What do film and television do that games don't?

I'm talking emotionally here, not cinematic events that amaze you but sickeningly beautiful and meaningful moments that make the biggest of men turn into crying messes. How is it achieved? It seems such a simple question, but the answer is not so obvious.

I've thought about this for years and I still, even now, can't find a solid answer. Nothing, and I repeat nothing, can have such an emotional hold on somebody in the same way that film or television does. There are countless times when I've sat crying away at a television show or film and I'm actually proud that they can effect me in such a way. They managed to create an unusually amazing relationship between myself and the characters.

So, it's now that I ask whether it's the shortness of games that blocks this relationship from being formed, the lack of humanity in the characters, or even the fact that they're just geometry?

Opinions?

 

Linear media have had more effort put into understanding how—and why—they work over the decades.

We know how to write a good (linear) story, but few people really 'get' how to do it in an interactive medium: it's very hard to subsume the ego of the author to a level where you're happy to let the players write their own stories in your world.

Computer-aided game technology is also still very much at the Zoetrope stage of evolution, so there are inherent limits in that technology preventing many kinds of storytelling. As the technology evolves, new kinds of interactivity and gameplay mechanics will be enabled. The recent rise of multi-touch input is merely the latest example of this process; there is far more to come.

 

A good question, but if the answer to how one can evoke a deeply emotional experience in a game could be summed up in a forum thread, it probably would have already been done. I think some level of emotion has been achieved in many games though (anger, frustration, suspense, gratification, etc.).

It does seem difficult to relate to game characters with the same depth as characters in film though. It might partially be due to the fact that you know the character can't really get hurt or die. It's hard to feel for a character that simply respawns when they die. I think stimarco also made a good point about linear media. You can choreograph it much more easily and tweak it until it's just right. A game is more dynamic, making it difficult to set up the perfect conditions to effectively pull on those emotional strings.

I suspect there will eventually be a game that will pull it off and make some eyes well up, though I'm not sure how it will be achieved.

 

The biggest reason is that in linear storytelling you can control exactly when something happens. You control the emotions of people by building up peaks and lows over a known timeline. In games this is hard because the player does things in his/her own pace, you miss a jump 5 times in a row and has to start over every time, maybe the player stands around for a while admiring the beautiful texture of a tree or tries to climb some boxes in a corner for ten minutes instead of doing what the game designer wanted him to do. The game designer staged an epic firework in the sky but the player looks in another the direction at that moment. All of this makes it very hard to build up to a certain emotion.

Sound and music is another factor that is extremely important in movies and tv-shows. It is one of the strongest tools to convey emotion that you have. But how do you work this out in a game? Look at a greys anatomy episode, It is practically a long music video but in a game you really can't repeat that beautiful song over and over again just because the player has to run back and get more ammo. How often do you hear vocal music at all in games when you think about it, hardly ever. Maybe for a cutscene. Smarter ways to deal with music and sound is the key I think to create really emotional games, but its a tough thing to sort out.

As for games that did pull of some emotions I heard from friends that they got a bit welled up when the horse died in shadow of colossus. When I played Ico from the same developer I felt an emotional attachment to the girl you are guiding through the castle. You were always afraid to leave her alone in fear that the shadow figures would come and hurt her.

 

I think that this is very simple to answer.
First thing which is supporior to movies are actual real human acting, where as human being you can connect to certain character as you mentioned. Games are fantasy, and if we are talking about games with realistic aspect there is still one important barricade that does not allow you to properly connect with game character or game itself. That would be technology. Game characters are still not enough realistic and advanced, neither are games in whole aspect. I think that in 10 years technology will advance enough to provide realtime characters and no technical restrictions on game to provide prefect copies of reality. But yeh most games have too small ammount of emotions provided for player to connect with character.


But image if you could play F.E.A.R, Longest Yourney, (just giving some examples) with some sort of glasses where you are transfered in 3d world. Important part is that you arent looking on game trough screen but rather you get game projected on your brain or just infront of your eyes. If someone could achieve that (without actuall impact on human brains, and with low ammount of play time per day), that would change gamming industry for 500%. Player could connect with character much easier. I cant even imagine how scarry would some horror games be.

