Every single time you think about something, you are actually only thinking about yourself. This is true whether it’s about your boss, partner, child, or even yourself. This emotional blindness, called “emotional blindness,” occurs when we believe we are responsible for others’ happiness. Our emotional blinders cause us to believe that we can fix the problem if we fix ourselves.
Emotional blindness, like any other blind spot, is often the result of a lack of self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize our emotions and the emotions of others and to understand the effect they have on our lives. It’s not something you can force on yourself. It’s something you have to develop. The good news is that you can, and I’ll give you the details of what that process involves in the pages that follow.
Our goal in Deathloop is to take out eight Visionaries, intelligent party-lovers who’ve locked an island into one repeating day so they can piss about for eternity. It’s implied that Colt used to be the head of security for these Visionaries, but something bad clearly happened for him to be trying to murder them all.
It’s a common theme in our interviews with developers; one of the ways they can be emotionally blinded is by their own inability to recognize emotion in others. We’ve seen this play out with many developers who have worked on Star Citizen’s The Dark Eye, our third game in its story mode. One such developer, and a friend of ours, is also the director of The Dark Eye.
The one thing we see in the trailers and interviews is that the developers are more concerned about the story and how the story is told to our audience than they are about how they make the game. The problem is that many developers are so focused on getting their game to look good that they forget to make it feel great.
What makes a good story? Well, I think that’s a problem that our own study of over a billion pages did not find. It turns out that the good story is one that is interesting, well written, and believable. That is, we want the story to make sense, that it has meaning, that it makes a kind of sense, and that it has a point to it.
We also want the story to make us feel something. That is, the story should make us feel something. That is, the story should make us feel a certain emotion, one we should feel. For instance, I think the problem with most games is not that they don’t make me feel something about them, it’s that they make me feel nothing at all.
The emotional blindness is the same in real life as what it is in games. The problem is that it’s so widespread in games that it’s hard to even talk about it. I mean, if I walked up to you and said, “Hey; I think I know this game”, I’m sure you’d be quite interested in knowing what game I’m thinking about.
If you are a gamer, you’ve probably already found this yourself. You’ve probably seen it in some games, seen the same emotion in others, and you know you must have it too. For me, I feel no emotion whatsoever, because I’m not in the mood to feel any emotion. You see, I’ve been told I am emotionally blind.
Emotionally blind? This is a term that has never really caught on. In the 1990’s games like Doom or Star Control II or Command & Conquer or Doom 3, you could find a character with an emotion in the game. You would find this character so intensely sad that you would think he was going to cry. Well, he just did. For me, I feel nothing.