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Idle Thumbs News PodBLAST - In two weeks, a videogame will make you cry

B

border

Member
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/idle-thumbs/~3/EGRUUV-bk6M/idlenews_090309.mp3

"A computer game still hasn't made you cry. I think we'll crack that problem in the next five years and it'll be a watershed event for our business." -- Neil Young, GDC 2004

"I think the real indicator will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17." --Stephen Spielberg

Five years ago, prophecies by Steven Spielberg and EALA's Neil Young charted a course of new, untold emotional resonance, and the future of video games was irrevocably changed. As Game Developers Conference 2009 approaches, the clock ticks ever closer to the video game singularity: Prepare for the countdown to tears. Games discussed: Steven Spielberg, Neil Young, the crying game.

Stephen Spielberg and EA have promised tears - can they deliver? (Assuming you didn't already cry after paying $50 for Boom Blox)
 
B

Brobzoid

how do I slip unnoticed out of a gloryhole booth?
onion.gif
I'm ready!
 
C

Chris Remo

Member
It is genuinely crazy to me that we are coming up on the five-year conclusion of Countdown to Tears. The Idle Thumbs staff has literally been making Spielberg/Young jokes for half a decade. That is fucking ridiculous.
 
J

Jake

Member
Not related to this specific cast, but somewhere someone has really good taste.

By which I mean, Pantscast, a (presumably) new iPhone app which sneaks fart sounds into quiet moments in podcasts, has Idle Thumbs featured in their store art. Thanks to Hosensoft.
 
M

Mistouze

user-friendly man-cashews
Podblast!

SotC did make me cry at the end of stage 16 so I don't know if that qualifies... Damn horse...
 
wolfmat

wolfmat

Confirmed Asshole
Dreamfall kinda made me sad at the end, but I was too aggravated about the FUCKING CLIFFHANGER ENDING to shed a tear
 
G

GDGF

Soothsayer
I thought this was going to be about an ancient Electronic Arts ad campaign.


(and I know quite a few people who cried when Aeris died)
 
M

Mar

Member
Before I've even accepted this blast into my face. I have to say that the closest a game has ever got to making me somewhat emotional. Would have to be the ending to Shadow of the Coloncyst. I did get a bit of dust in my eye for a few seconds when
the horse came back
. My wife also stopped what she was doing as she was walking past and sat down and watched the ending.

It was pretty powerful.
 
A

abombb

Banned
People are so tolerant to violence these days, that it would take a great effort to make someone cry in a movie, let alone a video game.
 
H

HamPster PamPster

Member
Does someone want to give me a brief Idle Thumbs history?

I downloaded this and the most recent podcast (both were great... now I have another video game podcast to add to my weekly line up!) Currently downloading some past episodes

Of course there's only 20, yet the site has been around since 2004? And all the podcasters have other jobs - why did the old site close down? Are the two sites related at all?
 
D

daegan

Member
I've cried at the endings to a whole slew of games, most of which when I was younger.

The end credits theme to Chrono Trigger can still stir tears in me even when I'm not actually playing the game.
 
wolfmat

wolfmat

Confirmed Asshole
abombb said:
People are so tolerant to violence these days, that it would take a great effort to make someone cry in a movie, let alone a video game.
Click to expand...
Making someone cry with display of violence - how does that even work? Are you thinking about torturing viewers á la Clockwork Orange or something?

I mean, you usually don't cry in a movie because it's so violent.
You cry because the dog they made you like tragically dies and the young boy is all alone now or whatever. You cry because of emotional impact.

Violence has no emotional impact whatsoever if it's not RL violence, I think it's always been like this.

Okay, some movies manage to have some kind of impact, particularly those showing believable torture scenes and the usual shit like stabbing eyes out, tearing off toenails and so forth, but not to a degree that'd make me be engrossed SO MUCH into the movie / game that I'd start to cry out of agony.

If that ever happened, I'd fucking file a lawsuit. That'd be truly disturbing.
 
A

Awntawn

Member
"A computer game still hasn't made you cry. I think we'll crack that problem in the next five years and it'll be a watershed event for our business." -- Neil Young, GDC 2004
Click to expand...
FFX came out in 2001. Pretty sure there have been more before that too. We know it's rare, it's there. Why do people completely write shit off just because they don't get it themselves? Hell Bambi's mom getting shot did nothing to me, doesn't mean that's not a scene that makes people cry.
 
L

leroy hacker

Member
Q: How far out do you think the industry is from creating the elusive "game that can make you cry?"

Jenova Chen: I'm very sick of this "will games make you cry" thing. First of all, I cried at a game when I was 13. I cried hard and I cried deep for a game that is totally crass by today's standards. I never doubted that videogames can make you cry; I'm trying to recapture that feeling.

