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.