Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 383)

Trigger Happy
385
flawed Soul Reaver (1999). The player’s character is a
vampire called Raziel. When he dies, you do not start
again from the last safe point; instead, you shift into the
“spectral realm,” the same environments with a twisted,
Boschian air, where you continue playing and find
previously nonexistent pathways to new areas.
In order to increase the player’s possible emotional
involvement, moreover, non-player characters who may
be wounded or killed will need to be more fully
characterized (dynamically and iconically), so that the
player comes to care about them as ends in themselves,
rather than just selfishly regretting their demise because
it spoils the game. The Final Fantasy series of role-
playing games, while not to everyone’s taste, is
certainly at the forefront of this sort of approach, yet its
major scenes of emotional drama are still prescripted—
presented simply for the player to watch. The
inevitability of the prescripted FMV fatally draws the
sting of the emotional event, for the player knows it
could not possibly have happened otherwise, which in
principle prevents basic guilt from blossoming into the
more refined emotion of regret. We may be guilty about
things that we simply couldn’t help, but we only regret
things that could have happened differently.