In the Arrested Development episode "Top Banana" there is a scene in which Michael is in his kitchen, and walks up to his fridge. He is hungry. Upon opening the fridge, he finds a brown paper bag marked "Dead dove: DO NOT EAT." He is curious. He opens the bag, finding a dead dove inside of it, and he recoils immediately. He is disgusted. He says to himself, "I don't know what I expected." He is disappointed. Not disappointed with whoever left the dove in the fridge, but disappointed with himself, because he should have known better. These kinds of events are not out of the ordinary in his house. Fewer than ten seconds have passed, and Michael has felt four different emotions, but for the viewer, it's just one joke.
Consider Mother 3, the sequel to Earthbound. The tagline for Mother 3 is "Strange, Funny, and Heartrending." Often, the game switches quickly between these three modes. In some cases, it accomplishes this using the technique described above, the 'Dead Dove Bag,' where the player is Michael, opening bags of dead doves left out by the game's designers. One relatively spoiler-free example of this technique being used in Mother 3 comes at a time when the player's party washes up on the shore of a tropical island. Injured and exhausted, the monsters on the island will kill you easily unless you can find some way to restore your party's health, but the only food you can find is a large pile of mushrooms. Your party eats them, which does restore their health, but they turned out to be hallucinogenic mushrooms. What follows is one of the most stressful sections of the game. Periodically as you walk around, you will hallucinate a person you met before, or a person one of your party members knows personally, including dead parents and lost siblings. The hallucinations often tell you they miss you, that you should abandon your quest and come home, but at the end of the conversation they usually say something very personal, very hurtful to one of your party members. Adding injury to insult, the hallucination then initiates combat with you. You then have to fight off several real monsters, but since you're hallucinating, you don't know what they are. They all appear as random people or monsters. This makes it really hard to choose the proper combat tactics, since you can only infer the identity of the monsters based on how they attack you.
About halfway through this island adventure, you come across a hot spring, your first rest in a long time. In Mother 3, there are no monsters at hot springs, and you can bathe in them to heal your party. Once you've healed up, you have nowhere to go further into the island, battling insult-hurling hallucinations as you go. When you reach the other end of the island, you meet a fairy who restores you to sobriety. Once you've come to your senses, the fairy reminds your party of their epic quest, and urges them onward. After leaving the island, the player never has any reason to return there. Given the choice, I imagine many players would never come back, in large part because it was such a stressful part of the game. However, now that your party is no longer hallucinating, combat on the island will be much simpler, and you can see what the island actually looked like, if you're curious. Much of it will be what you'd expect from a tropical island, but one notable exception is the hot spring. If you took the time to backtrack, if you disregarded the fairy urging you to complete your quest, you'll find that the hot spring you thought you were bathing in is actually a pool of toxic sludge. The sign that you thought read "Hot Spring" actually says " <-- Hot Spring." If you walk one screen to the left, there is an area, which did not exist the first time the player goes through the island, containing a real hot spring.
Upon reaching the fairy the first time, most players probably expect they'll remember the island as one of the most stressful parts of the game. However, if you were curious and chose to backtrack to the hot spring after you came to your senses, that memory will be tainted with a bit of silliness. And then you might be upset for a short while because the mood of the game was ruined. And when you're done being upset, if you have a good sense of humor, you might chuckle again, knowing that whatever you felt at finding toxic sludge, you brought that feeling on yourself. The game gives you a bag to open, but it is clearly marked, 'DO NOT OPEN.' If you don't like what you find inside of it, you've really only got yourself to blame.
Predicting how players will treat their freedom to instill emotions can be very effective, but it is also difficult. Other games use simpler devices to make players feel for the characters and events in a game. Consider Final Fantasy 7. Halfway through the game, Aeris, one of your party members, dies. She is slain by the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Many gamers will openly admit to weeping at this moment in the game, since they had become so attached to Aeris. In my opinion, were Final Fantasy 7 a movie, people would have a harder time caring about Aeris. Some people might not find her very interesting, some might not find her very attractive (her body contains around 20 polygons, half of which are in her hair), and most people probably don't think she's very cool. Every other person in your party is way more bad ass than Aeris (except maybe cait sith). The reason why players still feel attached to Aeris is because you have to depend on her for so long. In the beginning of the game, Cloud, the protagonist, travels alone. Battles can be difficult, since cloud has to heal himself in battle, giving enemies more time to attack him. Eventually, Aeris joins cloud, and while she isn't nearly as strong, simply having a second member of your party is extremely helpful. She can heal while Cloud attacks, finish off weakened enemies so Cloud can attack stronger ones, etc. Players definitely appreciate her presence because for a long stretch of the game hers is the only friendly face you see. Were this game a movie, the situation would not seem so stressful, since you know that the movie has to proceed, and all you need to do is watch it. As a video game, however, even if players don't particularly like Aeris at first, they have to respect her, since without her help, the game could possibly not progress, unlike a movie, since you might not be able to defeat your enemies without her. If she joined your party at a later time, when you had other characters to choose from, I doubt that players would have reacted so strongly to her death.
Another instance in which Final Fantasy 7 instills emotions in the player occurs later on in the game, where Cloud is reminiscing about his days in SOLDIER, an elite military force that he served in with Sephiroth. You play through the flashback, fighting a monster alongside Sephiroth, escorted by two generic soldiers. Normally in RPGs, when combat starts, the plot is paused, but this flashback works differently. The premise of the story was "hey guys, remember how cool I was?" but when you get into the flashback, Cloud has very little health, doesn't deal much damage, and doesn't know many spells. Sephiroth, on the other hand, has tons of health, deals tons of damage, and knows almost every spell in the game. If you attack the monster, it will do very little damage. The monster then attacks Cloud, killing him in one blow. Sephiroth revives Cloud, and then before either Cloud or the monster has time to act, he also slays the monster in one blow. Then the flashback ends. Cloud continues telling the party how awesome he was, but as the player, having just played through that, something felt wrong. Sephiroth was clearly babysitting Cloud, they were not equals in combat, like Cloud likes to remember. Perhaps there is something wrong with Cloud's memory? The player's suspicion of Cloud's memory foreshadows events later on in the game, where it is revealed that Cloud is all kinds of crazy. Cloud was not fighting next to Sephiroth in the event you flash back to, it was Zach, a member of SOLDIER who Cloud apparently had a huge man-crush on, so in time, Cloud came to believe that everything he saw Zach do, he had done himself. Cloud only remembers that event at all because he was one of the generic soldiers escorting Sephiroth and Zach. Cloud was never actually an elite member of SOLDIER.
If the player paid careful attention to the flashback scene and was suspicious of Cloud's memory, they'll probably feel clever when the full extent of Cloud's psychological issues is revealed. Of course, if that player thinks too hard about the flashback scene, they'll probably be confused or disappointed, because it doesn't entirely make sense if you look at it too hard. But still. Points for trying.
