Creating Emotion in Games: Wrapping It Up

I didn't really expect my retrospective of Creating Emotion in Games to wind up like this. It's been a while since I've been motivated to recap the next part, and there's a few reasons for that. With at least five, six more blog posts that need to be surmounted in order to finish the project, it was beginning to look intimidating, especially because they just weren't getting creatively fulfilling to me. I'm going to unpack some of that here, along with some of the other things that were beginning to make this a frustrating project.

So I think it's time to call it. Officially, this is going to be the last post in the retrospective, but I'll be talking about the things I want to write about going forward, because I have plenty of ideas ready to go!

Game Moments: an Outburst in Girl by Moonlight

There's a moment in an RPG session that's going to stick with me for some time, I think. Not necessarily for how dramatic or important it was, but for how miraculously effortless it was. I was playing a session of Girl by Moonlight, a game about magical girls in the midst of turmoil. My character, Aster, was doing physical training at the gym with her teammate Solania-Vetis when she pushed too far and collapsed. When she was advised to be mindful of her limits, Aster lashed out and said "I don't want to have limits!"

It surprised me, because it just popped out, and yet it also perfectly fit the situation, because of the way that the game set things up--it was the sort of spontaneous outburst that I hadn't really experienced in games for some time. Let's have a look at what came together for that moment...