Trigger Happy
flawed Soul Reaver (1999). The player’s character is a vampire called Raziel. When he dies, you do not start again from the last safe point; instead, you shift into the “spectral realm,” the same environments with a twisted, Boschian air, where you continue playing and find previously nonexistent pathways to new areas.
In order to increase the player’s possible emotional involvement, moreover, non-player characters who may be wounded or killed will need to be more fully characterized (dynamically and iconically), so that the player comes to care about them as ends in themselves, rather than just selfishly regretting their demise because it spoils the game. The Final Fantasy series of role- playing games, while not to everyone’s taste, is certainly at the forefront of this sort of approach, yet its major scenes of emotional drama are still prescripted— presented simply for the player to watch. The inevitability of the prescripted FMV fatally draws the sting of the emotional event, for the player knows it could not possibly have happened otherwise, which in principle prevents basic guilt from blossoming into the more refined emotion of regret. We may be guilty about things that we simply couldn’t help, but we only regret things that could have happened differently.
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