Why is Emotion so much harder to potray through games rather than movies?

Apart from scaring the crap out of someone, why is it so hard to make the player feel emotionally connected to the ai or the player itself within a game?

Even big blockbuster games (battlefield 4 etc.) fail to do this convincingly, whereas even homemade movies can engage the viewer (emotionally) more than your typical video game.

Why do you think this happens?
Are there any explanations?
How can we make our games connect with the audience?

Real people dont have to look real.

Game characters rarely look anything close to real. Emotion for game characters tends to be - imo - related to our investment in that character; I’ve played everquest on and off for nearly fourteen years and I identify to some extent with the main character.

Many games don’t last long so it is very tough to obtain any emotion from something that has required little involvement.

Story telling can help, but often when we play a game we just want to blow shit up, relieve a little tension or stress.

Check out “The Last of Us” it’s a PlayStation 3 title that came out june 2013. They’ve nailed character development by having the main main character get to know the supporting character over time and there for you’re getting to know the character just like meeting someone in real life. They start out distant but as they bond you bond with them.

You can also look at The Walking Dead with Clementine sort of the same situation. Both game/series will have the person start off as one character but in time switch to a supporting character. So you get a better feeling of knowing how the character thinks and reacts to things. The difference with the last of us and other titles is they had the writer direct the actors rather than have a director give you his version of the story.

You can watch a play through of the last of us with PewdiePie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wLljngvrpw

Games like Mass Effect and The Walking Dead managed to do this extremely well (The Walking Dead left me depressed for about a week after the ending of Season 1).
It’s mostly because on those games, you develop your character. You feel connected to him/her through the consecuenses the actions you decided make. You control their history and everything.
Battlefield doesn’t has this because the game is mostly just go, run and shoot these guys.
Another example would be Halo. Halo managed to partially make me feel connected to the player and characters because of it’s story telling :slight_smile:

It’s to do with focus. When you sit back and watch a movie, you take in all the emotion. When you’re concentrating on jumping platforms and whatever else, character empathy takes second place. Walking Dead works because there is a good helping of emotionally charged cut scenes.

This mostly occurs with human characters in games (and sometimes movies) as far as I can tell. Because the artists have tried to make the character as human as possible, it looks bad because it is subtly wrong. The animation, lighting, modelling, texturing, hair, skin shaders etc. don’t look quite right. The animators don’t have full freedom because they have to animate to certain physical limitations – a person’s arm can’t extend more than the physical joints will allow it).

When trying to create a “less” convincingly realistic character (like a cartoon character), you end up having a simpler rig with much more creative freedom (for example: a “jaw drop” could literally drop to the ground rather than just a character’s mouth opening slightly). Expression is easier to identify. Even the voice actors will have more freedom to pursue what they want their character to sound like – not just what it should sound like.

The characters are also usually modelled to be more attractive and likeable: Women are portrayed incredibly beautiful with an impossibly tight waist, larger eyes, rounder face, smooth skin and “enhanced” breasts. Men are portrayed incredibly handsome with wide shoulders, six pack, glorious muscles, a strong wide jawline, usually a shadow of facial hair and no signs of baldness. Though these are, of course, never actually found in nature, they are what we perceive to be beauty: a strong, healthy human. It is purely in our biological make-up that we find this attractive.

On the other hand, some characters are made to look ugly to enhance that they are evil or have a malicious intent. Basically, the characters are moulded to what the story is; it is the same when picking out an actor or modelling a realistic human – you look for a suitably similar actor to what the script describes – but the creative freedom, again, allows for a far more emotively appropriate characters, seeing as you can literally create whatever you want.

One thing that humans know very well are other humans. Every human knows pretty much without reference what humans look like. therefore, when you are creating a character, any small discrepancy and the character doesn’t feel real.
When you make a movie, you don’t have to worry about making the characters appear human, because they are human. It’s just a matter of developing that character.
Games frequently rely on the player to create their own attachments to characters, instead of developing them. So, for example, the Master Chief is a great character because he is an avatar, but would be a terrible character in a movie.
Characters in games are becoming more relatable with the increase in graphics quality. For example, now, about 90% of games use MoCap, which allows the character to appear extremely lifelike. It’s all a matter of relatability.

Movies and games, especially the newer games, can get the same amount of emotion, actually. A lot of it comes down to how the player relates to the character, and how the player connects through the storyline. Games like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us (PS3), can do this really well. Voice acting, cinematic and player animation all contribute but will not be as much as the experience that a player feels.

I rarely play video games, surprisingly, but from the games I have played, I only felt for the characters that grew from the beginning. There has to be a growth that the character goes through that the player goes through, too.