 

@janpec. I doubt it has that much to do with realism of characters, after all animated movies does a great job in conveying emotions or puppets theaters or just look at that girl drawing in sand to music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1JZ9O15280

 

I think because movies can better relate to someones real life. Lets take a strong relationship between two people, say parent and child, and put it in a movie.

It is human nature to find something relatable to themselves in everything. In a movie about a parent and child, the parent can put themselves in the parents shoes, and the child can put themselves in the children's shoes. This makes the relationship between the actors in the movie very believable, and relatable. Say the child dies in the movie, and the parent grieves. Every parent can easily relate to the sorrow of the characters in the movie.

Now lets put this in a game. In a game, we put the player into the actual embodiment of another person. They "become"
that person in their own mind. Then lets say the player has an in-game daughter. Instead of having an imagination to fill in the gaps and make the player believe the relationship, they are told about the relationship. The player cant quite relate, because nothing is really similar to the daughter. The game designers make every aspect of the daughter, and leaves nothing for the player to relate to.

Now, a movie or tv show can make me cry, and a game cannot, but it can effect me in similar ways.

I started tearing up when I was watching my favorite anime, and my favorite character died (the anime is Death Note and the character is "
L"). I believe it was because the character was so like-able. he was smart, cunning, funny, etc. But after he was killed, (he was killed right before he would have made a pinnacle turning point in the series, probably bringing it to an end) I started tearing up. I immediately thought it must have been because he was such a like-able character.

I believe the same can go for video games. I always thought it would be fun to have a partner throughout the game, obviously much greater in strength and talent, that could rip apart even the most difficult of enemies in an awesome way. Literally, a perfect character. Then, when you and your partner come close to winning the game, he is killed, and by a cheap shot too.

Or if you even introduce several characters at the beginning of a long, long game, and have them frequently interact with the player, the player can grow a strong relationship with them. I have been recently playing L.A. Noire, and there is a vice cop (spoilers?) that is such a lying, cheating, corrupt cop, it just makes me incredibly angry and I can not wait to shoot him.

Positive experience : At the end of Half-Life 2, you finally defeat the man that has been responsible for mass genocide of the human race, with your closest ally, and as your ally begins to cheer, the location you are in begins to explode. In that split second, your friend only says, "oh no" and your heart drops with the thought the game ends with your death. And with a beautiful cliff hanger, time stands still and the "G-man" walks out from the void of the explosion, only to bring you to another dimension and lock you away in a black room.

ANYWAYS, I think it can be done, I just think we havent exactly hit the nail on the head yet.

In my game, im trying to break the barrier of emotions in a game. My game is post-apocalptic, introducing the player to the world as a prisoner, with no name, back story, or past that the player knows about. ( I want it to feel like it was your life, then you go straight over to the player). The whole game will be reminding you of everything and everyone you now being lost or dead, and actually having to cope with life after the annihilation of the human race.

Just my thought on the subject.

 

I think people automatically put up emotional barriers when playing games because they are so used to the death and violence in games.

Movies take time to get you to bond with the character and show the depth of the character.
You won't cry in a movie if a guy dies that only has 1 line and is only on screen for 2 minutes.

The use of technology has very little to do with it - people cry when reading books.

A big driver of emotion is commitment. Someone / something you’re committed to will have you more emotionally involved.
E.g. you’ll feel more for someone once they’re your girlfriend and even more when they’re your wife.
You’ll feel more for a dog you have to look after than your neighbour’s dog.
Many people cry in movies when the loyal trustworthy dog dies. But an animal that shows no loyalty and is nothing other than lunch gets none.
In the distant future - will you love your children? Of course. Why? Because you’ve already made that commitment.

In conclusion:
If you want to build emotion, your user must feel safe that the character isn’t going to die every 30 seconds.
You must develop the character. The user must know it has emotions, it has a history, it is relatable to.
Get the user to make a commitment. Maybe after the opening seen make some sort of commitment to seeing the quest through – e.g. swear to take revenge or take a vow to save mankind. Tie the characters into a cause.

Commitment is hardly ever mentioned when it comes to feelings but is probably our biggest driver. It is at the foundation of love.
People that just "fall in love" end up just falling out of love, but those that make the commitment love forever and it's truly heartbreaking to watch that end.
How many action movies have an opening scene, then the commitment: "I'll do it mr president" or "I'll get you if it's the last thing I do". It may not actually be said, but it's always conveyed.
You cry when the horse or puppy or dragon dies because you know there was life time commitment there.

