Video games are a lot of things - a $7 billion-a-year industry, a source of entertainment for millions of Americans, a pop culture phenomenon that has spawned books and films and, some argue, a medium that glorifies violence. But the one thing they are not is tear-jerkers.

At least until now.

Tomorrow, game industry leader Electronic Arts releases The Sims 2, a souped-up sequel to the best-selling computer game of all time and an attempt to reach an emotional level rarely achieved by video games. The Sims 2, in short, wants to make you cry.

The way to do that, Electronic Arts says, is through the use of artificial, or preprogrammed, intelligence. Unlike the original Sims, characters in the sequel will have aspirations, fears and memories that guide their actions. They will behave more like real people - with the hope that the real people playing the game form attachments to them.

Such emotional responses are common in the passive arts - theater, film, literature. But so far they have eluded video games, a medium that has rapidly evolved to offer stunning on-screen graphics but little depth or emotion. For video games to broaden their audience, and to step up as an artistic form, game makers realize that must change.

"As an industry, we understand that engendering emotional response is the only way you make anything of an entertainment nature interesting," said Chris Klug, a professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University and former online creative director for Electronic Arts. "If we don't engender that response, the audience is going to turn away and do something else."

Toward that end, creators of The Sims 2, which will sell for $50, have allowed players to choose not only the appearances of their characters, but also their personalities and aspirations.

Characters can be neat, shy, playful, grouchy, lazy - or the opposites of those traits. They can aspire to wealth or popularity or family. They can form memories: If they get burned in their kitchen, they'll order pizza for dinner the next night.

And, unlike the previous edition of The Sims, which came out in 2000, characters in the new game can die. Sims 2 characters experience six stages of life - from infancy to old age - and when they die, they pass their traits on to their children, and beyond.

"You feel deeply engaged in the lives of the human beings you've created," said Lucy Bradshaw, the game's executive producer. "It's certainly a goal, to bring more of an emotional sensibility into games. It's essential this medium gets to that level."

In seeking that level, Sims 2 creators worked with experts in human behavior to shape their characters. And Electronic Arts, the Northern California-based maker of The Sims and the world's biggest video game company, is opening a 500-person studio in Los Angeles and hiring movie industry veterans to help bring emotion and storytelling to video games.

More than the 'look'

The video game medium is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. Hardly anyone played the games 20 years ago, but now more than half of Americans say they do. Rapid progress in technology has meant that video games look better and better, and industry officials say "photo realism" - games that look like real life - will be the norm in five years.

That means games will have to offer something other than graphics to distinguish themselves from competitors.

"Every game will look as good as the next one," said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association. "The game community is going to have to do a better job of giving the players something to connect to the game. It will inevitably be better writing, better plots, better storytelling and a better job of creating a truly immersive experience."

Enter The Sims. The first edition of the game was built on the popular SimCity games in which players built towns complete with roads, parks, power plants, homes. If Godzilla or a natural disaster ripped through your town, you didn't much care. You just started over again.

The Sims allowed players to put people in the houses they built. But much of the game was devoted to tending to the Sims' basic needs - eating, bathing, using the bathroom. They were stupid, in a way: They would walk through fires or get stuck in a corner.

"In Sims 1 it was a little bit like Groundhog Day," said Bradshaw, the executive producer, referring to the Bill Murray film in which a man keeps repeating a single day over and over. "Your Sim woke up every day and it was a brand new day."

Aspirations, personality

The original game was a hit, but the creators realized that for a sequel, the characters would not only have to look more human - with more choices of hairstyles and clothing - but act more human. So they imbued them with aspirations and personality traits. They had Sims share DNA with their children and grandchildren. If a family member dies, relatives become sad and mope around. Their gloomy thoughts appear in bubbles over their heads.

And, finally, the game creators called in Brenda Harger, a professor at Carnegie Mellon with a background in theater and technology who is studying emotion in video games. She and four graduate students flew to Electronic Arts' headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., to talk about their work.

Harger believes video games place too much emphasis on appearance and not enough on character. She says games must use more of their processing power to add depth and dimension to characters, to make their behavior more random and less predictable.

"The gaming industry grew out of computer science people, not artists in particular," she said. "There's a fundamental difference between games and stories, but I think there is an intersection that can occur."

Klug, her colleague at Carnegie Mellon, said games can follow the lead of films and TV in making characters appear more real and sympathetic. Screenwriters have something of a checklist to make characters more appealing - a self-deprecating sense of humor, an appreciation of art and beauty, a value of family, a love of animals - and some of that can translate to video games.

Video game characters can also be given goals to achieve - getting married or finding a good job - and moving characters toward those goals can engage the audience, Klug said.

He noted that video games are not devoid of emotion. They can be good at eliciting guilt, for instance, because the player is the person directly responsible for what happens to a character on the screen.

"Guilt is hard to elicit in film or narrative prose because you are removed from the decision," Klug said. But in video games, "The exhilaration of winning isn't distanced. It's immediate. The visceral thrill of killing something - though it isn't the real thing - there's no doubt that's part of why certain games are addictive to certain people."

The Sims 2 doesn't exactly prompt those sorts of emotions. Bradshaw, the executive producer, says players can get some satisfaction from overseeing the evolution of a Sims family, of following them through generations and helping them reach for their goals. But the work is far from done.

"I think video games have a long way to go," she said. "It's fairly young compared to literature, theater. I see a time when that gap is going to close, and the fact that you can be an active participant in something may make you more emotional."

And just maybe make you cry.
 

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