Jamie Antonisse

Dear RJ,

You've been promising this post for a while, man... I'm glad you finally put it up. Great stuff, stuff that needed saying. In fact, there's too damn much to respond to... so I'm just going to pick my favorite bit and see where it goes.

Especially, I'd like to say Amen on the point about emotion in video games. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think that, in this debate, the EMOTIONAL experience that accompanies movies has been oversold, and the emotional experience of games underplayed criminally. You're right... triumph, frustration, anger, euphoria, these are, if anything, COMMON emotions in games because they are tied to things we, the players, are actually DOING.

On the other hand, there are certain emotions that are more likely to be associated with being "swept away" in experiences beyond you. Sadness, wistfullness, bemusement. These are very filmic emotions.

However I've felt an active sense of triumph in movies (Return of the King comes to mind) and I've felt a sweeping sense of sadness and loss in games (the aforementioned Shadow of the Colossus). I think it's interesting how similar these two "crossover" pieces are in tone and style, but that's a tangent for another time.

So I agree with you that people need to realize that games have their own emotional spectrum and that the medium doesn't need to look to films for emotional inspiration.

There's another area, however, where I think video games, as a young medium, COULD stand to learn a thing or two from their granddad literature and their big brother film. That is in how Interesting they are. How much there is to think about, not during the experience when you're too immersed to notice anyway, but after the controller is put down. I mean, I've got my indie popcorn games like Katamari Damacy and my blockbusters like God of War, but can we get something going that runs a little deeper? A disc I can LEGITIMATELY take home to Ma and Pa non-button-masher and say, "you REALLY need to play this?"

I see nothing, absolutely nothing, preventing designers from making a video game which has an emotional impact but whose setting and events are worthy of discussion beyond the living room. We have all the tools that filmmakers have at their disposal, and more: we can generate control schemes, we can tell players who they are and what they can do in relation to the story/event/world in question.

I've seen some great games, truly great games, and I know there are smarter minds than mine at work on this problem (though, in keeping with the movie industry, twelve times as many who see cash as the only bottom line). I believe we're taking the right steps, getting closer. And I think once we make something that does this well, in a way that's not too pretentious or alienating, it has the potential to explode the gaming demographic. What's it going to take to get there?

Thanks again RJ, you're the man.

Jamie