JK

 

First and foremost.

* Games can have significant emotional impact upon a player.

Now lets get into some of the reasons why games don't work as well as they could:

1) Pacing.

The game controller has little to no control over pacing. I can play all of HL2 in 12 hours.... or do it 12 years.

I read 'save the cat' there is a very precise formula that all good films use (literally - page 5 this happens, page 18 this happens etc). How can you achieve minute by minute precision in a game?

2) Length.

Most games are entertainment. All the 'big name' ones are designed to-have a significant play time.

Take movies on the other-hand, you have a ton more effort squeezed into a period that is far shorter. 2 and half hours is a long film.

It is all about exhausting human emotion. 12 hours can leave the audience tired and numb.

3) Much easier to break the fourth wall.

In a game, the user has control. As of such he is much more likely to lose the suspension of disbelief.

This is not only the player dieing (ETC.) due to poor game design, but player saying 'but I would have done it differently'.

I bought Dead space for $2.75 or something stupid, but I haven't played it through because I hate the control system.

etc.

Basically, it is very hard to write a good film, and with games you lose so much control. Very few games have really seriously attempted to address these problems. It can be done of course, but needs serious investment.

 

I don't think its the realism of characters compared to actors either. Why is the Book usually better than the Film?

Games in the future have far more potential - to create your OWN stories, plots and adventures.

 

I think that it's length of time. If you play an MMO, you might only played 'story-related' bits for a small amount of time, then grind levels, then go and do something else. Whilst with a film, you're being given the whole thing in one go, with no other distractions. I've played RPGs before now, when after a really long gaming session, it felt exactly like a film. Oh, and immersion in a game is broken so easily (achievements popping up, a new Skype message, etc.)

 

As others have said, it's all about control. In a game, you can't control what the main character does nearly as well as in other media. A good example is when the main character does something ridiculously stupid that is critical to the plot. If you force the player to do that, or just do it in a cutscene, they feel like they should have had a choice; they start thinking about what they should have done instead. It breaks the immersion when you're separated from your character's decision-making like that.
If you instead let the player make their own decision in that part and deal with the story from there, you lose a critical piece of your narrative.

I think in time, games will be a compelling medium for storytelling because of, not in spite of, their interactivity. Just not yet.
I think a great example of how this can be accomplished is Portal 2, though it's certainly not perfect. SPOILERS AHEAD.
1. The main character of the narrative is not, in fact, the main character of the game. Chell (the human character) is just a walking portal gun again. Wheatley, the blue personality core, on the other hand, is a really, really interesting character who you wind up really caring about, even though he starts trying to kill you about midway though.
2. The gameplay drives the story, and the story compels you to keep playing. Try making Portal 2 into a movie, I dare you. It won't work. The playable test chambers are a critical piece of storytelling that must be interactive to be any fun at all. At the end of every test chamber, there's a small bit of story, usually just a witty insult from GLaDOS. It encourages you to finish the chambers quickly just to hear the next fat joke. The chambers themselves are so much fun that, after the story bit, you want to start the next one. It's like crack. It really is. At one point in the game, Wheatley tells you that something will happen in 5 test chambers (It's actually 3), which sets a short-term goal.

It does some things wrong, though:
1. It forces you to walk into traps, which breaks immersion as I discussed above.
2. At the beginning of the game, your character's objective (escape the Enrichment Center) is not the same as the player's objective (Think with portals for as long as possible and never, ever, stop). The thing that you want to do most (solve testchambers) is what the characters are trying to avoid.
3. It's not remotely interactive; the story goes the same way every time you play the game. Wouldn't it have been interesting to have to choose between killing Wheatley and GLaDOS?

I think it has nothing to do with the length of the movie versus a film. Some television serials (Something like 24 or LOST) are just as compelling as some good films, and some of them are longer than video games when you add up all the episodes of every season.

 

What janpec said.

It all comes down to relation with the people on the screen. In a game you never really become emotionally attached to any characters, firstly because they're not real people, and secondly because you spend more time playing, and only watching cut scenes with them.

