Rouse displays a slide with the quote which will define the theme of his lecture: "Weeping is an interesting touchstone because it assumes that melodrama is the measure of narrative art." Janet Murray, George Institude of Technology, Hamlet on the Holodeck. Steve Meretzky said the crying debate is "so 1993." Richard Rouse says he crieda t the end of Titanic. Also a General Hospital montage in the mid-90s. Also a Rush concert because they're "so awesome."
The first way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen, with the text "This Was Your Life" in big, bold letters that fill the screen. Rouse shows a music video of Johnny Cash's "Hurt" which shows various clips of Johnny Cash's life, his family, his present, and other images were obviously important to him. So a montage. I was kind of hoping for a clip of the General Hospital one. Rouse says "the sort of flashback looking back at the life technique is a powerful technique used in a lot of tear-jerkers" as covers of the Titanic, The Notebook, and Away From Her are shown on the screen. Rouse then goes on to discuss the importance of long-term characters in The Sims. He then references and shows a clip of the end of Fallout 3, which had an ending that showed a montage of the player's accomplishments throughout the game. "I don't know if this is necessarily tear-worthy."
The second way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen is "Amplification Through Abstraction." I think: oh, come on, Richard Rouse, is showing a clip from the hyper-sad Grave of the Fireflies really, really necessary? Come on. That was completely tragic. Rouse says that the movie being an anime/cartoon allows for a level of abstraction that the viewer projects a person onto the little girl, rather than dealing with the barrier that a real actor would create ("poor performance" or "too specific"). Rouse now shows Jason Rohrer's "Passage." "I think the reason this works at all [...] is because it's just these two little pixel-y characters and not this photorealistic person" so the player projects his life onto these characters.
The third way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: "The Weak Shall Inherit (aka Transformation)." Rouse cites It's a Wonderful Life, which he then summarizes because it's such an obscure, unknown movie. George Bailey goes through life all philanthropic-like until he has his moment of crisis at which point he is shown how great it was and he begins to appreciate the life he led and then at the end everyone comes together to help Bailey out. I hate you if you haven't seen this movie, by the way. "It's interesting we're crying at the happiest part of the movie, not the saddest. Which is a recurring thing with crying," Rouse said. He goes to the game example with Bioshock which he details his player experience where he saved all of the Little Sisters throughout the game ("because [he is] sappy that way"). The "touching moment" is when the Little Sisters come in and band together to kill the bad guy while the player is weak. Let's face it, a bunch of little girls stabbing someone to death with Adam really is a lot like the end of It's a Wonderful Life.
The fourth way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: "Don't Know What You've Got Until it's Gone (aka Loss & Recovery)." Rouse displays a clip of an old silent movie where a husband took his wife on a trip where he planned to kill her, but in the end he can't do it because she's too important to him. She runs away and the man is forced to realize what he had. Eventually the two accidentally meet in a church with a wedding going on and the man cries a lot, the girl realizes maybe he really does care, and they re-fall back in love. And at the end of the movie the woman dies in a boat accident. Then, I guess, a woman found the man's wife and she really wasn't dead. Or something. Moral of the story: "it's only through losing it that you realize what you had." Rouse then brings in Portal and the confrontation against GladOS where the player destroys her individual personalities one by one and one of them begs for its life and it's this bittersweet moment. Now... Nintendogs! Rouse describes his dog in the game that, eventually, his daughter took over playing with. When Rouse was away on a business trip, his wife called him and said that Rouse's dog in the game is "gone." Rouse describes his sadness regarding the loss of his dog in the game until he came back to the game when he returned home and the dog came back and he was brought to tears by this joyful reunion.
The fifth way that a game can make you cry goes up on the screen: nostalgia. Rouse brings in Mad Men and the COMPLETELY AMAZING scene where Don Draper demonstrates the "Carousel" to Kodak. Draper displays a very emotional, meaningful slide show of his life with his family, causing Draper to rethink his current state in life. So we're back to montages again, basically. "Nostalgia -- it's delicate -- but potent [...] nostalgia, in Greek, literally means 'the pain of an old wound'," Draper says in the clip. Even I'm getting weepy here. It's so good. Rouse goes into the love between two children in Ico, the attachment to Rapture in Bioshock, the lives we never had in The Sims, or simply the experience in Rohrer's "Passage."
Richard Rouse concludes by pointing out the sentimentality in relationships with people and characters in games, rather than in tragedy.
