emotions posts

There is a moment during the almost three hour-long Giant Bombcast: Game of the Year Edition when Jeff Gerstmann is expostulating on his choice of Grand Theft Auto 4 as his pick for GotY, where he describes a character that so closely resembled someone he knows -- and the associated memories of that person, and presumably the eventual fate of that person -- that he broke down a little and cried. "And games don't do that," he adds quietly.

It is the continuing viewpoint among those who don't play video games that games are not art. Among the reasons they cite for this stance, valid or not, is that a game could never make the player cry, because it lacks any sort of emotional depth. Obviously, this is an extremely facile argument, and can be attacked on a number of fronts, but let's examine it from the opposite angle. Can we envision a game that could make us, any of us, cry? What would it need to do to accomplish that?