BTW, there is a big difference between expression and emotion in media.
The expression of a character creates the emotion, but the emotion is not subjected to only character expression. Cinematics like music and lighting are the fundamentals of emotion. But what can deliver it more than cinematics, is the lack of it. Sad and sorrowful sequences can be deliver using music well, hitting all the right notes and keys that can jerk a tear, but sequences that are left with the base noises and lack music leave room for the mind to process.

Fast paced shooters, Call of Duty, Battlefield 3 & 4, etc. have very little room for sorrow, or any emotion because that would prevent the player from taking risks. If one goes through a level that is emotionally tragic, and ends off on a fast paced, high flying note that causes a drastic change in tone, it’s going to seem fake.

I feel as if you could portray a character, be it cartoonish or realistic, in an emotional stressful situation, like in a movie, by creating a growth. I’ll contrast Despicable Me to my favourite game The Last Of Us. As Gru in the cartoon evolves in the film, his decisions seem more rational, and you back up his decisions in your own mind. In The Last of Us, Joel and Ellies relationship progresses at the exact same rate as the player, but it extends throughout the game play and especially the cutscenes to further the emotion to a film-like structure.

Concluding, I rarely play fast paced shooters, I play 3rd person story games (The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls [many ps3 exclusives…). They give me the best feeling because it feels like an ultra, super long movie.

Everything I wanted to say as pretty much already been said aha, so I’ll just post this video. Its a PS3 tech demo, Its all made in the quantic dream engine (one used for heavy rain (a game which i cant play without crying haha)). But this video (and heavy rain) are great examples of making the viewer/player express real emotion while gaming.

Note that this is just my personal opinion here:

I think a lot of people might be looking at this from the wrong direction, which is “Why can’t games engage the player emotionally like movies do?” There are different reasons for it, but I wouldn’t put the uncanny valley (unrealistic lighting, texturing, particle effects, etc) high on the list. Even short indie games (Cave Story) can make the player feel for the characters far more than even AAA games. A couple of the things that can help engage the viewer emotionally are:

  1. Relate-ability. With homemade movies and entertainment that generally makes you feel some emotion, you usually have emotionally heartwarming scenes, like a child’s first steps, or a mom cooking dinner for her family - it’s not about the graphics or visual appeal of the These are things pretty much anyone can emotionally “vibe” with - scenes that remind you of something. These scenes establish the character as being a proxy for yourself, in a way - it makes you able to stand in for the character. Usually, games miss these kinds of moments; even between action, you usually don’t have “buddy moments” where two heroes talk about a good or bad outcome of a quest like you do with movies, for example.

I think it’s far more likely that you’ll be able to relate to a game character making sad, tough decisions, especially after multiple games in the series and after you get to know the character better, than to relate to a game character mowing down fields of bad guys. Empowerment can be fun, but is in general not something people relate to emotionally. Being weakened is, in my opinion, a much more relatable feeling.

Imagine a game where your goal is to infiltrate a hostage situation as a cop, and your actions influence how many people die within (as well as who). No matter how you play it and what your strategy is, though, people will die, and will do so seemingly randomly between plays. Having the game show the effect on the character, having him react differently and be visibly pained is something that I think players could relate to as everyone knows that in real life, everyone doesn’t win in the end, and you’re rarely one of winners.

Being consistent is also important. You can’t have a cinematic where the main character is supposed to be a good guy, and is struggling to attack a bad guy, but then has no qualms about shooting a rocket launcher at grunts when the player’s controlling him. That obviously doesn’t make any sense.

  1. Pacing. Games in general both have much slower pacing when compared to movies, and even TV shows. A player might spend 5 minutes or 50 hours between story cinematics, so it can be a lot harder to properly convey how a character is feeling when the developers don’t really know just how much time has passed between two points in the game. Compounded with the ability to walk away from a game for extended periods of time (whereas TV shows happen on a weekly schedule, and nobody pauses a movie in the cinema), and I can see why it probably would be difficult to properly pace things out.

Games are mainly interactive, so not everyone will like cinematics to tell stories. You could use other means (i.e. documents, audio files, etc.) to effectively add color to a world and some body to the characters within, but if you make it non-mandatory (to make them incentive to explore the world), then there’s a high chance that the player won’t collect any of that information.

The short of it is, most games don’t have relatable situations or interactions, and mostly aim for empowering stories. Most games also have a wildly varying pace, rather than the steady linear flow of a movie or TV show.

I think as well as being relatability, it’s also a case of death.

In FPS’s, a player dies many times over the course of a game. This does not help you ‘grow’ with the character. You get better at what you do (controlling him) and he get’s better at various other things (eg weapons skills). But as he repeatedly dies, your bonds with him break, and the character become something replacable and not that important.

