Games and emotions

This is new for me, big time new. I started learning how to make video games at the beginning of last term and now I'm making one for my senior experience. Fortune favors the bold I guess. I've never had a blog before and I feel like I'm unconsciously writing in the tone of a teen nick character from the early 2000s, like as I write a voice over is saying what I write to an audience of children. I'm new to making video games, but I'm not new to making art, so my challenge and goal is to reconcile the new medium and new skills with my sensibilities, and to let the two influence one another.  When I make stuff it's important to me that the core of whatever I make be honest emotion. I want to express a feeling I have whether or not that feeling is what the viewer perceives or receives. This has been the biggest hurdle for me when it comes to game design. I want this game to have emotion at it's core, not have an emotional narrative, or relatable characters, but to be rooted, wholly, mechanically, in emotion. This idea of turning emotion into mechanics seems to be the secret to making a powerful game, but it's hard as fuck. It's an obtuse challenge that I've been attacking from all sides with some limited success, I think. It's difficult because normally when I want to express emotions that are difficult to express in my work (in writing, film, whatever) it often ends up being a matter of thinking less. I'm often overcomplicating the expression of the emotion which both makes it more difficult to convey and less powerful, so I strip away whatever layers of abstraction I've piled onto the emotion to get at it more directly. With gamemaking though it's all thinking. To translate emotions into gameplay requires a great deal of thought which requires a certain amount of rewiring for me. Or maybe I'm doing the same thing with games that I've done in the past and I am overthinking the game design and making the emotional conveyance more difficult to achieve. The reality almost definitely lays somewhere BETWIXT the two. OH WELL. HERE'S SOME GAMES THAT I THINK DO A GOOD JOB OF USING MECHANICS TO CONVEY EMOTION:

UNDERTALE

PAPERS PLEASE

GETTING OVER IT WITH BENNETT FODDY


FROG FRACTIONS






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