This one will be quick. Take a look at this quote from Chris at ihobo.com:

This is the nub of the issue here: a story can make you cry by empathising [sic] with the protagonist (or another character), but a game (when viewed as a formal system) cannot do this. It follows that the only way that a videogame can make you cry is by using narrative tools that have nothing to do with games as formal systems whatsoever. So even though, for instance, many people report that they cried when they played Final Fantasy VII at the fateful scene [...] the moment that actually brought the player to tears was a non-interactive cut scene. It wasn’t the game (in the systems view) that made them cry – it was the story – and there never was a question as to whether stories could make you cry.

I agree and disagree. His examples are true, in so far as the part of the game that makes you cry isn’t an actual, functional part of the game at all. So in his examples it’s never really the game itself that makes you cry. However, this overarching statement is shortsighted in that it doesn’t account for the possibility that a game’s mechanics could themselves be the ones communicating the story. And this is an important distinction.

If it’s safe to say that a movie made you cry because of the way it tells you its story, then it’s also safe to say that if a game’s constituent parts (units and rules) convey a story, then a game can make you cry.

Are you excited about Heavy Rain? You should be. Quantic Dream’s David Cage, the man responsible for Heavy Rain (and Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit) held a talk recently at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in France where he said basically nothing about the game … but did point out something interesting about games today, as reported by Francois over at Gamasutra:

[…] the base, primitive human feelings of fear, excitement, frustration, and aggressiveness – these, he claims, and not the more “sophisticated” emotions, all too frequently serve as the emotional backbone for video games.
The more subtle, social emotions such as love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger and shame are frequently addressed in literature and cinema […] but are rarely successfully tackled by games.

But why is this the case? Well, consider the so called primitive emotions of fear, excitement, frustration and aggressiveness. The reason games are so good at instilling these emotions is because the act of playing a game, reacting often quickly and almost always skilfully in a competitive environment, will get these emotions going. But it’s easy to disagree with Cage and say that no, even simple games can make me feel love, joy, sadness, shame and anger. After a long battle I can come to love a certain weapon, or certain tactic. I can certainly feel joy over winning and sadness or shame over losing, and sometimes even anger towards an opponent or game mechanic.

But thinking like this misses his point. Cage’s “sophisticated” emotions are the social versions of love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger and shame that you feel when interacting with other people, or in our case, fictional characters. They might activate the same area of the brain, but to Cage the latter are more worthy of our effort and attention because these distinct emotions are difficult to produce in people. That’s not to say that designing a fun game isn’t difficult. It’s just that making you feel joy over defeating Bowser is easy. Making you actually care that you saved the princess…well, isn’t.