+Paul Bills posted recently about video games' potential to evoke emotional response from players, and this was something that I wanted to touch upon a little bit. I've played video games almost all of my life; my family got a SuperNintendo when I was like three, but even before that, my dad had an old Commodore computer with such thrilling adventures as pixel Olympics or, later, Frogger. Now, we have stunning, million-dollar productions with complex themes and characters, stunning scenery, moving soundtracks, and design teams in the hundreds and thousands. The point I'm trying to get at, though, is that games have come a long way in the past twenty or so years. They still have "a lot of growing up to do," as Grant Tavinor puts it in The Art of Video Games, but they are coming into their maturity and are becoming a powerful tool for influencing the human psyche and emotional state.
Paul mentioned a number of emotions, and I wanted to build on his list in contributing what I feel to be paramount pieces in the history of video games.
1. Longing - Final Fantasy
First off, I'll admit that I've played only five or six of the games in the Final Fantasy series (there have been, as I recall, something like 15 *Final* Fantasies to date), but they have nonetheless had a profound impact on me and on my development as a gamer, a thinker, and a creator. In my mind, these games are the most emotionally complex and evocative games on the market, conveying a diversity of profound messages about humanity and the world. For me, though, the most powerful of emotions in the series is that of longing. I don't know that I can pinpoint exactly what it is that so draws the player into the Final Fantasy realm--a rich and immersive world, a profound sense of connection to the divine, a strong ideal of personal agency and potential to change the world, or just sheer awesomeness in fighting monsters and calling on arcane magics--but the longing for that world, for its vitality, is very real. The series has been the subject of an enormous volume of fan fiction, and deviantArt is plastered with thousands upon thousands of examples of art inspired by the fantastical and beautiful world of Final Fantasy. I honestly feel like Final Fantasy is responsible for the aesthetic and thematic qualities of the JRPG genre as a whole and has served as a model for most major modern story games.
So, right now, you're potentially thinking, "What's the difference between longing and nostalgia?" Well, to be honest, I'm not really sure, but I think nostalgia is for something you had and lost and longing is maybe for something that you've not yet attained in full. But in any case, my initial playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the first time a game had awakened that sense of nostalgia. In the game, Link, whom you control, goes through a number of adventures that take him through time, and he ends up growing up and saving the world. At the end, though, after you've met all these amazing people and done all these amazing things, you have to go back to where and when you were before it all started, and you still you know about all the adventures that you had, but no one else does: you are completely alone in your recollection of the wonder and terror and beauty and sadness of it all. Now, I hesitate to express this last thought for fear of becoming maudlin, but that moment for me--the moment where you go back and realize that you can never return to how things were--made my heart physically ache. It was one of the most powerful emotional responses that any game has ever elicited from me, and I think it has had the same effect, in one way or another, for a vast subset of America's gamer population.
Oh, and a quote! Just because!
"Just as film differs from television, and prose from poetry, [video] games are unique and thus require their own theoretical model" (298).
Paul mentioned a number of emotions, and I wanted to build on his list in contributing what I feel to be paramount pieces in the history of video games.
1. Longing - Final Fantasy
First off, I'll admit that I've played only five or six of the games in the Final Fantasy series (there have been, as I recall, something like 15 *Final* Fantasies to date), but they have nonetheless had a profound impact on me and on my development as a gamer, a thinker, and a creator. In my mind, these games are the most emotionally complex and evocative games on the market, conveying a diversity of profound messages about humanity and the world. For me, though, the most powerful of emotions in the series is that of longing. I don't know that I can pinpoint exactly what it is that so draws the player into the Final Fantasy realm--a rich and immersive world, a profound sense of connection to the divine, a strong ideal of personal agency and potential to change the world, or just sheer awesomeness in fighting monsters and calling on arcane magics--but the longing for that world, for its vitality, is very real. The series has been the subject of an enormous volume of fan fiction, and deviantArt is plastered with thousands upon thousands of examples of art inspired by the fantastical and beautiful world of Final Fantasy. I honestly feel like Final Fantasy is responsible for the aesthetic and thematic qualities of the JRPG genre as a whole and has served as a model for most major modern story games.
2. Nostalgia - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
So, right now, you're potentially thinking, "What's the difference between longing and nostalgia?" Well, to be honest, I'm not really sure, but I think nostalgia is for something you had and lost and longing is maybe for something that you've not yet attained in full. But in any case, my initial playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the first time a game had awakened that sense of nostalgia. In the game, Link, whom you control, goes through a number of adventures that take him through time, and he ends up growing up and saving the world. At the end, though, after you've met all these amazing people and done all these amazing things, you have to go back to where and when you were before it all started, and you still you know about all the adventures that you had, but no one else does: you are completely alone in your recollection of the wonder and terror and beauty and sadness of it all. Now, I hesitate to express this last thought for fear of becoming maudlin, but that moment for me--the moment where you go back and realize that you can never return to how things were--made my heart physically ache. It was one of the most powerful emotional responses that any game has ever elicited from me, and I think it has had the same effect, in one way or another, for a vast subset of America's gamer population.
Now, there are others that I could potentially talk about, but +Paul Bills had mentioned that he was hoping for some literary connections to the emotions he had posted earlier, so I'll chime in on that briefly (and very informally).
- Loneliness - Catcher in the Rye, Perks of the Being a Wallflower, Frankenstein, Cyrano de Bergerac, Castaway
- Triumph - Perks of Being a Wallflower ("infinite" moment), anything by Ayn Rand
- Paternal Love - "Paternal Love," by Victor Hugo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hansel and Grethel, Finding Neverland, What Dreams May Come
- Fear - Dracula; there are also lots of horror movies that do this
- Moral Anxiety - The Crucible, Anna Karenina,
- Relation (which I'm going to call Companionship) - "St. Crispin's Day Speech," Of Mice and Men
- Discovery - Jurassic Park, The Journal of Christopher Columbus, "Columbus's Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem" by Carol (?) Delaney
- Loss - A Grief Observed, The Problem of Pain
- Hope - Gilead, The Grapes of Wrath
- Anger - Moby Dick, Ender's Game (it made me really angry at least)
Anyway, I hope that's a helpful resource and I'll look forward to contributing other works over the next while.
Oh, and a quote! Just because!
"Just as film differs from television, and prose from poetry, [video] games are unique and thus require their own theoretical model" (298).
Ruggill, Judd Ethan, Ken S. McAllister, and David Menchaca. "The Gamework." Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 1.4 (2004): 297-312. EBSCO. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.
Tavinor, Grant. The Art of Video Games. Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
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