Out of all the games we’ve played up to Week 7 for this class, none had managed to make me angry. Even games like Problem Attic and Curtain, which everyone agrees are disorienting and uncomfortable games, only managed to slightly annoy me at the most. But I must admit––We The Giants angered me.
When I first opened this game, I was intrigued by its aesthetic. Assuming the role of a giant––which is represented in the game as a black square/rectangle with an eye––I proceeded through the game, reading the instructions until I reached the most important one: how to sacrifice. After seeing another giant perform the sacrifice ritual and leaving behind knowledge about baking soda and vinegar, I knew that I wanted to impart something much better. So, seeing that it was my turn to sacrifice, I pressed esc, spent maybe fifteen minutes trying to write something insightful and maximize on the character limit, and then pressed sacrifice. Nothing happened.
I was so angry, and not because I spent time trying to write something meaningful. But because I felt cheated. I expected to be able to sacrifice myself, and impart my wisdom onto other giants when I was no longer alive. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the game wouldn’t allow me or anyone else to perform a sacrifice.
I don’t know what emotions everyone else was experience while playing this game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was the only one to feel angry, but I do actually think the anger I felt toward the game made me more interested in it. Even though it wasn’t the creator’s intention to have the sacrifice mechanic disabled from the beginning, the anger I felt at it not working prompted me to think about the game from a lot of different angles. How I was so stressed trying to write something meaningful to impart, but the simplicity of the baking soda and vinegar example conveys that even little things are valuable, as it’s the culmination of everyone’s advice that leads to the stars. On the other hand, because the giants aren’t actually giants, one could interpret that as the game saying that little people are capable of giant ideas. Regardless, my point is that my anger made me think about the game more strongly than I would have otherwise. So I think it’s worth thinking about the role that emotion plays in educational games, and how evoking emotion could be used strategically to improve learning from educational games.
You weren't the only one! I tried the game on multiple different browsers, each time tweaking my message to make it more and more perfect, thinking I could use the technical difficulties in my favor to get across exactly what I wanted to say - just to find out I can't say it! When games don't do what they're supposed to, or more specifically, when they appear to fail to follow through with their promises about what we can get from them, in that moment, you must acknowledge that you want the game to give you the next step, which I think sometimes hurts! When waiting for a server in Modern Warfare 3, or that next turn in Civ when…