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.
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.
Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.
Music makes me high on stage, and that's the truth. It's like being almost addicted to music.
Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.
Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.
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