Re:Horror, Genre pleasure, the Unknown (Score 1)

I think it's important (and going to be increasingly more so) to have any kind of full, mature emotional attachment to either a main character in a game, or an NPC or even an environment. As with any artistic medium, once a genre gets flooded, it becomes generic, and therefore the emotional involvement becomes reduced for the player as he sees the same things over and over again.

I reckon that being scared is a relatively easy emotion to convey through games. You know, put a few swinging lights in there, a few creepy noises in mixed audio channels and a few squirts of blood going up the wall, and you've got a creepy scene. It'd be nice to see the same inroads into other emotional arenas to just give the player a sense of satisfaction at having played a part in a story, not just the satisfaction of having super fast reflexes or solving some puzzles.

The Secret of Monkey Island (going back a few years!) is a game that still sticks in my mind as having a truly memorable lead character because Guybrush was fully fleshed out. So too were the other characters in the game. I think because of that, there was a sense of satisfaction at having completed the game due to the emotional attachment to the story, characters and environs.

As the audience gets more sophisticated, the involvement of the player should get more sophisticated, either by being terrified or made to laugh or to start caring about the characters to actually want to complete the story and see what happens.

Hentai dating sims just don't have the emotional depths needed!