Clive Thompson
25/1/05
the crying game.
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.25.06/emotional-0604.html
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I COULD TELL something was wrong as soon as I saw my friend's eyes. It was back in 1997,
and he'd been playing the recently released Final Fantasy VII.
That afternoon, he'd gotten to a famously shocking scene in which Aerith, a beloved young magician girl,
is suddenly and viciously murdered.

He looked like he'd lost a family member. "I'm just totally screwed up,"
he confessed as he nursed a lukewarm beer at a local bar.
Nearly all my other friends were playing Final Fantasy VII, too. So one by one over the next week,
they all hit the same scene, until every nerd I knew was sunk in a slough of despond.

Not all games offer such a wide emotional palette, of course. Bowen found that role-playing games were the most emotionally potent genre, with 78 percent of gamers singling it out. First-person shooters came next, with 52 percent of gamers in agreement. Flight simulators and flying games finished dead last, at 8 percent each.

(in responce to the bowen research article)
Why? Probably because RPGs and first-person shooters rely most heavily on a narrative structure,
and narrative is one of the world's oldest technologies for transmitting an emotional payload.
Indeed, when Bowen asked his respondents to pick the single most emotionally affective game,
the far-and-away winner—with a remarkable 61 percent of votes—was Final Fantasy,
one of the most narrative-heavy series in history.