"since theatre comes under this definition, games under these kinds of definitions had always already made people cry, even before the first videogame."

This is a fallacy. crying is often part of what an actor does, but the game of playing the part isn't making him cry. Don't confuse the player with the audience, for whom theater is not a game. The person watching the game is rarely considered with videogames.

You're right that a game has never made me cry. And in "game" I include an unfashionably large range of activities. For instance, playing music is a game, though of course listening to it is not. I'm not bad at all at improvising, and I've done some improvisations which had tremendous emotional significance to me at the time, but I never came close to crying. I don't think a dancer would cry either. As with theater, much effort is put into getting an audience to cry, but the game itself isn't going to get any tears.

(I wonder why that is.)

I propose that getting the player to cry is not the be-all and end-all of emotional resonance. You're absolutely right that when gamists boast their games are going to "make you cry" they're going to use all sorts of non-interactive gimmickry to get there.

You know what, I think I've just realized why games (even including the "old" interactive arts) don't make a player cry. Games are small. Crying comes from huge emotional upheavals in life- when we cry for stories, we're recognizing those in other people. But if I'm hitting notes on a piano, no matter what those notes are, why would anything affect me like that? I can imagine someone who gets so involved with his gaming that he cries every time he gets really close to the end and loses, having to start over. But most of us aren't like that. A game isn't our whole world, it's just a tiny little piece of it. So whatever happens in a game, it's not going to affect us that profoundly.

But I think that points us to a way in. Games aren't just pure systems, they build worlds and context and atmosphere and with online games even urgency. All these things can make the game seem bigger. Could a game present an interactive relationship so invitingly that it seems, as you're playing, almost real? I think it could, though of course that'll never happen as cutscenes are still used as crutches. Also, it requires that the game be designed from the ground up for storytelling. Once that's done, the potential for making you cry with interactive dialogue and situations is there.

This is a nice distillation of the distinction between the story elements of games, and the systems element. However, there is another element, which does not clearly and unambiguously belong to either of the above, which is character*.

When systems can be developed that embody character to a degree that can make the system user attribute theory of mind to the system, then interaction with them may well evoke enough emotion to cause crying. In other words, when you really believe that you're playing a game against an intelligence on a par with your own, that 'game' may well be able to make you cry, without story.

Of course, that's not the current situation, by a long shot.

*I'd tentatively argue that character is what makes narratives emotionally affecting - a purely uninhabited narrative has never caused a tear in me.

ps. a quick way for games to make one cry - haptic feedback, as painful as necessary >:)

There is a moment in Jagged Alliance 2 that was very emotionally powerful (I didn't cry, though), and while it was set up with narrative back story, it played out almost entirely through game mechanics and dynamics. (Not refuting what you wrote here, just pointing out that there can be a nice blend of narrative and gameplay to create this effect.)

Here's one title for you: Photopia. OK, so, it's interactive fiction, therefore not *quite* a game, but the distinction is blurry.

That's 4 counter-examples until now, if I counted correctly. Are they simply the exceptions that strengthen the rule?

Honestly, much of the purpose of this post was to poke at the "games as systems" view as being too narrow for my own tastes. >:)

Then I'm confuses as to what that view entails. I thought my own view fell under the 'games as systems' model. My definition of games considers them a formalised set of rules needing a goal or measure of success just as you say.

I'm not clear what definition you're rallying against. Could you explain?

I've got to say I rarely cry at movies other, but if we bring it to the level of "overwhelmed by emotion" I'll vote for the final level of Braid (not counting all that looking-for-hidden stars nonsense).

The final encounter with the princess in Braid is a piece of narrative entirely born from the gameplay, a perfect summation of the theme of the game, and would not work without the established context of the gameplay mechanics that lead up to it. Absolutely took my breath away - felt like I'd been kicked. If I was more inclined to media-weepiness this might have done the job.

Well put. I totally agree. Also with the irrelevance of the argument. Narrative seems to be one of the elements that is important in any form of art, as it reaches maturity. But games-as-games are just games, you know: for fun. They are not an artistic medium. Even the games-as-systems enthusiasts who hope for games to become an art form, have to admit that the game system only provokes another emotion than the game-related ones at the point where the system generates a narrative. My personal problem with this is that the grammar and vocabulary of games-as-systems is too poor to generate any kind of subtlety. But maybe it can be developed further in the future.

All this is quite irrelevant, however, given that videogames have become a lot richer than pure games already. And this doesn't mean that we are able to slap alien forms of storytelling onto the medium. No: we have already developed entirely new ways of telling stories in the interactive medium. We're only confusing the matter by insisting that these things are games. The medium has outgrown that state now. It's time we take its challenges seriously: let's tell stories with the interactive medium! Let's see those tears!

I see what your saying but you don't understand that the gameplay modifies that experience to make you cry. If you were to watch all of the FFVII cut scenes in order for the first time you would not cry. Games give the stories and edge unlike any other medium. The MGS story is beautiful because you feel the greatness of Solid Snakes tale, the grandeur of what exactly your doing. It has you fighting on the top of outer haven, it has you fighting in the forests, it has you taking down solidus, it has you go against grey fox. The game play imbues the story with such an amazing feeling that they could not achieve without it. Look at advent children, while being an entertaining movie it was not moving because it didn't have the days of work put into reaching the end. They have an impact that most mediums can't achieve the feeling as if you are the person carrying out these actions, and that creates a connection between the player and the player character that allows you to feel for the characters as if you were them or sympathize with them on a brilliant level.

