The careful pilot of my proper woe

Earlier this week I linked to an article from The New York Times, written by the sort of Times writer who says things like “to use the vernacular, I almost lost it.” Seth Schiesel, the monocle-popping writer in question, feels that emotional involvement in videogames is limited compared to other media, and that this limitation may be inherent. He suggests that the most powerful affective reactions to art come from what he calls “emotional surprise,” and that in a medium where the audience’s choice determines the outcome, this surprise is impossible.

I agree with some parts of this thesis, and I think it is important to consider what the addition of agency does to the nature of emotional engagement. What hardly ever seems to be remembered in these sweeping considerations of videogames as a medium, however, is the extent to which all games restrict the player’s choices. Even in the broadest sandbox, the mechanics of the game determine what scenarios can possibly arise, and learning the possibilities and impossibilities of a given game can indeed be surprising. What’s more, plenty of games have rigid narratives that can startle the player in the same way as stories in other media; Aeris’s ever-shocking death in Final Fantasy VII, for example. So I don’t think emotional surprise is what is at issue here. Nor do I think it’s that artistically impressive in and of itself, for that matter.

I do agree that the range of emotions that arise from actions for which you are personally responsible is very different from that which arises from observation alone. I don’t know yet what the characteristics of those two ranges are, or how much overlap there is. But the suggestion that the distanced, observational emotions of the latter are by necessity deeper than the personal, responsibility-driven emotions of the former – well, I think that requires a whole hell of a lot more justification than Schiesel provides.

Still, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for people responding with greater emotional fervor to movies, books, music, and the like than to videogames. What I think is really interesting about this is the apparent paradox of the more involved medium resulting in calmer emotions, while the more distanced media result in stronger emotions. Schiesel writes as though it’s normal for a golf game to be a more detached experience than a symphony, but I think that sounds completely insane. Probably true, but insane. Why do we respond more strongly to the recreated, abstracted feelings of an artist than to spontaneous feelings about our own successes and failures?