Why Games Fail to Emotionally Connect

[Loppan Torkel]

Why Games Fail to Emotionally Connect - a pretty interesting article. I mostly agree with what the guy writes, but I'm questioning if I would connect emotionally to the later, japanese games he did. I also wonder if the age of the gamer doesn't have a greater impact than the actual game. It seems a lot of gamers connect to games such as Halo, which I fail to see why if it doesn't depend on the impressionability of young gamers.

What's your take on this and what games have you connected emotionally to lately?

The characters, main character and partymembers, in Planescape: Torment are obvious, but lately, it's more difficult... Myth 2 was a bit like Cannon Fodder in terms of attachment to the units.

 

[Maniacal]

In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion I felt no ownership over my character despite pouring hours into their creation. The world around them never felt like the same one I inhabited as the player, and as rich as the environment was, it always felt disappointingly sterile. This was partly because of the voice acting; although the main quest characters had individual actors, nearly all other non-player characters were voiced by the same three people. It did make for some laughable moment, especially when dialogue lines were repeated incessantly, but it also made the world impossible to believe in. The stilted animation of its characters, and their design firmly slotting into the uncanny valley, made Oblivion feel far more alien than it should’ve been.

I completely agree, I enjoyed Oblivion, but never came close to finishing it, it just felt wrong. Morrowind had rather static NPCs too but it wasn't as wrong feeling as Oblivion.

If the game has vocie acting, not just the dialogue but the vocie acting is hugely important. In Call of Juarez the two playable charactors, Billy Candle had a good vocie actor and Reverend Ray had an excellent vocie actor that really helped portray the characters and made it feel like mroe than just a floating pair of hands holding guns (although you could see your legs if you looked down, which is good, makes you feel even elss than a floating pair of guns *cough almost every fp(s) games cough*).

 

[GVBN]

Can't think of too many. Planescape Torment, Pathologic, and perhaps Mask of the Betrayer

Like it says it really depends on how fleshed out the characters are. Oblivion and Bethesda games in general have generic character with poorly written dialogue. Those scripted eat-work-sleep NPC day cycles don't make them any less lifeless. And JRPGs? They're about as emotional as reading some teenage drama queen's diary. Persona is the best the entire genre has to offer and that's not very impressive

 

[Leonel]

Call of Juarez 2 was pretty good in that respect. When Ray accidentally shoots his youngest preacher brother and that Indian chief mourns over his dying son, I was pretty close to crying.

 

[Lade]

I'm hoping SW-tOR will, but I think Civilization is actually the only game I've really felt connected to.

Well, that and D&D.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Call of Juarez 2 was pretty good in that respect. When Ray accidentally shoots his youngest preacher brother and that Indian chief mourns over his dying son, I was pretty close to crying.

I almost cried at the end of The Longest Journey.

 

[GoodGame]

PROS: Characters, Immersion, Interactivity, Original Story, Voice actors that are good at emoting

BANES: games that are clones, have so much detail that they're spreadsheets, have so little detail that they're boring immediately, games so hard they need walkthroughs