We have already had a few fans mail us about Flower to tell us they had tears in their eyes, or they cried after they played the first level because it reminds them of their dead mother, or it reminds them of the town they used to live in forty years ago. So why are we even asking if [games] can make people cry? Games have already accomplished that.

But maybe ten or thirty years ago, games could only make kids cry because they had not yet experienced anything deep. In my case, in the 1990s, my parents felt a lot of fictional novels were very bad for kids so they never let me read books, and they wouldn't let me watch anything on TV that related to adults. So all I could watch were very stupid cartoons. It was videogames that my parents were not familiar with, so they never guarded against the content.

So I played these games with crappy plots that mimicked Shakespeare - these Romeo & Juliet plots - but I had never seen Romeo & Juliet before. I had never seen a love movie before. So that role-playing game where the female character died was my first experience of losing someone who I really liked.

That very first experience was so strong that it allowed me to reach catharsis. But most other adults would not be able to because they've read Romeo & Juliet and they have a much higher tolerance. So maybe what you're talking about is how to create a very, very strong emotional experience so even adults who have seen the greatest movies will still be touched. That's all about creating a unique and strong emotional experience. If it's unique then people wouldn't be able to expect it, and it would be possible to be touched.
Click to expand...


From a recent interview with Jenova Chen, some sensible yet obvious words about the issue of crying over games. I'm impressed to see him admit that the game he named himself after was "crass" and "crappy."
 
A

abombb

Banned
wmat said:
Making someone cry with display of violence - how does that even work? Are you thinking about torturing viewers á la Clockwork Orange or something?

I mean, you usually don't cry in a movie because it's so violent.
You cry because the dog they made you like tragically dies and the young boy is all alone now or whatever. You cry because of emotional impact.

Violence has no emotional impact whatsoever if it's not RL violence, I think it's always been like this.

Okay, some movies manage to have some kind of impact, particularly those showing believable torture scenes and the usual shit like stabbing eyes out, tearing off toenails and so forth, but not to a degree that'd make me be engrossed SO MUCH into the movie / game that I'd start to cry out of agony.

If that ever happened, I'd fucking file a lawsuit. That'd be truly disturbing.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I kind of misphrased my post. I mean that people being tolerant and used to violence would make them more tolerant to other forms of emotion. Like it would be more difficult to make them cry during a sad scene.

That may not make more sense, but all I'm saying is that Emotion is Hard.
 
M

Mar

Member
Oh, SotC was mentioned on the blast. Keep in mind I didn't actually cry. My wife was sitting next to me so I had to be all manly and shit. You know, talk about tits cars and explosions. But I did get a little misty eyed.
 
J

Jake

Member
HamPster PamPster said:
Does someone want to give me a brief Idle Thumbs history?

I downloaded this and the most recent podcast (both were great... now I have another video game podcast to add to my weekly line up!) Currently downloading some past episodes

Of course there's only 20, yet the site has been around since 2004? And all the podcasters have other jobs - why did the old site close down? Are the two sites related at all?
Click to expand...

Since you asked, here's a bunch of shit nobody will read!

Idle Thumbs was started in 2004 by a bunch of hobbyist games writers (originally mostly from a few LucasArts and adventure gaming related news sites, Mixnmojo and Adventure Gamers specifically) who had generally gotten into covering or talking about games due to one of those various niche/hobby sites but were tired of covering only a specific thing. Those sites had gone a bit tongue in cheek after writing about the same things for years on end, and we thought it would be interesting to try it out on a new site that was more about gaming as a whole.

Three of us (myself, Marek Bronstring of Adventure Gamers and James Spafford of Mixnmojo) sort of came up with the idea while at E3 2003, and started poking at and gathering people for about a year, designing the site, building the backend, and finally opening Idle Thumbs the night before E3 2004. (for many of us that meant E3 was opened with an all-nighter, which was a horrible idea.) The site (more or less) regularly published news as well as reviews/previews/opinions/interviews, mostly done via email or at the occasional large industry event like E3 or GDC, though occasionally we got invited to press events with the "real sites" as well.

We tried to mix lighthearted casual or humorous writing with more serious discussion, and also often poked fun at or pissed on things which were lame. The goal wasn't to be assholes or to be in mean spirits, but just to have fun (and by extension let our readers have fun) writing about what we found interesting about games. Over time we picked up writers who weren't from hobbyist/fansite communities, but were just drawn to writing for Thumb because they thought it was interesting, too, I guess.

Over time, Thumbs gained an alright readership in the industry, and the experience we gained, coupled with our real life jobs (or other hobby time-killers) slowly resulted in most all of us getting jobs either making or writing about games professionally. The UK guys are at Sony, Atari, Media Molecule, Disney Interactive I think, and indie studio Beatnik Games, among other places. In the US we're at Gamasutra, Shacknews, Telltale Games, and 2K Marin among other places. Duncan Fyfe remains alone in New Zealand.

