Poignancy

Some people watch movies to see happiness, others watch them to see moments of sheer terror or horror in a way that is safe to experience.  There are many different genres of film that grace our screens, none more than at any point in history for the simple fact that cinema is a cumulative industry.  That which came before does not cease to exist as the industry advances, much like that of the music industry.  One industry I find intriguing however is the gaming industry. 

I have a degree in Computer Science with Games Technology, which I spent 3 years at University to achieve.  For the most part I have not ventured very far into the games industry as a whole mainly because of a disillusionment that gripped me when I studied it at University.  I've written about this before, of how the fourth wall was broken when I studied the mechanics of game design, and how the magic of the games themselves was lost.  It's taken some time for me to move beyond that and find myself in a position where I can once again enjoy games without thinking about the technology and the technicalities of their design to a level that destroys the experience.  One way that I have been able to recover this love of gaming is to go beyond the traditional nature of gaming and explore the innovative side, where intrigue and mystery still exists, where "I wonder how that is done" isn't a question that is easily answered. 

To go beyond tradition is to go beyond the usual and the repetitive and search for the things you would not expect to be gripping.  The greatest example I have of achieving this is to go beyond the obviously evocative emotions of happiness and terror or horror, and venture into the emotions that are harder to trigger.  It's harder to make people feel sad, in a constructive way.  It's easy to do in a destructive way, but there's no enjoyment to be found there.  Sadness for the sake of being sad often ends up producing contrived content.  This is where poignancy comes into play.  Poignancy is essentially constructive sadness; a sadness that evokes an empathic response.  Games like The Beginner's Guide do this very well.  The Beginner's Guide was developed by Davey Wreden, who also developed The Stanley Parable another game which employs similar themes of evoking an empathy within the player for the person they play in the game.  Worthy of note here is the fact that in both cases you "play" as a character within the games but no character actually exists, instead you take on a role and engage in the story as the main character.  Also worthy of note is that both games are driven by a narrator, and employ storytelling as their main mechanic.

I have a love of writing, which I have made no secret of here on this blog.  I have also written quite a few stories and a few books that I have self-published and one that is in print.  What I would like to achieve at some point is to take a story I create and make a game out of it, but not in the traditional sense.  What I would seek to do is to capture poignancy through the art form rather than get bogged down in the technicality.  This isn't something I devote a lot of my time to however as I feel it's one of those things that would be nice to do but probably won't happen in reality.  That in and of itself is rather sad.