The other night I had a dream about Nintendogs. I hadn’t played the game (actually) in about a week. I turned it on, and not only was my corgi puppy filthy, starving and parched with thirst she’d also actually grown up into a full, mangy dog. (This is actually impossible in Nintendogs.) I desperately tried to figure out what to do and a dialog box appeared on the screen which read: “Do you want to give up and start over?”
If you think having guilt-ridden dreams about Nintendogs is weird, you either haven’t played the game for more than ten minutes or else you’re a puppy-hating bastard.
I have said to anyone who is willing to listen to me that making games that make people cry should not be a designer’s holy grail. What I’d rather see designers aim for is to make people feel . To make them care .
Crying is the result of a limited range of emotions. For a game to really succeed at meaning something to its players, it needs to be able to engage them on many different levels. Laughing, crying, getting indignant and maybe even feeling guilty.
Guilt can be a strong, motivating emotion. And its a very personal and interactive emotion. It may be one of those emotions that is more relevant to the game space than to other forms of media because it occurs as the result of one’s action or inaction. Very few movies have made me feel guilty, but many, many movies have made me cry. When a game makes me feel guilty, on the other hand, it is one of those signs that I am involved enough in what I am doing to really care.
I think its time to feed my Nintendog.
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One Response:
April 1st, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Interesting that about guilt’s relationship with agency.
I’d say that there’s “passive” media that have managed to make me feel guilty, but it tends to be in reflecting on my use of agency outside the movie world. (The evil big chain store puts the ma and pa shop around the corner out of business, I start feeling bad about any time I’ve gone to the Gap.)
Within a game or simulation, guilt tends to stay more localized. It influences my in-game/in-sim behavior…
Except for those times when I just decide to be a puppy hating, sidewalk driving bastard of course.