"Conjurer of Cheap Emotion"

by Daniel McMillan of Cosmic Origins (Frontier 1859)

Think about movies for a second. What makes you teary-eyed? It is usually that you can relate to a situation, and along the way, you have found someone to care about. 

Once upon a time, when I was 17, I nursed my 71' Chevy Camaro to become one of the finest motor cars in the Detroit Camaro club. 

One day, on Fathers' Day, while returning home from the mall, and just after revealing months of work on the car - a lady was kind enough to wreck the car for me. I cried. I literally cried. But, what made me so damn upset about a car my mom and dad asked? It was the effort, the long hours, the days and nights underneath it doing whatever it took to make it better than the rest. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a babe magnet (in a time when cruising was still the thing to do on Woodward Avenue.) 

In any case, as I grew up, and started working on movies and TV spots for many years, the :"suspension of disbelief" was in my power to control, for I had become an FX coordinator and a writer. In college, ladies would start crying at my more melodramatic work, while I wasn't quite sure why (from a guys point of view). 

As games started to get better in the late 80s, such as Starflight, Space Rogue, Wing Commander, Artic Fox, Midwinter, Star Control, Ultima V, and so on...the closest thing to any emotional value in a game might be experienced in Ultima V, when your best adventurer who has been with you for weeks and dungeon after dungeon finally dies, and he cannot be raised, and you feel this loss - because you spent so much time with the person. This of course, would be a minimalist example of stirring emotion in games. Somehow, today's games attempt to do this, but we have all been desensitized by death in games, and therefore - loss. 

We don't care about anything because we know a replacement is just around the corner. Kind of a "baby jar food" game design mentality.

The only hope to change this trend, lies in the province of the MMO. The dimension people bring into the characters they composite can be used to do much of the work for us, but few have learned how to direct it.

I can tell you I am working on this problem in "Frontier 1859" and am constantly reminded of ways to help people naturally care about someone and/or something. Still though, the numbers will be disappointing, I mean face it - 'Emoticons" are a great example of a cheesy way to model feelings in the virtual world, but yet the very notion of emoticons renders the feeling superficial. (This is the key, so therefore we approach it from another direction, and that is articulation - on the ready-line to use the information people give you to aid the story).

In SWG, and DAOC, I have watched people chat about their pets after they pass away. They care more about a pet that dies - than a person, and that is because the pet doesn't come back, and it was with them through many adventures. When we catch ourselves "chatting" about our emotions - the very emotion itself is being let go. Thus, the environment itself lends to the therapy. I could get really deep into this subject, for I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in the trenches with players from all walks of life, and listened to their tales of woe, their RL problems, their concerns about the game, their happy thoughts...and their sad moments, etc.

Thus, it has allowed me to assess the condition of the virtual role player, and explore some new paths into crafting assets and characters that people will care about, involving more emotion - but this will not come without a cost. In film, people are passive, and therefore "flatline" in brainwave activity, but focus intently (if it is immersive) and therefore, empathize. In games, people are hacking away at the same mob, pressing buttons, listening to music in the Real World, or the phone ringing, or the book next to them that they are supposed to be reading - rather than playing a game. Thus, they are juggling two or more dimensions of participation, and that in itself consistently shifts the focus.

This becomes the greater obstacle to overcome, and one exponential factor because we cannot predict everything that a person will do around their PC while involved with a game. It is easy to addict someone with the content, and even easier to aggravate them. Frustration is an emotional response, and next it demands the participant to exercise tolerance. In the end of this equation - we did not cultivate the kind of emotional buffet we were aiming for.