Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of emotional engagement in gaming, aiming for players to fully immerse themselves in the experience.
David Cage highlights that the ultimate goal in game design is to emotionally engage players, allowing them to lose themselves in the narrative and the world of the game. By achieving this, he suggests that the experience transcends mere play, encouraging players to suspend their disbelief and truly live the story as if it were real.
In practice
During a game design presentation, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of player engagement.
My goal is for 'Heavy Rain' to leave an imprint in you and change a little bit of who you are and how you see things. Maybe the key characters and key moments will leave a trace in you. If you don't have this ambition as a video-game creator, then maybe you should do something else, because this is what creation and art is about.
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
That's the kind of music I want SoulBird to represent: music with intelligence and heart, music that moves people in their souls and their bodies. Music with wings.
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, βHere I am,β but to write a novel, hold it up and say, βHere YOU are.
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