Video Games have Feelings Too!
Someone once related to me a scene in Final Fantasy 4 that, many years back, had brought two teenage boys to tears. Was this an anomaly of two gamers too deeply involved with their game, or something more universal to the gaming experience?
Today’s Wired news cites a study done by Bowen Research on the emotional element of games. The researcher, Hugh Bowen, found it surprising that “two-thirds of all gamers think games exceed, could exceed or could equal the emotional richness of other major forms of art and entertainment.” He did not expect that, at 78%, RPGs would top the list of most emotional genres over MMOs. Even more surprising to him was that gamers told him video games inspired such feelings as love and compassion.
Finishing my first Final Fantasy redefined me as a gamer. I was completely taken in by the richness of the characters and how greatly I became attached to them. In Bowen’s research 104 out of 535 people cited Final Fantasy as a rich emotional experience—and why not? Honestly, I’m surprised that only two-thirds of gamers believed in the emotional richness of video games. I would venture to guess the other third invest more time in genres such as strategy, sports games, non-linear quest based RPGs, multiplayer-shooters, and MMOs and other competitive social games, which tend to have less of the reflective type of emotional experience. The significance of titles such as Final Fantasy and more story driven RPGs and shooters is that they are partially interactive movies. The time you invest into games greatly exceeds that of films and because of that the characters grow on you—that is, unless the designers created shallow characters. Wired and Bowen’s report both talk about grown men crying over Aeries’s death in FFVII, but seriously, you don’t even need Aeries. With a good plot and good characters, those 8-bit pixels in FFIV can do it.