Games as emotion (Part One)

 2021 was a year where I reconnected with playing games in a big way. I played a lot more games. I finished games. And I felt a lot more strongly in games.

To be clear, I didn't feel a lot more strongly about games. As has probably been obvious from this blog feed and the lack of any Roguelike Radio episodes for more than a year, I have cared less and thought less about games than probably any time in the last decade. The exception maybe the TTRPG I've been working on since 2015, but even then releasing it has felt less urgent than probably at any point during its development.

This is because I am tired of the whole rotten industry edifice: the abuse of game maker and critics by players and funders continues to harm, burn out and drive away those people in the industry while enabling abusers. I quit BGG a few years back because of the way that community ignored, created and facilitated that actively hostile environment, and I genuinely see no end in sight anywhere in the industry. The world wide failure to deal with COVID should be clear to everyone by now that capitalism ensures there is no end.

While I'm highlighting the power imbalance between workers and consumers, I should be clear that there is no safe part of the industry: game players are just as trapped in this systemic abuse as anyone else, nor elsewhere in the world. My non-game industry day job is about 8 out of 10 on the actively evil scale and I spend as much effort as I can afford trying to get it to a 7.

But games in 2021 made me shout out emotions: fiero, joy, boredom, regret, surprise and surprisingly sadness, in a complex palette, in brief shared exchanges with strangers and in ways that no other medium can possibly encompass.

I'm writing this because I want to talk out a distinction I felt between emotions engaged by games and emotions engaged by narrative in games. I'm sure that there's plenty of writing and analysis out there about this (post in the comments if you know of any), but I'm going to try to tease these out myself so excuse any old ground that I'm walking over in a way that doesn't patent infringe by causing a narrow path to slightly broaden (thanks Sony!).

And that brings me to the first feeling I want to talk about, and probably the most complex: sadness in Death Stranding. Parasocial twitter mutual GB 'doc' Burford has written extensively about this elsewhere but I want to call out a different time Death Stranding hit me in the feels: the literal end of the Elder quest chain. Quest chain is the wrong word: Death Stranding does part of what I asked for many years ago and turns quests into a trading-like game, although like everything the game does, it makes the them most gentle and forgiving version of that idea.

On this scale, the Elder is the more annoying version. He's out of the way, requires that you climb up to the top of a hill without being technically difficult, and offers little in the way of rewards. The Elder also delays his connections to the chiral network just to rub it in your face: he doesn't want you there and the game does little to pay back your investment. Unlike another mission giver, there is no hidden back story, no secrets or twist. The Elder starts being unpleasant to your face, eventually begins to like and praise you and, just as I got towards the end of the game, he leaves you a message saying he's dying and then dies.

And his death left me in tears.

I have a good relationship with my father. He nearly died last November, which is to say that I have possibly felt a tiny fraction of the grief and frustration that someone who has lost a loved one during this pandemic and been unable to travel to see them before they died or to grieve them with others afterwards. This happened well after this incident in the game, which is my circular way of saying that I don't think there are specific extenuating circumstances that might have rendered me vulnerable to this story arc in a way someone else might not be.

Instead I think it was a story well-made. It wasn't well-told, or well-shown: the holo image I saw of the man fit the thematic conceit of Death Stranding, and the plainly written emails aren't especially memorable in themselves. This underdevelopment is typical Kojima canniness towards the broader themes he's exploring, but that set dressing needed me to act and feel my along the path he had laid out. My thesis here is games are unique in the way they can make emotions in a way no other medium can.

And in part two, I attempt to explain what I mean by the phrase a "well-made" story.