Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of emotional engagement in gaming, aiming for players to fully immerse themselves in the experience.
David Cage highlights that the ultimate goal in game design is to emotionally engage players, allowing them to lose themselves in the narrative and the world of the game. By achieving this, he suggests that the experience transcends mere play, encouraging players to suspend their disbelief and truly live the story as if it were real.
In practice
During a game design presentation, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of player engagement.
My goal is for 'Heavy Rain' to leave an imprint in you and change a little bit of who you are and how you see things. Maybe the key characters and key moments will leave a trace in you. If you don't have this ambition as a video-game creator, then maybe you should do something else, because this is what creation and art is about.
When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.
A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.
Well, the way I play, I try not to be a 'repeater pencil', ya dig? Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original.
As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.
There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.
An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.
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