Rage-quitting is typically a young man's game; anger, however, never truly fades. When designing a game difficulty is, well... difficult to balance. One way to foreshadow difficulty is through a game's advertising. Dark Souls is infamous for its extreme difficulty, largely due to its tag line "prepare to die," so it is harder to justify becoming angry. In much the same way, Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain to its summit. By all real-world accounts, this is an extreme feat. But because it's in a game, there may not be an expectation of great challenge. To fix this, Celeste focuses on another solution: fairness. Rarely, if ever, does the game make you feel as though you are out of control in your failures. Without spoiling anything, it would corrupt its themes to do so. Instead, the game goes out of its way to make sure that the player knows the mistakes they made and can quickly correct them if they so choose. This is not only thematically smart, it makes the gameplay much less frustrating than other platformers of a similar caliber. Despite the two aforementioned strategies being good ways to curb visceral rage, well-executed storytelling can use anger positively. The common phrase "love to hate" is commonly attributed to antagonists, and ones who are good at what they do. A major reason for this is because these villains are written for the audience to dislike them. If a villain can make a viewer actively hate the actions they take, then that is anger making a story more enjoyable. Of course, characters who make wrong decisions in a specific moment can also elicit anger from the audience. This can serve to create a better emotional response to the moment, to flesh out the character more. Anger is a core emotion of humanity, and is plenty important in the stories we tell. But, as in real life, its use should be calculated and restricted. Entertainment should typically be a good experience, and without proper precautions, anger can ruin everything you have built. We must be wary of the dark side.
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AuthorMcRae Walker, an 20-year-old writer and lover of many dorky topics. Archives
September 2022
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