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[Allan Schumacher]

I think it's mostly an empathy issue for me.

When I'm feeling an emotion, it's often me empathizing with the character. My reactions are often that which I am feeling as though I were the character. My character can't get angry if I can't understand the circumstances of what is happening in the game to know if being angry is an acceptable response.

Any emotions I can feel are still isolated to within the game. I turn the game off and my life is pretty unaffected emotionally. So when a game makes me feel an emotional response, I feel it has done a great job of creating a setting and story where the circumstances that are occurring allow me to empathize with the characters in the game (whether my own or even NPCs). I love those emotional responses and I consider it a high mark for a game if it can do that to me.

If a game doesn't illicit any emotional response from me, it likely means I just didn't care.

[Allan Schumacher]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

But if his emotional reactions are not relevantly similar to your emotional reactions, would that empathy still apply?  You can understand intellectually that anger is appropriate for him without it being appropriate for you if you were in the same situation.

Yes.

Even if something doesn't personally make me, Allan Schumacher the real person that lives in Edmonton, angry had it happened to me in real life, I can still feel the appropriate emotion if Total-Jerkface-McGee gets double crossed and now he wants to make those people suffer.

I can still chuckle to myself with satisfaction as I exploit those local peasants to do my bidding under threat of force to their families, and I still feel that satisfaction when I bend the world to my will.


Even then though, my empathy towards other character's still helps feed into understanding how the situation plays out.  While I can grin as my Revan convinces Zaalbar to kill Mission in KOTOR, I can also understand how that decision makes Zaalbar and Mission feel.

All of those emotions are exactly what I look for when playing video games.  If I don't care about the characters then I don't empathize with them and I consider that a huge failing of the game.

[Allan Schumacher]

KiddDaBeauty wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Even then though, my empathy towards other character's still helps feed into understanding how the situation plays out.  While I can grin as my Revan convinces Zaalbar to kill Mission in KOTOR, I can also understand how that decision makes Zaalbar and Mission feel.

You heartless monster  I was role playing a character who I knew would take the moment to kill Zaalbar and Mission, but I was feeling horrible myself as my character kept making Zaalbar do those horrible things x) Horrible in a good way of course, it's great that a game can make you feel so strongly.

Haha, on a purely personal level, there was definitely an "Oh man that's cold!" when I did that hahaha.

There were some similar cases where my jerk Jedi in SWTOR did some evil things in disgust, and I the gamer felt awful about it lol.  But yeah, I think it's great when a game can illicit a response like that out of me.