5 ways computer games play with my emotions.

Computer games differ from movies and literature in the way that a lot of the events happen to you the player. Not John McClane, not Harry Potter. No; silly old you behind the keyboard or joypad. So that’s a great way for game-designers to play with a person’s emotions. Here’s my little top five of computer games that managed to make me do and feel things I normally wouldn’t have (done).

5. Forcing me to be a villain.

This is the easiest one on the list. Simply create a level in which you, the player, have to do a truly heinous act to be able to continue the game. There are several examples nowadays. Like –as a terrorist-  shooting civilians in Call of Duty. Or torturing a person in the latest Grand Theft Auto.

This is the easiest of them all. And I don’t really like it. But the game forces me to do it if I want to continue and (eventually) finish the game.

A more ‘open’ choice was given in the first Fable game. The whole premise is that the player can just as easily become a villain as a hero, depending on the choices the player makes throughout the game. In the end, however, these choices were rather black-and-white. Kill the good guy/kill the bad guy. A more nuanced or deceitful choice would have made the games far more interesting. Which is the main critique the game got at the time.

Interestingly enough, in the game Saboteur, I can drive my car over -God knows how many- civilians,  shoot them even, and at the end of the game I’m still the good guy. So, strangely enough, this ‘forcing me to be a villain’ only works when the game emphasizes the fact that I am playing a villain.

As a final thought: In Silent Hill 3 you go around the gameworld killing monsters. Then, late in the game, a character named Vincent mentions that those weren’t monsters at all. That you were in fact killing innocent people. He’s only joking. But that would have been an interesting twist. Going in the game thinking you are the hero, end up becoming the villain.

4. Forcing me to love.

“Aeris lives”. Anybody who knows what this means can read on. The rest, continue to the next paragraph.

In Final Fantasy 7 Aeris dies. Murdered by Sepiroth (that bastard). At the time I didn’t understand why it hurt me so much as it did until I understood what had happened. Real life happened.

Imagine your first true girlfriend or boyfriend. You invest time in the relationship. You are still trying to figure out if the two of you are going to be together forever. You hang out, cuddle, kiss until BAM a drunk driver kills her/him. That’s what happened in Final Fantasy 7. I had spent hours leveling her character to get a strong member for my party (plus I always preferred the more feminine girl over the more tomboy Tifa-character. So I often picked her for my party.) and without warning she got stabbed.

So part of me was struck because I lost the girl I really liked. But another part of me was shocked because I just spent hours invested in her that – in the end- were unneeded.

Naturally the second time you play this game you don’t spent a lot of time levelling Aeris, she’s going to die anyway. As it turns out Tifa is a lovely girl also.

3. Forcing me to be a pervert.

Silent Hill: the room. Like any other Silent Hill game is a horror-story which –partly- involves you killing monsters but with one fun twist: For large chunks of the game you are stuck in your apartment unable to get out. After five minutes in that apartment the walls really start closing in on you. You can’t turn on the telly, you can’t read a book, in short; you are bored stiff. So you start looking out the window, spying on your neighbors.

Then you find a whole in the wall to your (attractive) next door neighbors’ bedroom and you start spying on her. Anything for some human contact.

What happens later on in the game is even more fun. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, your next-door neighbor is in danger. And you are incapable of helping because you are still locked in your room. This creates tension because –through your voyeurism- you’ve become attached to your neighbor and now there’s a danger that you might lose her; lose the human contact.

I thought I bought a horror-videogame but as it turned out the game explored my peeping-tom side which I didn’t know I had.

2. Forcing me to flee.

I like to take thing head on. If there’s a problem I want to deal with it right away. Now, I’ve been perilous situations several times in my life  and each time I noticed about myself that I was reviewing the situation. “Can I do this? Can I do that?”

The point is, even in extreme situations there is a choice: you can either fight or flee.

Now; take the game Clock Tower. In this particular game they take away this choice. There is only one choice: flee.

The game is simplicity itself. You are a girl named Jennifer. Locked in a mansion (without a front door apparently) trying to get out. There is demonic child chasing you holding a large pair of gardening scissors. Each time you hear him coming your need to run and hide. And that’s the only thing you can do –run and hide.

Knowing that heightens the tension. You are constantly afraid the scissorman is coming for you. Forcing you to find another hiding spot. Forcing you off your quest to find the exit of the mansion.

The same happens in the last act of the aforementioned Silent Hill: the room. Suddenly evil spirits start to come out of the walls of your apartment. This boring room you were locked in suddenly becomes a dangerous place to be with a fun fact: you can neither (truly) fight, or flee. Panic!

1. Forcing me to be God.

S.O.S. by Vic Tokai. A capsized ship. 2100 souls on board. You’ve got one hour to escape a bring as many survivors with you as humanly possible (seven in total) or the ship will sink. Play it alone, you can get to the boiler-room/ exit within ten minutes – five even if you try really hard. But then the ending will tell you that you died.

Now, if you want the best ending you’d better get some survivors with you. And herein –as the Bard would tell us- lies the rub. Because each survivor has his or her own problem. So sometimes a survivor doesn’t want to go with you just as readily as you’d want. It takes time to convince him/her.

Example: two girls. One is deaf and in shock, the other one won’t go with you if the first one doesn’t go. How to get them? By spending several minutes writing and trying to convince the deaf-and-shocked girl to come with you. Several minutes you don’t have.

So the next time you play the game you decide not to take these two girls along because they take too much time. Instead you only take the ‘easy’ ones. So you find yourself walking past these girls while they (or at least the talking one) scream at you to help them. It’s like playing God. You get to decide who is to live and who is to die.