Although I would admit in an MMO once, I had this pet I named Tweety, and he traveled with me for two days or so, and he got stuck on the other side of a lake I swam across (he couldn't swim), and he was screeching when I left him, that was probably my saddest moment in gaming

 

When I was playing LA Noire I actually felt alittle bad for some of the little girls of the dead victims which I found surprising

 

aiursrage2k, my hypothesis is because the relationship of a child to their parent is very strong, and one that everyone can relate to. Just like if someone at work tells you their son died yesterday. You cant help but feel sad because you can relate to their relationship.

Like NPSF3000 said, movies all have the same basic storyline. He read it in "save the cat". I learned it in Highschool. The great Epic's that the Greeks wrote all used the same formula. Character with a flaw, blah blah blah, faced with almost certain doom and no way out, blah blah blah, overcome the flaw, blah blah blah, everything is good. Nearly all stories follow the same formula because it simply WORKS. If someone can create a different formula that is still as powerful, then they will create the best story ever.

 

Probably the same reason that books are a lot better at communicating emotion than movies. Books have more time to get inside characters whilst movies let you see real people display realistic emotions. It's no surprise that the best actors usually are best eye actors and use their eyes to communicate a much broader range of emotions than good actors. Games can't as of yet come close to communicating these things. Plus games generally don't even try and explore a story or character in as much detail. It's interactive and simple mostly linear gameplay is what games focus on.

Movies and books focus on stories and characters. Games try to be cool, sometimes witty or funny but rarely serious or mature, usually black and white with little in the way of greys in how the world is portrayed, ideas communicated.

Books have many hours or even days to communicate ideas, concepts and explore characters. Movies seldom have more than 3 hours. Games have seconds or minutes to try and communicate with the player before most players just want to get on with interacting with the game world.

Also games are still developed by mostly young people though some of us are getting older. Young people often haven't experienced enough of life to get past a lot of cliches and stereotypes and find a way to tell complex emotional stories well.

 

I think the reason is kind of simple: Games are young and people don't really know how to effectively use them yet. Books had a very long time to get to where they are now; the first things that we consider "books" were probably cold recollections of facts and it took books centuries before they were able to convey emotional feelings. The first movies and television were dysmal; I don't think anyone would say that early television or film made people feel any real emotion for the most part. Once agin those took a few years to get to the point where they could portray real emotions, and many years more before they did so effectively. Compare that to games, where games have had a relatively short time and, I think, are starting to transition to the point of portraying real emotions but still have a while.

Also, video games are at a disadvantage because they can and do copy from other media. The only other art form that had the advantage of copying from other media was film-making, but even then that "stole" from an amalgamation of things including novels, paintings, music (conveying emotion through sound), and photographs, not to mention it had to learn how to effectively deal with the idea of motion and pacing. However, modern video games pretty much only "steal" from one thing: movies.

Early video games had very low memory and very low graphical capabilities, so for a while games had to basically blaze their own path and stole from no other medium. However, as soon as video game creators wanted to put a story into games, they first started "stealing" from novels and eventually movies. Now, most video games are basically two things: One: The game, which evolved from the first video games and only "steals" elements from other games for the most part, and: Two: The story, which steals from movies and usually consists of cutscenes or in-game dialog. Personally, I think this is a terrible system and we should be trying to avoid this. It is so limiting and basically removes everything that makes a game unique (interactivity) from the story.

Additionally, keeping the story and the gameplay essentially separate offers another problem, which is that the story and the game almost always clash, and the player notices this, even if they put little conscious thought into it. This is a concept that Jonathan Blow calls "dynamical meaning", and I'm not really going to elaborate on this because he has made some great talks about that and you should check them out if you care about story and games. But, this is essentially the reason why nobody can really get an emotional connection with games.

TLDR Version: Because story and gameplay is too separate and as such, this wall prevents people from connecting with video game stories.

 

LOL @ TLDR version

 

Disagree. A story is the result of playing a game. Record a gaming session and, when you play it back, you'll see a linear story.

Non-linear play is older than linear stories. It began as the learning process our species (among many others) has evolved to use. Children (and other young mammals) play order to learn about their environment. However, this is both slow, and often relies on trial-and-error. Some "lessons" don't lend themselves well to such an approach. ("Ooh! Look at that wobbly, reddish-yellow stuff! Mummy's been showing it my dinner for ever such a long time! I wonder if it'll be friends with me too? ARRRGH!")