In a film, we don’t have this same problem of the main character dying a lot.

In RPG’s people do experience this bond with a character, and this is because they don’t die as much.

Just my 2c

One fatal flaw we have missed here - no one spends nearly the length of time of a movie on the delivery of storyline. In fact, most people here won’t even spend that much on the actual game. Graphical realism / fidelity are definitely not essential to delivering emotions. We don’t notice the quality it lacks, we notice when what we do see is lacking.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

The Walking Dead and the Last of Us aren’t actually “games” so to speak. They’re interactive narratives. There is no failure state. As agoose77 said, (paraphrasing) most AAA games today spend more time on development of the graphical fidelity than the actual storyline and characters. Interactive narratives spend ALL of their development on the story and characters.

Hello, lot of thing has been said already but I want to add something.

This is personality exposed during gameplay, it’s my key point about emotional connection.

the fact is that in most games the main character is just an empty avatar during gameplay that you play instead of a character with his own consciousness that react at what you tell him to do, and in the first case you often have disonance between cutscene and gameplay which don’t help to be emotionally connected, because when you return to gameplay you often return with empty avatar, they are just parts of game cut by parts of movie.

The more recent example is The last of us that some have already mentioned that I think is a good example of characters at who you can feel connect because he have his own consciousness during lot of gameplay, in this game it’s made because the charactere comment and talk during gameplay.
The character often talk at his allies but he can talk to himself too, even if it can sound dumb that a character talk to himself at first I assure you that add a lot because you can feel its personnality when he do it, and he not only talk to himself but also at you the player.

So for me personality exposed during gameplay is The key point about be connected to a character, whatever how he grow or if it’s about story telling or not.

Now I will talk a little about cutscene and camera.

I’m not for cutscene because it’s passive and when I play I want to play.
You can argue that cinematic are more emotionnal than gameplay because of movie finition, in character development, camera, music, flow, etc, but I think it’s mostly because gameplay lack of a lot of it.

In a certain way that why qte exist, because you play something that have the finition of cutscene, and to be able to match this finition dev let you interact only minimally because they haven’t find a way to make gameplay finite like this, mostly because of camera in my opinion, hard to move when you can’t properly see where for example, but first resident evil game tell me that we can have some kind of movie feeling in camera during gameplay if it’s make properly so I’m still on research about it.

Camera can add to the overall which I think it’s important, it’s a secondary key in connection and it’s more about presentation, it add sensation to the overall but isn’t emotion.

Following from this, many games seem to miss the distinction between being a character or directing one. The walking dead demonstrates a form of influenced personality - the character appears to have his own morals and personality, but we can steer it somewhat. We are not them, but they are not exactly themselves either. Most FPS games with give you a character who fulfils a mission and you simply witness it from their perspective. You are not them, you simply observe them. Conversely, open world games are a good demonstration of what it is to have free will, and shaping your character from that. With all of these differences, one can see that each style of character requires a different means of connection. Typically speaking, we connect with characters when we are invested in them, so having multiple lives can detract from that connection. (imagine the last of us with no replay capability). The more relatable a character is, the more we can connect. This means that the environment matters as much as the character itself. Lastly, character depth is key. Characters who appear to follow thought processes, with deliberation and ambiguity are far more relatable than gun slinging robots.

Nice responds everyone. (well except for the new guy who felt the need to plug the world’s most popular LPer) Here’s my $3.50.

I can’t help but laugh when people say Last of Us or Walking Dead touched them emotionally. That kinda tells me you’re void of any REAL emotion. When people feel more connected to whats happening to a game object than real shit going on the world around them … I think we have a problem. Story ruins a lot of games, even GTA Online. Games like TitanFall include fiction. XD. Nerds seriously. It’s times like this where I know I’m geek, not nerd. If there’s a difference between nerd and geek, I think I know it.

Frankly it can’t be done and I rarely ever see it work, yet everyone puts story as one of the top 3 reasons they play. Story in games is noise, its there to advertise and propel you forward, to make you give a damn and not lose interest. Walking Dead is about exciting as a bubble test you take in a school course. They could of burned this experience onto a movie dvd and it would be no different, for the viewer sitting next to you, or someone watching online, its the same experience for them as well. So many things wrong with this picture.

Read a book, watch a movie. Games are meant to be played from an extension of your body. Like any sport, riding a bike/skateboard, cooking. Hands on. Experimental. That’s what I’ve been playing my whole life. Metal Gear Solid does a good job. They try so hard in that game its famous for trying too hard. So again we have a problem here. Even when its quality its still misunderstood or shunned. Why even bother?

I watched Taxi Driver again recently. A movie from 1976.

No game can ever do that. Not even Heavy Rain.