Everyone getting real jobs doing the things we used to write about, coupled with the inevitable slow but eventual deterioration of all unpaid free-time fun-time internet projects, slowly led to Thumbs disbanding, dying more or less for good in 2007. In mid-late 2008, Chris and I started talking about how it would be fun to try and do a gaming podcast that was just sort of us fucking around (as in, not affiliated with anything real) and also wasn't over Skype. We couldn't come up with a name for it, and after a while Chris suggested calling it Idle Thumbs. We checked with the other guys and they were okay with it, so we got Nick to join in, put up a new homepage and started recording. The end!

--

Bonus old stuff: The old editorial content from the original site is is still up, browseable from the bottom of the site. Here are all the old feature stories, for instance, and the interviews. Here's The Crying Game, Chris's original article about Spielberg and Neil Young.* That article is actually a sort of follow-up to I Kill You, another article by him, which was probably the first story we did to get any actual attention. Here and here is some old crappy news I wrote for the site back at the time.

I probably got some stuff wrong, but that's the general gist. That's probably the best I could do without asking any of the other guys.


In hindsight, it's surprising (and pretty enjoyable) to look back on the old stuff we were doing when we started the site, and realizing how much it has in common with the stuff we're doing on the podcast. The actual quality of the writing, and most of our opinions, maybe haven't aged that well, but the tone and the intent seems intact. Nobody cares about that but us, I'm sure, but it makes me happy at least.



* "The Crying Game is a poor article." - Chris, present day.
 
G

GotchaForce

Member
I think SOTC was a good mention, I didn't cry but I could easily see somebody doing it. Also a couple other recent games for contenders:
MGS4, I know a lot of gaffers mentioned crying at the end.
I think Jeff Gerstmann mentioned something from GTA4 making him cry, had something to do with his actual life I think. Maybe he robbed a bank with some Irish dudes?
 
D

Deleted member 30609

Unconfirmed Member
Interesting read, Jake. I always wondered what the deal was with the whole Idle Thumbs site (being someone who started listening to the podcast right at the end of 2008). Thanks for the info.
 
B

Brobzoid

how do I slip unnoticed out of a gloryhole booth?
robut said:
I think SOTC was a good mention, I didn't cry but I could easily see somebody doing it. Also a couple other recent games for contenders:
MGS4, I know a lot of gaffers mentioned crying at the end.
I think Jeff Gerstmann mentioned something from GTA4 making him cry, had something to do with his actual life I think. Maybe he robbed a bank with some Irish dudes?
Click to expand...
MGS4 is as graceful as FF7. I'm not doubting that some people cried at MGS4, I'm just calling them twats.

I cry sometimes when I play games. But that has more to do with me being really drunk...
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
Brobzoid said:
MGS4 is as graceful as FF7. I'm not doubting that some people cried at MGS4, I'm just calling them twats.

I cry sometimes when I play games. But that has more to do with me being really drunk...
Click to expand...

And realizing you'll never live to see a binary sunset.

I made myself sad playing Mass Effect. The story didnt do a thing for me tearwise though
 
P

Peronthious

Member
Awntawn said:
FFX came out in 2001. Pretty sure there have been more before that too. We know it's rare, it's there. Why do people completely write shit off just because they don't get it themselves? Hell Bambi's mom getting shot did nothing to me, doesn't mean that's not a scene that makes people cry.
Click to expand...

Sure, but was the crying stimulated by the game itself, or just a cutscene? Until the game itself, through elements of gameplay, makes you cry, that goal has not been reached. Excellent read on the subject.
 
L

LiK

Member
GDGF said:
(and I know quite a few people who cried when Aeris died)
Click to expand...

yea, her death hit me pretty hard when i played it. it was pretty shocking for the time. i think i welled up but i didn't actually cry.

i bet Chris cried when he played Mirror's Edge :p
 
D

Danne-Danger

Member
Peronthious said:
Sure, but was the crying stimulated by the game itself, or just a cutscene? Until the game itself, through elements of gameplay, makes you cry, that goal has not been reached. Excellent read on the subject.
Click to expand...
I've heard a lot of people say that they got misty-eyed while playing Flower. In Flower there's no "protagonist" and no real narrative. Any emotion you get out of it comes from the gameplay itself.
 
P

Peronthious

Member
HK-47 said:
Why gameplay? There is more to a game then that, sorry to break it to you
Click to expand...

Of course there is, and that isn't something I wasn't aware of. What I'm saying is that for a game to really be said to have induced a reaction as strong as crying, it should be the game as something you do, not the game as something you watch. The latter wouldn't be anything new, since movies have done it for decades. On the former, however, it appears Flower is one of a few games starting to break ground.
 
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