In an assessment of how deeply games can move people, Wired asks whether it's possible for a game to make you cry. The article is based around the research contained in a book called Videogames: The Impact of Emotion (which we've covered before), in which the author asked 500 gamers to describe how their emotions were affected by the games that they played. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results showed that "honor", "loyalty" and "wonder" ranked among the top feelings. These feelings are closely matched to the emotional feeling from a war game like Call of Duty or Brothers in Arms.
Personally I've experienced several different kinds of emotions from playing video games. I've reeled at the excessive gore from certain games (Soldier of Fortune) and I've jumped out of my seat because of others (F.E.A.R.) but I've never been moved to tears because of a game. As the Wired article suggests, it may simply be my choice of game. I rarely play RPG games, which tend to have a immersive narrative that can make the death of a character harder to take. It's hard to care about another bot biting the dust in a game of Unreal Tournament. What about you? Did you shed a tear when Aerith was murdered in Final Fantasy VII?
[Via digg]
