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.
That the best piece of art a person is capable of making is the one that only they could create.
Years ago, I thought up the name Queen...It's just a name, but it's very regal obviously, and it sounds splendid...It's a strong name, very universal and immediate. It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations. I was certainly aware of the gay connotations, but that was just one facet of it.
Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.
The two things you can't fake are good food and good music
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.
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