Emotions while interacting with medias

I was talking with my friend today and at one point he told me that I was missing out on alot of good stuff by not watching TV to which I responded that i was replacing the good stuff with other good stuff by playing video games. Then he said while youre not particularly active while watching a good show/movie on tv, its more entertaining than playing a video game cause theres more emotions.

and i firmly disagree with that no matter how you look at it, im not denying that good tv shows or movies are not entertaining and dont give you real emotions when you get involved with the show or movie, but its definitely not more entertaining.

lets look at both type of medias

in a tv show or movies, the author is entirely in control of whats displayed to the watcher, he can then try to play with different images and sounds to create different emotions, he can also write a really complex story since hes entirely in control of it, the story will develop exactly how he wants it.

In a video game, the player is free to move around and act as he/she wishes to determine the outcome. when you script a game, you dont have a full control on what youre showing, but you can still do alot of things and add scripted events that will surprise the player. The main difference tho lies in the nature of games, youre in control, you are there, you are the character, your actions matters, its not somebody else doing it in front of you and that adds alot to the immersion which id say is at the base of all emotions lived while consuming entertainement products.

Theres different emotions and good feelings I can recall from playing different good games, ill name a few just for the hell of it

Call of duty 1: In the stalingrad mission when youre sent to the front with no gun and are forced to charge the german mg42s unarmed, the first time i played through it i couldnt believed, i was playing a FPS game and i didnt have a gun to be a hero and save the day.

Call of duty 2: at the end of the Pointe du Hoc mission where you fall back to the shore while trying to contain the germans back, the feeling i had while playing that was just great, I was reloading my 2 guns as fast as i could but there were just too many

Also in cod2, at hill400 when you wait for air support to assist you at the top of the hill, then again i had a great feeling, trying to be a hero and kill as many germans as I could.

I think these 3 moments are the most intense moments i lived playing SP games, but theres other cool thats cooler for their RP part

like in Far cry 2 at one point i had to ambush a convoy so i was really high on a mountain with my sniper rifle and tried to snipe the driver, I was so far away the AI had no way to know where I was it just felt cool

Theres also actual RPG games, like kotor1, kotor2 and Dragon age, all 3 had really great stories and the in-depth dialogue system creates a really good immersion in the game, you end up liking your character and your companions quite a bit just like you would in a good tv show.

Also, as times goes on and game technologies improves (better graphics, physics, sounds) and the budgets increases, games with good stories are becoming more common, before you had programmers quickly writing stories but mainly working on the game, now you have teams of professional writers working on stories and its only gonna get better.

But thats for actual story driven games, sure the stories are cool and can give you good emotions, but theres other way to live emotions while playing games. As youre playing games, online games i might add, youre in a real world interracting with real people and when you have people with people, anything can happen. You can find what someone says or do funny, or it can make you mad, or sad, it can be anything. you can do things that makes you feel good or not so much, youre in control after all.

Ive lived all sort of emotions playing different games, the good feeling after winning a game of ut2k4 team deathmatch, seeing the score after 20 minute of intense play and what you had to do to get there.

In Star Wars Galaxies, when I PvPed with a bunch of friends and we worked togheter to beat groups of players from the other faction. I still remember one guy shouting to me on Teamspeak "BURST RUN PAKO BURST RUN" cause my character class could provide the group with a run speed buff.

Or when some guy came on teamspeak crying cause he'd been kicked from the guild ( http://pooregot.ytmnd.com ) it was a hard moment to live for everybody there and I still remember when it happened.

That and all the drama that can happen in all games with people disagreeing with each others, theres nothing more real than these emotions, its not always funny but it can definitely be really intense.

On the good side, theres all the good feelings you can get from being rewarded after accomplishing something difficult, being rewarded of all the hardwork and the good teamwork you had to go through. The sense of happiness you get after completing something difficult, and the even better feeling when you had to work in harmony with other players to do so.

But one of the best feeling you can live while playing games comes while youre actually playing and its what i call "the zone"

Its not a feeling unique to gaming, people generally live it while playing sports, its that feeling you get when you feel so in control of yourself and the game, where you feel like nothing can get past you, that you see everything, that everything and every action you make is right. Thats the best feeling, and the one im looking for when playing games.

Ive felt it while playing goaltender in street hockey or at school, as a player its possible but since you get physically tired after a while, its hard to maintain. Ive mostly felt that feeling playing games like ut2k4 in the middle of a close tdm match, or in guildwars in a good GvG. I havent felt it much playing games on the playstation 3, maybe a little bit when playing nhl 09/10 but it never felt as good as it did when playing Guildwars.

The zone is the best feeling after orgasm in my opinion