More Emotions from Video Games

+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.

More Examples for Andrew, Plus Some Questions

I'm not sure how much +Andrew Perazzo's last post works into his overall topic of Brandon Sandersen and Awe, but I figure it couldn't hurt to give him a couple more examples of how sci-fi has inspired real-world research and discoveries.

1-Genetic Memory
This video was one +Greg Bayles sent to me me last semester about how a study confirmed that at least some kind of "memory" indeed can be passed through genes, an idea made popular in the fiction of the Assassin's Creed vidoegame series.

I asked the question then, and I'll ask it again now. Would that study have been done if that idea wasn't already popular because of Assassin's Creed and other works of fiction that have played with the idea? Is one functional aspect of awe in fiction to inspire us to create more awesome reality?

2-Tablet Computers
Long before the iPad, people saw this on their TV screens all over America:

A "tablet" in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Now, ironically, thousands of people watch those shows on devices that look eerily similar. It might sound like a silly question, but is part of the iPad's success because it's the closest to what sci-fi promised us? There were tablet computers before the iPad, believe it or not, and arguably much more productive and feature-rich ones. But the iPad won in design, and fulfilled people's dreams more fully.

It was a kind of tragedy for me when I saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and half of their awesome futuristic gadgets were either run by iPads or were just iPad apps. Can we seriously not think of anything cooler, even in fiction? Do we need a new wave of sci-fi/fantasy writers to push the limit again to inspire real-world innovation?

3-Consumerism

This one's different, but super important to me. Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World 1931 (1931!) that in the future "...all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that [people] consume manufactured articles..." Reading it that way, it sounds ridiculous--all you need to play soccer is a ball! How terrible to defile sports with such blatant consumerism! But what does it take to play soccer today? Ball, pads, jersey, shoes, membership fee to a team or whatever, travel expenses (nailed it, Huxley!), and on and on. Even running today requires $200+ shoes, special non-chaffing shirts (protect your nipples!), brand-name energy boosting this and that, and on and on.

Reading Brave New World in its own time caused awe at the thought of a future that could ever possibly be like that. Reading Brave New World today inspires awe because in so many ways the world has become like that.

So, the question arises, what are science fiction and fantasy writers saying about the future today? Should we be paying more attention? Is awe, at times, meant also to warn, or to instruct?



There's some stuff, Andrew. Hope it helps!