Humans invented linear storytelling—essentially a means of describing the results of someone else's playing—to speed up the process of learning: suddenly, Homo Sapiens had a way to pass on information directly, instead of just shouting and grabbing any children who strayed a little too close to the fire. And it scaled better too: learning how to read and write using nothing but empirical play would take forever. So humanity could get down to some serious inventing.

This is what makes our species different from the others we share our world with (with the possible exception of cetaceans).

Humans also live in linear time, so linear media are a much better representation of human experiences than games, which are essentially simulations of environments. Games aren't supposed to "tell" a story. They're supposed to be environments players can explore—and, ideally, even learn from—while telling their own stories using the storytelling elements provided within the game's environment. It's the difference between building a world and telling your own stories in it by means of novels, and building a world and letting other people tell their own. The crucial difference in games is that the game world has to work within the context of a computer simulation: the content is inherently finite, and it is confined. It is a pocket universe with finite possibilities, with the designer's hardest job rather like that of the director in "The Truman Show": keeping the player from accidentally bumping into the artificial boundaries and shattering the illusion.

At one extreme, you get the "sandbox" games, like those "Tycoon" variants, arena-style multiplayer shooters, some free-form MMOGs, and, to an extent, many puzzle games. These are the gaming equivalent of toys—the "Fisher-Price Activity Centre" end of the market. These are characterised by a focus on non-linear gameplay, quite a lot of abstraction, and little, if any, overt plot or storytelling

At the other extreme, you get the "Hidden Object" mystery-solveing games, or more advanced variants on the theme, like "L. A. Noire". These are fundamentally throwbacks to those "choose your own adventure" books of old, with elements from the old point-and-click games by LucasArts and Sierra Online. They're much more overtly linear, with plots and characters. The player reacts to the story which is weaved about him, instead of creating it. (The GTA series is also very linear: at best, you got to pick and choose which short story in the anthology you were going to get involved in, and when, but you had little, if any, effect on the overarching plots and themes. The designer was always there, in the background, nudging you along in the "right" direction.)

Neither extreme is "wrong", any more than television is limited to murder-mystery detective stories: linear stories form such a fundamental part of everyone's character it's pointless to expect everyone to leap onto full non-linearity every time. Linear media is what our brains have evolved to work with. But we still have that primal mammalian urge to play, and that's where the "toys" come in.

Contrary to popular belief, there's no such thing as a completely non-interactive form of storytelling. Movies, TV, radio, graphic novels and straight prose all rely, in varying degrees, on the consumer applying their own life experiences and knowledge to fill in the blanks, the shortcuts and the clichés. It's why we have stereotypes. It's how many jokes work. A good director will squeeze an entire character thumbnail into a minute or two of montage shots, but, without our understanding of how linear stories work, we'd never understand what those seemingly random shots and sequences meant.

The old cliché that "the pictures are better on radio" is because our own imaginations conjure them up from the sounds, but what those pictures look like will vary from person to person. And that means no two listeners will have the exact same experience. Good storytellers—novelists, screenwriters, playwrights—understand this at an instinctive level: they're not programming a computer in C++, but programming humans in English (or whatever their native language is).

The best stories will affect each audience member in different ways, and the oral storytellers of old knew this: they often adapted and modified their stories to suit each audience—often as they were telling it—and that's the very essence of interaction. All storytelling is therefore interactive at some level. Games merely make that that interaction more direct.

 

Actually its because video game stories are, in fact, rubbish hollywood faire. I would no more feel emotional over mass effect than I would an episode of star trek, and they are on par with each other in terms of story telling.

If you want emotion in games then you better have a look at how pixar does it, or a cartoon rather than a film because immersion isn't near as close yet.

 

I found Mass effect story excellent. This is probably one of several games that are half games and half movies. There is a lot of conversations, cutscenes and other which puts story more interesting. I dont think you shouldnt hammer on Mass effect story, there are 90% games that arent even close to Mass effect story telling, so it is defenetly at least in top 10%.

 

An important aspect in filmmaking is the difference between pacing and timing. The timing is in the realm of the split second. For example, the follow through of an action in camera movement, hand movement of an actor or sound of a closing door. That is all quite accessable in games.
Pacing is the driving force for longer time periods. It's the silence for the storm. The growing anticipation of love making.
In game development too little attention is being spend at developing a TimeLine, combined with a Tracking Model of the User.
We don't need a CutScene between game levels. We need well informed CutScenes during game play.