Emotions other than ;-P in games

Emotions and first person shooters, that sounds funny at first since they are always portrayed as being very simplistic but look at it a bit longer and you’ll find all sorts of reactions to the games.

Few FPS games are designed to evoke a certain emotional reaction, other than quick scares by sudden actions towards the player.
Counter-Strike for instance is not designed to create any particular emotion but it’s competitive nature creates envy, unhappiness when you die and potentially happiness at the end of the game when the final scores are shown. It’s technical implementation can create extreme aggression due to design flaws and bugs that are never going to be fixed even though it was promised to the players.

But there are some FPS that target specific emotions by design. The easiest emotion to induce is fear. It is one of human’s basic instincts and therefore the triggers aren’t difficult to reach.

The game  DOOM 3 does this by playing on player’s religious fear towards evil and especially satan by drawing satanic symbols all over the place and the -in your face- scare attacks of this type:
You are in a dark corridor with a broken light that flashes every now and then, at the end of the corridor is a door thats slightly opened and you see light. As you walk up to the door and want to open it just like any other door, the middle of the door’s surface suddenly morphs into the shape of a scary monster’s face and jumps out at you, and then fades away.

Thats when the player who hasn’t played this part before and is somewhat immersed in the game  will feel his heart pump and will very cautiously attempt to open the door again, hold his gun loaded and direct all concentration to the game as he’s ready to shoot anything that moves.

The other aspect of DOOM is the enjoyment of violence. You can use a shot gun, rocket launcher or chain saw amongst others to transform mountains of enemies into gibs.

Then there is F.E.A.R, you’d expect that it’s scary just from it’s name. This game uses the effect that makes weird looking little girls really scary, lots of disturbing pictures of mutilations and the resulting mess of blood and bones and a newly available graphics technology for it’s fear attacks on the player.
This is more advanced than the DOOM type of fear because it is implemented in a more movie like style.

Japanese movies and their remakes of little scary girls are somewhat popular and have part of the player base predisposed to scares in this game due to it’s use of the same type of imagery. The rest of the player base is slowly made to fear this too by use of atmosphere building game elements and then scaring the player with her appearance in unexpected situations.

Then there is the experimentation with newly available graphics techniques, transparent enemies that refract light like glass. Think of how different everything look when seen through a glass of water or trough uneven glass like bathroom windows. The difference to previous technology is that it was either visible or not and usually flat. This technique of scaring the player, making him fear the game is using the  awareness-suspense-surprise! style. They are cloaked enemies, people, that can climb walls like spiders, jump you and see in the dark. You are alerted by the sound of their cloak and informed of their position by means of 5.1 directional sound effects or the dim night vision goggle light.

High quality surround sound is used to create much of the atmosphere and lead up to events like in movies.

There is one game I’ve played that could potentially make you cry, depending on whether you are more likely to cry, to turn to self-punishment or become angry and violent against others or things.
It is EVE-Online, a space MMO with minimal RPG but much PVP. You build your fortune and ship (which is incidentially your character, compared to other MMO’s) over weeks and months, you go and have fun playing with others or against others but there will be a time when you just expended all your resources to get that one new big space ship and someone else blows it up. Death in this game is permanent, for your ship-character at least, your avatar with the skill/experience points is a bit less permanently mortal but can under certain circumstances be just as destructible as your ships.

Compare it to building the biggest sand castle on the beach, it took you all day to create it. Then you have to go to the toilet and by the time you come back, someone else is kicking it apart, taunting and mocking you just because they can. The same emotions apply to the game in those circumstances.

The game is a sandbox type game with an unusually lose rule set that allows for unconsential PVP combat and gives little to no advantage to the inferior party in uneven matches.