Videogame Emotions suffer from an Interactivity Paradox?Nelson Zagalo, University of Minho

Universidade do MinhoIstanbul, Oct 23 2012

Pre-Conference: Experiencing Digital Games: Use, Effects & Culture of Gaming23-24 October 2012, Istanbul, Turkey

Image 1 – Games found to elicit human emotions following Russell model (2000). Full research in Zagalo et al., 2005). Notes: KH = Kingdom Hearts; ICO = Ico; Myst III = Myst III; RE X = Resident Evil: Code Veronica X; Doom3 = Doom 3; SH2 = Silent Hill 2; AvP2 = Alien versus Predator 2.

Interactivity Paradox

Limitation or convention?

Games for girls, Purple Moon by Brenda Laurel, (1998)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGeApdTQJxY

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPPdgBK3r8

“empathy and sympathy start not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation. It began much simpler, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn. Most of us have reached the incredibly advanced stage at which we yawn even at the mere mention of yawning - as you may be doing right now! - but this is only after lots of face-to-face experience.” (De Wall, 2009:51)

Chapter 1, sad engagement in three phases

1) The attachment – in which it is necessary to develop an attachment relation between the user and the artefact character.

2) The rupture – in which it is created a situation that leads to a rupture of the attachment developed.

3) Passivity – the creation of passivity in order to maintain sadness at least during a short period of time.  

Touching actions in the first chapter of Heavy Rain

1st Phase - Attachment

Climax made of stress and focus.

2nd Phase - Rupture

3rd phase – Passivity

“it is necessary to look for actions which create comfort and lower activity actions (..) attempt actions of reattachment of attachment relations or of the creation of new attachment relations which can be initiated by the virtual touch between the characters. Therefore body virtual touching is a way of sensitive comfort that the character can look for and consequently which the user can feel by somatic simulation (...) to do give pats in the shoulders or hands, to slip the hands on the hair or body, to hug, to kiss, to seat or to lie down leaned”

(Zagalo et al., 2006) 

Passivity Is translated in soft actions without obligatory and soft touches to re-attach characters

3rd phase – Passivity

It has been said innumerous times that Heavy Rain is more a movie than a video game but as we stated here above, it’s not because a game uses filmic conventions that we can call it a movie. Heavy Rain has really borrowed a lot from film art but its essence, the interactive play, belong to the world of videogames not of the movies. Heavy Rain is no movie because story changes accordingly to actions and choices. 

Visual art and editing

In Heavy Rain we can see close ups, medium and long shots, establishing shots, panning, travellings, steadicam, zoom, over-the-shoulder, tracking shots, top-down perspective, among others. All these different types of shots are then edited using the classical match-cut rule, providing a sense of invisible montage. Besides that Heavy Rain is even able to use split screen techniques, and mix these splits with cross-cutting techniques (see Image 6).

Visual art and editing

We can see two extreme close ups of hands, and two close ups of face expressions, that emphasize expressivity of each scene.

Visual art and editing

In the third act of the first chapter, rhythm is clocked by the game

Rhythm and Interactivity

Comparing the three phases – attachment, rupture and passivity – we can see that actions pace goes from moderate slow to extremely slow. In the first phase we still get to play outside in the garden with kids running and battling with toy swords. In the second phase, albeit being unable to push crowd as effective as we wanted we still advance while pushing it. In the last phase of passivity, we’re clocked by the game (see Image 8), we can’t really advance the actions, and we must wait for the right time to give food to the kid or to take him to bed. Hence while waiting we can sit down in the sofa and let feelings emerge.

Conclusion

The first main conclusion from the research done on the case of Heavy Rain is that it plainly demonstrates that we don’t have a language problem. Video games have found it’s own methods to develop the entire scope of emotions in its audience. Not anymore we can say that video games are unable to achieve emotional diversity because of an interactivity paradox.

Another example

Oíche Mhaith (2011) by Terry Cavanagh

Play it here: http://distractionware.com/blog/2011/12/oiche-mhaith/

Videogame Emotions suffer from an Interactivity Paradox?

Nelson Zagalo, nzagalo@ics.uminho.pt

B. http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt

H. http://nelsonzagalo.googlepages.com

F. http://www.facebook.com/nelsonzagalo

Universidade do MinhoIstanbul, Oct 23 2012