Youtube monologue about character empathy

[Jetrel]

Character empathy - not just in videogames, but basically in all of traditional fiction, is an unpredictable and fickle thing to try and evoke. Nevertheless, videogames have seemed to rack up a dangerously low batting average; wherein most situations that would normally work in a movie/book just kinda fall flat, or become outright narm in a game.

I don't necessarily agree with this guy; I don't have any conclusions of my own; however I think he's at least fired off a few insightful ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH1wXRvh ... re=channel

[boru]

I've never played any of the games he refers to (in general I don't have the reflexes for FPS and if I did, I'd be out playing a real game like basketball where you can really show off, 'cause there'll never be a stadium to watch a guy play Doom). But he raises some interesting points. I have to go way back to recall a game where I felt much about the characters in it. Probably Myst and Riven, which is kinda odd because you're generally just wandering around but I remember really getting into wanting to save this family. Offhand I can't recall any other game where I cared one way or the other about the characters. Isn't the idea that you're roleplaying, so you make believe that you have this lifelong bond with another character, even though you don't?

I don't think I cared much about PacMan either but I did want to stay away from the ghosties.

[A-Red]

In theory, story-heavy games are more likely to evoke empathy, but I'm not sure if that's true. Movies have a couple of advantages over video games, I think--1) the music is made to match perfectly with the emotions at any given moment, and 2) both live actors and 2D-animated people are more expressive than either 3D models or sprites. Books don't have those advantages, but even so they have more control over the emotional flow; games have to worry too much about gameplay, and nobody yet seems to have found a way to make gameplay and emotions go hand in hand. At best, emotions come in the breaks between gameplay, and more often than not they don't come at all.

Some games that did make me feel for the characters: Chrono Trigger, The Spirit Engine, Link's Awakening, and the Exile series. The first three did it through carefully orchestrated cutscenes, as well as music and other atmospheric elements. The last, which lacked music at all, managed it because they resemble novels more closely than any other games I know of.

[johndh]

Very insightful. Overall, I agree with the points he makes. I would generalize it more to motivation overall, but I guess that's more a case of character empathy for the protagonist and what he/she is trying to accomplish. Just because the protagonist wants so badly to accomplish some goal doesn't mean that the player does. Ryu wants so badly to beat the crap out of everyone in the tournament to prove that he's the best fighter in the world, and he's probably been dreaming of it since he was a little kid. He's feeling very driven to win because it's the main goal of his life. For me, it's been a minor goal of mine since I turned the game on. I'll punch a few pixels in the face, throw a few fireballs, but I'm not going out of my way. He's willing to train endlessly, bleed, sweat, cry, break cement blocks, kick tree trunks, and endure until the point where his body just wants to die. I'm willing to mash a few buttons for a few minutes at a time as long as I'm enjoying it and I've got nothing better to do. There's a major dissonance here.

Small wonder I've never made it more than a few scenarios into HttT -- Honestly, I couldn't give a crap about whether Konrad becomes the king of Wesnoth or not. The gameplay, art, etc., might all be great in that campaign, but I'd have no clue because the story is focused on how I have to take this kid who is not fit to lead a parade, and put him on the throne of the most powerful nation in all the land. Not a single [censored] was given that day. In contrast, everything in UtBS made me want to see the end, to see Kaleh triumph and to see the Quenoth safe. They were no longer Kaleh's people. They were my people, and I'd be damned if I was going to let them die. I think the earliest time when I recall actually caring about a character in a video game was in Ocarina of Time, when Nabooru gets kidnapped. I'd only met her minutes ago, but I really wanted to save her because I felt it was my responsibility to protect her from harm, and not in the annoying escort mission kind of way. I was an accessory to getting her into this mess, and sure as Hell nobody else was going to help.

[A-Red]

I've been thinking about this on and off all day, and I can actually think of quite a few different games that have made me feel things, and they've done it in all kinds of different ways. Here are some ideas:

-Opportunity 1: The monologue guy keeps coming back to the idea that you can't disconnect a player from the protagonist enough for the player to feel *for* the protagonist--but what about games where the player is the protagonists plural? Party-based RPGs are a perfect example. They usually have a large cast of playable characters, each with their own personalities and stories, and the player either isn't any of them or is sort of nominally one of them in a way that still allows for some distance. At the same time, you the player are around all of those characters all the time, and the whole game is spent building them up and making them lovable. If the writing is good (like in Chrono Trigger and Spirit Engine, as I mentioned earlier), you can end up caring about them and even about the people outside of your party whom they have relationships with. On the other hand, there's a game like Baldur's Gate, which focuses on giving you lots of options and requires you to pick six or so and ignore the rest. I love BG, but because of its goals, it tends to provide you with a bunch of really mixed characters, and on top of that it can't focus as much on the stories of any of them--so it's less good at evoking empathy for them than Chrono Trigger is.
Strategy games have a similar opportunity, although few of them seem to bother with emotional impact. No one character is really your avatar, because you're all of them--and you're an observer to anything they go through. Starcraft did a fairly good job of making me care about Kerrigan and Raynor, and Descent into Darkness did a fairly good job of making me care about Malin. A wildly different example is Dwarf Fortress; you love every one of those stupid little dwarves like they're your children, because the story and gameplay treat them like they are.

