Following Aleks' tear-stained post earlier this week about the quest to create emotionally resonant games, a firm named Bowen Research, which "studies consumer attitudes and behavior regarding high tech products", has made an interesting discovery:
"More than two thirds of all video gamers feel that video games already surpass, or will soon at least equal movies, music and books in delivering an emotional impact."
Quickly recovering from this cultural hammer blow, Bowen Research then asked gamers which genres made them well up the most. You can probably guess the results...
"Role-playing games evoked the most powerful emotions, but despite the explosive growth of multiplayer online role-playing games in recent years, most respondents still feel it is the single player role-playing gaming experience that delivers the greatest emotional punch. The next two most emotional genres are first-person shooters, followed closely by action games. Flying games and flight simulators ranked lowest on the emotional scale."
Of course it could be argued that RPGs simply attract more emotionally unstable gamers, and that if these same players were forced to try Microsoft Flight Simulator, they'd cry like babies when their Cessna crashed into a pylon during a failed runway approach. Sadly, Bowen does not appear to explore this possibility.
Anyway, the company also looked into the range of emotions felt by gamers:
"While 'competitiveness' ranked as the top feeling conveyed by games, it's interesting that 'honor/loyalty/integrity,' 'awe and wonder' and 'delight' also were mentioned frequently."
And finally, the most emotional, tear-jerking game event of all time?
"Respondents overwhelmingly cited the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games from Square Enix as the most emotionally rich games, and the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII was the scene many people said made them cry."
Personally, videogames have only driven me close to tears on two occassions: once when the third-party memory card carrying my Resident Evil 2 saves bit the dust, and another time when I stubbed my toe playing Dance Dance Revolution. I'm not sure that these scenarios factored into Bowen's research.
