A portion of a GamesIndustry interview with developer Jenova Chen...

GI: 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.

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I would really like to see some of Mr. Chen's work come to the Wii or DS. He sounds like he's perfectly inline with what I'm looking for from games. You can read more about games and emotional value in the full interview.

Link