Something odd happened to me today.
I felt guilt over killing characters in Grand Theft Auto IV.
Having spent many hours mowing down nameless, faceless, polygonal populace in past iterations, I'm abit baffled by these feelings. Why now?
Perhaps it's the upgrade in character animations that arose between the gap of last gen and current gen. You don't just ram a guy with a car here and watch him flatten under your car like a pile of squares. Here they have physics. Which means when I hit a guy with the front right of my bumper, he reacts as such, flying off into a spinning drop where he'll then bounce off whatever surface he impacts. It's far more unsettling.
I guess maybe gaming has reached a point where it can mimic life convincingly. All I know is that I spend a full four minutes standing over the virtual body of a dead video game character ripped with guilt. If that's not somehow evidential of gaming's ability to invoke emotion, then I don't know what is.
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2 comments:
I have to say - it was much more fun when in GTA3, they'd just go flying and disappear... ALl of the fun, and less of the guilt! :P
Yeah, I'm with you there. I could do without this guilt-factor :\
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