I was thinking about this topic a bit today. Most of the best ways of illiciting emotions in an audience is to have a compelling story, not more graphical and intense game play. You can read some novels and feel lots of emotions from it. Games can be the same way if the story is written correctly. The challenge in a game story is that a story can have multiple outcomes/segments depending on what the player does.

Good article.

I think we would do well to stop drawing parallels between video games and movies. In doing so, we ignore the most important trait of a video game: Interactivity. Instead of thinking how realistic graphics can be used to convey the horror of war (or anything else, for that matter), we need to think about how we can use the game's response to the player and vice-versa. Interaction with the world is the most important aspect of the human condition. Listening to music, reading dialog of a movie, watching action on a screen, seeing an actor pretend to suffer and die, as powerful as any of those things are, they are completely passive. The viewer/listener/reader DOES NOT participate. This is fundamentally different from video games. I think we are shackled into thinking in terms of non-interactive media. We should think in terms of gameplay over anything else.

Let's look at an example.
I am writing a simple 3D tank game. Everything about the game is abstract. The terrain is made of regular grids and blocks, all the tanks are untextured, 4 polygon programmer-art meshes. The game takes place inside a giant cube floating in space.

Even in this extremely unrealistic and simple game, I've challenged myself to get some sort of emotion or thought going in the player (more than just trigger-twitches).

Current ideas:
-The enemy tanks only turn hostile when they or a tank close to them is fired upon.
-The enemy tanks never try to kill eachother, even if accidently shot by another.
-Every level can be completed without killing another tank.
-At the end of a level, stats should appear with a comment. Something like "5/5 Tanks Killed. Nice going, you monster" or "0/5 Tanks Killed. Perfect." Different messages for the extremes of the kill ratio, even if one is an insult, gives the player a goal. Either way, it's a reward.

Common Problem:
When the scope of the interactivity of the game is so narrow (shooting or not shooting the polygonal tanks), players will choose the one that is most fun. In this case, they will just shoot the tanks. The same thing can be said about any game. Regardless of any moral message or whatever, players will just do what is fun. That is why in this TankGame, will not punish the player. Other games are not so simple. How do you convey the gravity of death without punishing the player? Permadeath is not fun.

That is the core of the problem. No one minds reading a sad novel, or watching a drama. But games are supposed to be FUN, above all. And my emphasis on gameplay implies that we can't just slap in a sad FMV of a favorite character dying and call it a day. Too easy. Too much like a movie.

I think what I'm asking is "Can gameplay alone invoke emotions beyond amusement?" Does that even make sense? Doesn't the very meaning of the word imply amusement above all else? So, I might have painted myself into a corner here. Any thoughts?