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AndyB

Crying game 2.

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So what IS the obsession with crying? Or more particularly what effect do you want to achieve in these games. It seems to me that this issue isn't so much about crying as achieving positive emotional attachment with a place, a character (or even a thing). (and then taking it away, or altering it).

What you want is games that get you to care about an in-game object /A.I so that you are upset if it gets hurt, or leaves you. At least, that is my interpretation of what you guys are saying.

How about a game which makes you leave the game world as you win, so that you leave behind the beatiful land full of enchanting characters to return to your character's "home".

The question is how do you make people care via gameplay rather than prescripted story?

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Any game that has the goal of making people cry, or teaching people about some high-level idea about the life, the universe or everything (see: Why games feel irrelevant?) has a high chance of failure. Pushing philosophical points, or pushing tears, are terrible conceptual starting points. Things will come across as contrived or cheap.

More generally speaking, I believe that a lot of video games could benefit from more universal stories about characters with real lives and real motivations. Once we get some more humanity into games, more of them will become genuinely meaningful to people.

That's not to say there isn't a place for stories in which the president's daughter gets kidnapped so she can be injected with a zombie virus so that she can be brought back to America and infect everyone (wtf?), but it would be dissapointing if stories in games remain monopolized by the plot-centric action variety.

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Crying is mentioned so often because it is the most difficult emotional response to illicit. But Marek is right, no media or art form will benefit from treating the end emotional response as the starting point of development. A worthy subject is most important, and if that is conveyed truthfully then the emotions will follow.

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Yeah. Why do we never hear about a big name developer trying to make us laugh? I'm not talking about the cruel super-villain laugh from a particularly gruesome round of GTA, but the real joyous outburst of mirth. It's all about the crying for EA (as they said) and their ilk. The other emotions, important as they may be, have been forsaken in pursuit of making a game that can bring a tear. Maybe tears aren't the answer to making games good. Why don't the big developers seek joy anymore?

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I know I'm going to regret admitting this, but the end of Mega Man Battle Network 3 made me cry. *blush* I knew that everything was going to be okay in the end (the game is called MEGA MAN Battle Network, after all), but I still got a bit upset.

Other games have made me cry too, but I can't remember them at the moment. Although, I do remember that playing Metroid II at 3:40am evoked feelings of pure, primal terror. Forget your survival horror games, THAT game genuinely scared the shit out of me.

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Yeah, and Super Metroid had some damn freaky moments too. Beat any actual "horror" game I've played since. Well, OK, as lacking as the gameplay was, Doom III had the scary as well. I'd call it a tie.

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I don't get why everyone's* making such a big deal out of this crying business. It's catchy and short and relatively unambiguous to say that a game should make you cry. A game that makes you laugh can be as simple as a game with a lot of one-liners, and the other emotions (envy, or whatever) are to complicated to use when you're trying to find an easy way of saying that a game should be able to evoke real emotions in the player, just like any good book or movie or painting or whatever.

That being said, genuine sadness would be one of the harder emotions to make the player experience in a game, right? I mean, look at movies: a comedy is easy to make, laughs are cheap (it comes in barrels). A real tear-jerker, though, requires more skill from the artist (!!!) in order to not make it feel contrived, right? At least if you're a real man, like me.

*Okay, not everyone.

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