FFIX – for the moment when the black mages learn about death. The black mages are creatures constructed as weapons. Some of them escape from their evil overlords and develop self-awareness. They create a small village.

And then they discover that they have a limited lifespan. One day – about a year after construction – they stop moving, and never move again.

Two black mages gather by the graveyard and talk about their friend, who stopped moving. And wonder what it feels like to stop.

Sad and beautiful. I cried.

Half Life – two moments, related. Gordon Freeman’s a scientist. He wanders around the complex, talking to his scientist pals. Then monsters appear and start killing everyone.

So far so ordinary.

Then the military arrive. But instead of just killing the monsters, they’re killing everyone. They’re killing Gordon’s/your friends.

So you start shooting the military when they appear. Cos sure as hell they’re going to kill you.

But the bigger moment, for me, is a bit later. You’re in an area that the special forces have under their control, and they’ve created a barricade, and they’ve put graffiti on it.

Die, Freeman, die.

And that’s when I thought, Yes, you fucks, I’m hurting you. And that’s what you get for killing my friends.

Also, the previously-mentioned Call Of Duty: yes, there are some seriously panicky bits, but they create a kind of empathy that is almost impossible with traditional history lessons. Immersion in the battle of Stalingrad brings home the terrifying scale of what was fought through, and the literally dreadful situation the fighters faced. It’s not just terror for terror’s sake.

FInally, Tomb Raider, for one very simple reason: Lara’s various death animations are so wrenching that they provide an extra impetus not to see them. Danny told me he’d heard how awful the drowning sequence was, so asked a friend to show it to him. The friend refused, clearly offended at the prospect. Now that’s impressive.

(I’m tempted to except Project Zero (aka Fatal Frame) from that, except that it never made me care enough about the protagonist to finish the game.)

A game worth singling out, in part because I can’t explain it, was Thief: the Dark Project. I’m addressing only the levels where you are up against humans; the zombie levels are just mediocre first-person shooter levels. I have had few moments of fear, dread, and a bit a panic as when hiding in a shallow alcove as a guard approaches, afraid he might notice me when he passes by mere feet away. Once he passed by, you wait, unsure how far away he needs to be so he won’t hear you padding away, worrying that as you step out, he might decide to turn around. Oddly enough the two sequels were less effective on me; possibly because the second one had lots of robotic enemies and the third was just too different. No other game in the stealth action genre (notably including the Splinter Cell and Metal Gear series) has been so effective on me. Probably because of the third person camera and the overly gamey stealth interface. In both series you can reliably predict which stealth attempts will work, the levels are overtly designed to have specific solutions.

The key for sort of emotional response is, of course, immersiveness. For all of the games above except Anchorhead, I find that they are all first person camera telling. (Anchorhead is told in the first person, but I’m referring to visuals here.) A third person camera makes the protagonist more of an “other,” and makes it harder to form an emotional attachment. A first person camera makes it easier to immerse yourself; those incoming bullets aren’t aimed at Bob on the scene, they’re aiming for you!

I think this is one of the reasons I find the overwhelming majority of games in the survival horror genre so dull; they almost uniformly have terrible immersiveness, starting by giving you a view of your avatar. I was really into Silent Hill 4: The Room at the start as I explored the apartment I was locked into. Then I moved on and suddenly I was back in the third person and felt like I was playing a video game. Generally the only emotion survival horror games evoke in me is throwing-my-controller-at-the-screen anger because I’m getting screwed by “artful” cameras or terrible control. The only survival horror game I can think of that did anything for me is Resident Evil 4, and even then it was only for the briefest of moments. That said, the first time the villagers true nature was revealed, I did indeed enter panic mode. (For anyone interested, I recently wrote a review of Resident Evil 4 in which I enumerate the legion ways in which it trashes immersion.)

I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a game that summoned love, happiness, joy, contentment, anger, or some other emotion in me. Sure, games frequently make me happy or angry, but it’s inevitably happiness or anger at the game, not the situation in the game. That is, I’m happy when I solve a particularly difficult obstacle, but the happiness is Alan’s accomplishment at a game, not one of immersion. Similarly, I tend to get angry when I feel a game is “unfair,” but that’s clear metagame thinking.