In Chapter 1 of How Games Move Us by Katherine Isbister, she talks about how games set themselves apart from other media when it comes to emotional impact. Unlike movies, games can leave its players with a different set of emotions, depending on how the players choices throughout the game. If the player had made the “right” choices at the right time, the player could feel proud and accomplished by the end of the game. On the other hand, players can feel a sense of guilt, given that they had made mistakes throughout the game and lost at the end. I believe that we can connect to games a little more deeply than we can to movies. As players of the games we play, there are consequences that come with our actions, as opposed to passively going through scenes in movies and trying to relate to them with our personal lives. Games are more life-like, in the sense that in reality, we too are given a set of choices and consequences are different based on the choices we make.
For my midterm paper, I played three different RPG/simulating text-adventures that give players the options of how to react and speak in each respective game. The one game that really hit my emotions was The Walking Dead: Season 1 because it simulated me having to kill people (dead people…?), and it never crossed my mind having or wanting to ever kill someone. The other day I watched a sad Pixar short film in which the son accidentally kills the father (http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/pixar-releases-dark-new-short-film-article-1.2838212). Though I thought the animation was super depressing, I still felt a little more depressed killing people in a game because I did it out of my own will, if that makes any sense.