The conference organizers of the Storyworlds Across Media conference in Mainz have put up the videos from the July 2011 conference.
Here is the video of me talking about The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?
This a chapter from my upcoming book on Failure, where I revisit a question that I dodged in Half-Real: Can a video game have an unhappy ending? (Answer is yes, in some ways, with modifications, it’s complicated.)
(The video contains a Red Read Redemption spoiler. You have been warned.)
That’s interesting. It does remind me a bit of the distinction between fiction-emotions and artefact-emotions in film, though I think the issue is that the relationship between those types of emotion in games is different to their relationship in film.
It certainly puts a perspective on the ending of Grand Theft Auto IV (at least the ‘revenge’ ending; I’ve never seen the “take the money” ending), which one of your questioners asked about, and which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. It’s interesting in GTA4 that the fictional, tragic emotion is expressed by Niko, the player-character, while the artefact player accomplishment emotion is actually displaced onto the NPC Roman. So that rules-driven emotion is to some extent expressed through the fiction, but is somewhat undermined by the very character you’ve been playing in his role as a perspective on the fiction.
@Allan – there is some similarity, though we could say that games have “game emotions” related to your performance. (This is Jonathan Frome’s argument, for example.)
This happens to be the topic I’m thinking recently, and I’m inspired by your opinion of the conflicting desires. The problem is how we can make player experience failure and avoid failure at the same time. Though we can set bad ending and good ending, when players load the previous checkpoint, they know they’ve already failed once.So my opinion is making bad ending world and good ending world Parallel universes or something, which means if the player failed, he can jump to another parallel game world with the same role, level and gear.
It’s different from S/L since S/L means the player fail and play again, and my way can make the unhappy ending just an obstruct during the game. Thus, if the player don’t like the ending, he can ignore it and go on playing until his positive goal is achieved. It is kind of self-deception, but I think it does have effect on players’ emotion.