Posts tagged mass effect

The Ballad of Tara Shepard (or: Why I’m playing the first Mass Effect again)

1
1 year ago
in

Playing through the first Mass Effect was one of the most gratifying single player video game experiences I’ve ever had. The second time I played it, that is.

The first time I played through the RPG dressed-up as a shooter, I played through as “Mark Shepard”, and I did what I usually do in games that offer you a lot of choices: I did what I’d do if I were there.  And it turns out, I’m kind of a Boy Scout.  I scored very high as a “Paragon” on the morality scale, meaning most of my decisions were selfless, and I always tried to talk things through before things got violent.  The universe that More >

A video game has never made you cry…but neither has a film or book

2
3 years ago
in ,

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 More >

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