Designing Journey

[Henrik Flink]

Now they've posted Jenova Chens "Designing Journey" talk over at gdc vault, it's pretty interesting.
http://gdcvault.com/play/1017700/Designing

There is one thing I've been thinking about thou, the use of catharsis to achieve the strong emotional reaction in the player.
I think it was mentioned here before, but is really the ultimate goal of this medium to achieve strong emotional response through our work? And through which means should we achieve this?

Through this "catharsis" you get the emotional response due to extreme changes in the emotional state of the game/book/movie, so maybe it's not really thanks to the actually content you achieve this but instead through the emotional flux. So I was just asking myself is this really a fair(to the player) way to achieve the emotional response? Perhaps it's too manipulative? But then, what isn't? Through audio & visuals we're constantly manipulating the player to evoke a certain emotion or mood. Maybe we're crossing some line sometimes in terms of manipulating the player to achieve our goals.

We've been through this before regarding to some free to play games, where players constantly are manipulated to get them to buy more in-game currency among other things. But now, we instead use "tricks" to achieve our own justified goals.

So where goes the line between what's okey and what's not?

[Jeroen D. Stout]

Not having seen the talk (yet? there are only so many hours), but it is interesting you say 'what isn't manipulating'. It is a sorry state for art if it has to do what it does through manipulation.

I more frequently have the feeling that 'we are going on a journey together' [EDIT: in other art] rather than having my feelings manipulated. An extreme of this is Northanger Abbey where Austen tells you that because stories 'such as this' need a heroine of a certain kind, there is one. It feels more like coming to tea to be entertained by the author, rather than being manipulated. I have the same with Donne, who can evoke a 'talking about it while sipping beer in a pub' feeling.

In game terms I would say 30 Flights of Loving is a little scherzo which 'invites you in'.

But it is also an aesthetic choice, I suspect, whether you (as a reader) want to throw yourself to the waves and feel things or take a measured stance and enjoy a work for what it evokes. I notice with Journey I can never participate in the conversation because the game has no hold over me and I never really can sympathise with other's feelings about it. The talk about 'it made me feel x,' 'it made me feel y,' and 'then this happened and I really felt, like, z,' and all the while I stand there like a forgotten statue holding a glass of white wine.

[Bruno de Figueiredo]

Manipulation would be welcome, it's one of the cornerstones of any noble form of entertainment from stage drama to magic. I don't believe that to be the case at hand. Video games are admirable agents of conditioning, on the other hand. At hindsight, my favorable experience with the last two Jenova Chen games was more consonant with a process of conditioning - a tour de force at that, however benevolent - rather than one of manipulation. I would add that there exists a substantial schism between the two.

[God at play]

While creating something that results in a strong emotional reaction is difficult just by itself, I think you raise a valid concern, Henrik.

One way we've been able to avoid being manipulative in our game is by creating something based on an intense life experience. Even toning the game down a lot and reducing our prototype from a real-life 6 hours to a game-time 10 minutes still leaves us with an emotionally intense experience. One could argue we are doing the opposite of making something seem more emotional than it is by being manipulative. We've taken several steps to try to make it less emotional, and in one case we failed: http://www.blackjacketstudios.com/gdc/gdc-2013/

And actually we have a situation of extreme emotional flux as well, but again it's based on what happened in real life. That's just how it works sometimes; laughter comes in the midst of pain. I think as long as the flux is believable, you're fine using that.

[Michaël Samyn]

I think we only feel manipulated when the content of a piece doesn't match up with the level of emotional manipulation. I feel a lot less manipulated by a Tarkovsky film than by a romantic comedy.

Journey felt quite empty to me. It's all structure and no content.
The fact that it still gives so many people an experience they consider deep and meaningful is something to think about.

[Jeroen D. Stout]

Considering manipulation (in the context of emotions) means 'to influence or manage shrewdly or deviously' I would say it is somewhat naive to phrase our engagement with a work of art as manipulation. And I do say naive because seeing manipulation as a positive is not even cynical; not seeing the absurdity of a world in which art has to be devious to evoke anything is some contemporary naivety.

We can feel manipulated (I would argue) if we feel the emotional content is not sincere and rather other conditions are created for the sake of tricking us. I.e., a film which has no real drama trying to manipulate you into feeling things. That is greatly different from a film which evokes a sense of drama, thereby making you feel things.

But on my end I like to read novels as-if I am the writer's peer; and I would hardly seek to be manipulated by my peers.

[Henrik Flink]

I quite agree with Michael, Journey feels allot more about the structure then the content.
Maybe the design(or rather use of structure) is a bit....excessive?

For me it feels extra obvious when watching the video. The whole project is more or less based on utilizing different kinds of structures for an emotional roller coaster in game form. As seen in the video they're iterating over the content to match the structure, so the structure is dictating what the content will be, which feels very much that the emotional response according to the structure is what's important for the developers.

When thinking about this even more, it's easy to spot in other entertainment forms.

Take comedy for example, how much of comedy isn't based on the actually delivery and timing of the joke? So when separating the content from the structure(delivery) it might loose what's funny about it.

Same goes for popular music I guess. It's pretty easy to recognize certain combinations and build ups that evoke a emotional response, that's being used in allot of the pop idol songs.

Should the content or the structure be the real focus?

[God at play]

I think they went for structure because the game was meant to represent an archetype. It was trying to be every kind of story, instead of one very specific story. I see it as a tribute to the structure of the story in an archetypal sense.