Unless you count gameplay that frustrates you to tears, then yeah I definitely agree that the storytelling component is what makes us shed.

An earlier poster commented that games cannot (or should not) be so easily separated into system and narrative, and I agree entirely with this viewpoint, also ceding that separating them so cleanly is a sharp and direct way to kick off a very interesting discussion, especially in light of some "games as art" discussions sparked by notable non-gamers and gamers alike.

I think it is proper in this case to turn the eyepiece on other activities/media to compare/contrast, starting first with sports. It is not at all uncommon to see an olympic athlete cry after performing at any sort of level in the olympics (well/poorly/happy to be there), but while the extreme physical feedback of olympic sports can produce tearful reactions, what is most prominent in these situations is also a sense of narrative, personal or otherwise. Stories of personal success and sacrifice and of international honor and of sports as a symbol are prevalent in the minds of many competitors, and are likely values instilled in them in their daily lives and training, and these sweeping emotional arcs have helped drive our athletes to physical limits previously unimagined (Usain Bolt? wtf?). This argument, now applied to sports, can be extended with only a little handwaving to most activities of our daily lives, so attempting to divorce narrative from games to inspect their mechanics feels inherently perverse and unnatural; why should we not apply the same knife to all other things we do?

A more substantive argument, than the above regarding sports can be formed by turning the lens to other art forms, painting, writing, music and film. Their mechanics could be argued to be their visuals, language, sounds and and the mixture of them, and one could further argue that none of these alone generally make the audience cry in a good way, and that what makes them significant is their suggestion of themes and experiences.

So a final inspection should be applied to the role of mechanics within art. While enthusiasts will often become excited or mystified with incredible displays or a mastery of them (the last paragraph of The Dead by James Joyce is some sort of fantastic), their main role is to facilitate emotion derived from the whole of their particular medium, rather than from the mechanics themselves. If the mechanics have done their job right, they should not make you cry, they should prefer to leave you obsessed. The power of mechanics is to leave the audience (the reader, the listener, the gamer) so enthralled that resonance can be achieved without full awareness of it, transforming the experience that they're a part of from toys or entertainment (not bashing fun) into something more enveloping, encompassing and sublime.

Huh... I guess this article is interesting. I never thought about the gameplay itself provoking an emotion. I'm with Travis M on the frustration thing.

People bring up FFVII all the time, but that moment never tore me up. I think the only time I came close to crying over a plot point in a game was when the nurse (Lisa?) from the first Silent Hill had her epiphany and breakdown.

Saw this linked at Kotaku.

I think the problem here is that both camps are missing the broader point about the emotional impact of playing a game. To suggest a game is _only_ a system or _only_ play is dangerously reductive; the fact of the matter is is that there is a system _and_ play at work here, and, most importantly, efforts to distinguish the two, though valuable for the sake of inquiry, amy lead to the foolish notion that the two are actually divisible (and/or that a lasting division should be made to anyone's profit). Furthermore, I suggest that a video game is in many respects different from, say, a book. _Anna Karrenina_ the book is not _Anna Karrenina_ the game; but not only specifically because the systems, or vectors at work in delivering the narrative (this is probably another false cosntruction at work here) to the participant (and it is wrong, I think to distinguish between audience and participant in most respects because interactions and game-like participation occur _on both levels_... see Stanley Fish) but also because the elements of play and system must be revised completly to conform to the strictures of the medium in question (which is only to say that video games and books have their own sort of systemic and interactive norms).

I think the problem of a lot of game academia and philosophy is the notion, often forced upon the academic/philosopher, that games are particularly different from books, etc. The two media _do_ indeed have different systems and vectors for delivering the game, but this notion is devoid of any sense of the level in which an active player or viewer interacts with a medium. Reading a book isn't like having Kafka's _Penal Colony_ machine go at me (not an original observation) but like having a conversation with someone quite a deal more erudite than me. The only way in which a game differs from a book, on this broad theoretical level, is that only the particularly active reader engages with a book to the same degree to which someone playing a video game _must_ interact with their medium.

Beyond that, it seems to me _idiotic_ to suggest that we would find emotional resonance with anything that we don't see in the sort of terms as we do the narrative. When I read some particlularly well-written piece of poem or literature, I am not moved by the eloquence of it because it is _formed well_ (though this is an acurate, though literal way of putting this relationship), but moved by the way the form effects more or how it "speaks" to me as either a reflection of the author or of something about myself or my life.

"Hence this question collapses in upon itself. Under the “games as play” view, the question is entirely irrelevant, and under the “games as systems” view, it is the story-aspect of a game that has made people cry, not the game itself. I therefore conclude that a videogame has never made you cry."

(SPOILERS FOR CRISIS CORE ENDING)
And you would be wrong because going by your definition of actually crying during gameplay could be used as the sublime blend of narrative and gaeplay that FFVII Crisis Core used in the fateful last battle where as Zack was fighting for his life all the the memories in the Digital Mind Wave slot reel that always hold Zack's memories started dissapearing one by one all of them almost bidding a farewell that echoed trough Zack's mind, the last one would be Aerith which Zack would try as hard as he could to keep on his mind until his HP run out, all this happened when I was playing the game and not watching a non-interactive cutscene.