believe that the shortcut to ‘emotions’ in games is killing off characters.
Think about the mechanics of the games you play and create, and the ways in which the
fundamentals of these mechanics can potentially interrupt and cause dissonance with the ideas
you are trying to present with them. Critical thought, at every part of the process, is
key. And last, but not least, get tae fuck David Cage, ya mad weirdo. Fahrenheit? More
like Fahrenshite. On that bombshell, I’m Hamish Black and
this has been Writing On Games. I’ll see you next time.