Bateman: games don’t make you cry, stories do

This isn’t so much a news article as it is a question of our culture as gamers. Did you cry when Aeris died? Has any game ever made you cry? No. At least, not according to Chris Bateman of Only a Game. He suggests that stories make us cry, not games.

Read more after the link.

This isn’t so much a news article as it is a question of our culture as gamers.

Did you cry when Aeris died? Has any game ever made you cry? No. At least, not according to Chris Bateman of Only a Game.

Bateman suggests that stories make us cry, not games. Or to be more specific about it, it wasn’t the interactive gaming elements that brought us to tears, it was the story. He posits:

This is the nub of the issue here: a story can make you cry by empathising with the protagonist (or another character), but a game (when viewed as a formal system) cannot do this. It follows that the only way that a videogame can make you cry is by using narrative tools that have nothing to do with games as formal systems whatsoever.

He cites Final Fantasy VII, of course, saying that Aeris’ death was a cut-scene – a non-interactive cut scene at that. “It wasn’t the game (in the systems view) that made them cry – it was the story – and there never was a question as to whether stories could make you cry.”

He explores the subject rather thoroughly. It’s a rather interesting topic for me, since it can potentially question the validity of consoles as a storytelling medium. That topic’s rather touchy, especially since one of the arguments against “violent games” revolves around the idea that video games are violent not for the story’s sake, but for the interactive value.

You can read Bateman’s entire post after the source link below.

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Via iHobo