-Opportunity 2: Myth: The Fallen Lords had some of the most emotionally hard-hitting game text ever, and used it in a very unique way to draw the player into the story. In Myth, you're literally not the protagonist at all. Every level opens with a journal entry by an unnamed soldier in your army. He's not a unit that appears in the game; you literally have no control over his fate at all. In between getting your armies badly bruised by relentless hordes of enemies, you get his perspective on his hardships, suffering, and hope. It's a really powerful, almost devastating portrayal of what war looks like from the ground.

-Opportunity 3: If the player is the protagonist, that doesn't mean you can't make their relationship with another person into a significant aspect of the game. In the FPS game Strife, there's a character called Blackbird who serves as a constant companion (as a voice inside your head--she's communicating from hiding). She's a campy, crazy [censored], but I *like* her, and if you get the bad ending in which she turns out to be an illusion, it *sucks*. A game like that just needs to take a little time to get it right.

-Opportunity 4: There are games in which I've played as a blank-slate protagonist which have gotten me to feel emotions *as* that protagonist. In fact, the less character your protagonist has, the easier it can be to feel things through them (ie imposed emotions get in the way, but if there aren't any imposed emotions you're free to feel whatever). The old FPS games often cast you as a sole survivor, and some of the best ones used their palettes, architecture, and music to subtly emphasize the fact that you're completely alone amidst utter desolation. This is true of Heretic, Hexen, and Doom to some extent, but it's expecially true of many of their mods, which have gone to much higher levels of detail in portraying the player's surroundings. If you can see every house as a house and every street as a street, if you see all the signs that other people used to be around but now there's nothing but monsters, and if the atmosphere is gloomy and the music is just right...it can definitely have an impact.
Another non-FPS example is Link's Awakening (maybe some of the other Zelda games too, but imo especially that one). You're not told to feel anything--you're just wandering around meeting the characters, hearing what they have to say, letting the mood sink into the cracks in your brain. And it slowly sinks in over the course of the game that it's all going to be lost.
(Edit: Cave Story tends to fall into this category as well)

-Opportunity 5: If your game is short enough, you don't have to focus on gameplay at all, and can instead put all your effort into the story and its emotional effects. Many experimental indie/freeware games prove this; I think the best example is a five-minute game called The Passage.

-Opportunity 6: Another game I mentioned earlier is Exile, which accomplishes a lot by being very text-oriented and therefore playing a lot like a novel. You have a party of characters, but none of them have dialogue or backstory; they're all a blank slate, but on the other hand, every other character has surprising depth, even the most irrelevant NPCs wandering around the towns. They'll all tell you their stories, and they'll do it vividly. Additionally, every key moment in the story is revealed through text narrative. It's not just the key moments either--there's lots of beautiful description, and lots of little details to explore. All in all, it's quite immersive--so when you need to feel for someone, chances are you will.

The most important thing about empathy in game design is that you can't tell a player what to feel--you have to show them. Plenty of games have been successful--I think the monologue guy's problem is that he only plays cinematic shooters.

[Velensk]

I can't really say that I can relate to very much anything he said. Of course, a large part of it is probably that I don't seem to play the same games he does and when I do I play them with a very different additude. About the only time I ever really think of myself as the protaganist is if the protagonist has absolutely no personality and no special capabilities (such as The Stranger in Myst). Even characters that are pretty much blank slates personality-wise I don't think of as myself. A good example of this would be Link from the Legend of Zelda series. I never think of myself as him instead I imagine a personality into the convenient void the game leaves for me and it dosn't really matter what I choose to imagine him as because I'm playing the game for the gameplay and so all I really need to do is to imagine a character that I can live with.

Of course, I've never really understood the concept of game immersion and it seems to be important to a number of other people. As it seems likely that it is related to this perhaps I just shouldn't comment.

EDIT: I saw his rant on game linearity and I have more of a comment on that. I actually hate true non-linearity. That is my biggest problem with Dwarven Fortress infact. I love how versatile and detailed the world and engine are, I love designing fortresses and keeping them alive under hard conditions. What I don't like is what happens after I stabalise things. At that point most other players embark on self-imposed quests to do this or that or the other thing (and there are a zillion and a half things you can do from conquering hell to designing and building working fluid logic computers) but to me this just seems kind of pointless. The game never lets me win, it just lets me go and tells me I'm free to play around however I feel like. It gets tireing to just build fortress after fortress just to adbandon them. I like the game to give me goals this way I can get the satisfaction of beating the game and moving on with the feeling that I completed something. Now, in my opinion if a game wants to be long lasting the system should be versitile enough to provide a wide veriety of problems and have many ways of solving any problem (since I mostly play stratagy games this is rarely an issue). I really liked Riven but I've never felt the urge to replay it because that game is already as solved/beaten as it can be. By the same tolken I've never felt the desire to go back and replay any of the Legend of Zelda games I've played despite not having beaten them as thoroughly as I could because I feel like I already accomplished the goal that was important to me and when it comes to it the problems are never going to change any, I can solve every puzzle the exact same way I did before and the fights arn't going to get more challanging.