Interesting idea - do male gamers shy away from emotional investment? I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere.

I personally love that kind of emotional investment. But not all the time. Take the new Assassin's Creed game. Now I adored Ezio and if I was going to leave my video game husband Kaidan for anyone, it would probably be Ezio. But it's surprising how little endurance Ezio has. His story is wrapped up in one game and his character becomes pretty stagnant after that. The games start piling on different kinds of mechanics, letting you ride ponies in Roma, throw bombs in Istanbul, none of it makes Ezio any more interesting. He's still a charming, somewhat vacant young man who has found his vengeance and now putters around trying to . . . what, exactly?

In AC3, we get two new characters. Haytham (incidentally, definitely a roll in the hay) and Connor (incidentally, definitely not). Now I liked the Haytham portions of the game but they didn't grab me. I loved playing as Connor. I loved how insecure he is, how he needs protecting. He's a warrior, but he's still a character who misses his mother. With Connor I felt maternal. When he's in the prison, I wanted to help him, when he loses everything, I feel incredibly sorry for him and guilty that I couldn't protect him from that.

I mentioned this on Kotaku at one point and one commenter said no male gamer wants to protect anything - well wasn't the exact reasoning for Lara Croft's attempted rape scene? That it would inspire the player to protect Lara? I have my own issues with that, but you can't deny the creators were trying to inspire an emotional investment.

I think there is a problem with all media types being too invested in the white middle class male. They're a powerful buying force for many reasons. Why do companies take such risks with things like online DRM, which has backfired horribly with Sim City and EA has been giving away free games to compensate, but they won't take a risk with expanding some emotional horizons?

I don't play Final Fantasy, so I have no idea what you're talking about, and that's probably a good thing.

He may be addressing recent action games (including BioShock Infinite I hear) that seem to have this as a goal. It worked for me, with Gears 3 and Halo 4, but it's telling at I didn't cry during the game. It was during a cutscene. Staten seems to be focusing on emotions that can spring from doing something in the game world.

Cue Cody Miller.

Like most here, I'm of the conviction that the best stories are the ones that successfully employ as many emotional connections as possible. I read a lot of books, and I play a lot of games, and in both mediums I appreciate a well executed heart-string pull. Whether it's (spoilers) Gavroche getting shot in Les Mis, or Eli's death in Half-Life 2, Episode 2, there are distinct moments that I can recall to mind having an emotional attachment to fictional characters. Attachments that transcended the simplistic "This guy did something cool! Radical!" connection that I seem to develope with any bro in power armor.

It's okay if Bungie doesn't want to try for a searingly deep and heart-felt emotional plot line in Destiny. After all, they've repeatedly stated that they're making an ACTION game, and to be a good action game you don't always need to have tears (though the ending of Halo 3 seemed to pull it off well (DOUBLE ASIDE: For me Halo 3's Chief/Cortana moments were WAY harder hitting than Halo 4's. I blame the writing.)).

If it's all the same though, I personally would prefer having both massive explosion high-fives AND serious story-driven sob-fests. But that's the opinion of one gamer.

His point wasn't that he doesn't think games can make people cry: he thinks games can elicit a range of emotion that other mediums maybe can't, or games can do those emotions better than other mediums can. So rather than trying to imitate what books and film do emotionally, he wants to concentrate on what games are good at more naturally.

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Curious. It's almost as if it was in answer to a question about that moment that a lot of gamers of my generation probably would say elicited that type of reaction: Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy VII (coincidental aside: I'm meeting the guy who made this in an hour, potentially to buy it — I'm a bad person).

I think Joe shows a kind of reticence towards certain types of emotion that I think reflects the gender balance in game production today. My girlfriend reads a lot of books, and a number of them have included incredibly poignant, emotional and (dare I say) tear-jerking moments — I have to take her word for it as I've not read them yet myself, but anyone who's read The Book Thief will doubtless be able to corroborate this. As with Aeris’ death, did these moments detract from the experience of the story, or did they help paint a picture with a wider range of emotions? I'm wondering if a male-dominated videogame industry is stopping us from exploring this kind of emotion.

What is this and why are you comfortable putting it in this post? It looks like you're saying guys can't appreciate sad things or sad moments in stories, or that "normal" guys can't, which seems weird next to you talking about this lack of balance in the industry. It's so jarring it almost seems like a joke or a troll.
For the record, there probably is some genetic male-female difference in typical and average emotions and what's appreciated, but I don't think that completely or even mostly accounts for this, and I generally like my entertainment to not be sad (very rarely do I like it like that, in fact), but that's me.
super late, I know, but I think this is a worthwhile conversation (not just about this comment, the whole thread)

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