A video game has never made you cry…but neither has a film or book
Dec 15, 2008 | Filed under Games, Rants
Video game blog Kotaku linked to an argument-provoking article on ihobo this weekend that makes the bold claim that a game has never made anyone cry. Well, not in and of itself. The author writes:
This is the nub of the issue here: a story can make you cry by empathising with the protagonist (or another character), but a game (when viewed as a formal system) cannot do this. It follows that the only way that a videogame can make you cry is by using narrative tools that have nothing to do with games as formal systems whatsoever. So even though, for instance, many people report that they cried when they played Final Fantasy VII at the fateful scene (and indeed, several other cRPGs also show up in player studies as having provoked tears) the moment that actually brought the player to tears was a non-interactive cut scene. It wasn’t the game (in the systems view) that made them cry – it was the story – and there never was a question as to whether stories could make you cry.
As a enthusiast and evangalist of gaming, I was taken aback at first when I realized he was right. Moving thumbsticks and mashing buttons on a controller in and of itself is never going to make you cry. Instead, it’s the narrative, something largely borrowed from film, gaming’s closest cousin, that provokes an emotional response.
And then I thought about it some more.
Technically, he’s still right, but with a very large asterisk. Gaming began as a strictly technical exercise, playing to reach an objective or break a high score. But ever since Donkey Kong snatched Pauline from Mario’s embrace, it’s evolved into a medium, a vehicle for storytelling. The years have seen an evolution in the ability of the medium for storytelling – from, “Our princess is in another castle” to the deep, interactive narrative of games like Mass Effect. In fact, the narrative is no longer confined to cut scenes, as the author suggests, as games like Indigo Prophecy (Farenheit) and it’s upcoming spiritual sequel, Heavy Rain integrate the story even more deeply with their interactive elements. You can take the narrative out of the game, or you can have a game without a narrative, but you can do that with any other storytelling vehicle, as well.
Consider film: a piece of celluloid in and of itself can’t make anyone cry, or envoke any sort of strong emotional response. It’s simply a medium, a platform for storytelling. You can have film without narrative — for example, on my visit to MoMA in NYC a few years ago, there was a film projected on the floor where the POV of the camera flew into the naked artist’s mouth, then out her rectum (seriously) and around to her mouth again. Arty and pretensious, sure, but there was no narrative to speak of. No story told. Film and it’s offspring, video and television, are simply mediums, and can be used to tell a story, or inform, or for artistic expression, or any other number of uses. Similarly, ink and paper pulp are not going to bring out emotion just by existing — it takes an author to craft a story on those pages before any sort of empathy can be reached.
Gaming is still in its infancy as a storytelling medium — the equivalent of the 1930s for film, where sound was just being introduced and color was just around the corner. Gamers are still waiting on our Citizen Kane — an ateur-driven masterpiece unique to its medium that both advances and defines the narrative abilities of its format. It’ll come, and so will other purely techincal games, like Geometry Wars and N+, games that don’t even try to tell a story. But the medium doesn’t define the narrative, and the narrative should never be discounted for its platform. If you ascribe to the notion that a game has never made anyone cry, then neither has a film, a book, or a play. It was just the story, and it doesn’t really matter how it was told.
This article is a response to “A Game Has Never Made You Cry” on ihobo, via Kotaku
April 17th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
true true..
The final cutscene of Bioshock 2 made me cry (when eleanor was talking to you and calling you daddy :) ) but not the game itself..
April 20th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
You liked BioShock 2? I avoided it since the original was so good, and Ken Levine wasn’t involved in the sequel at all. I admit, I was biased, but I really didn’t think it was possible that the sequel would live up to the original, and I didn’t want to tarnish the memory of the first.