Emotional Contagion 2

My last emotional contagion went over the compelling love story between two characters and their adventures together in the StarCraft universe. Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan had an amazing story put together for them by some talented story writers. I have found another great set of story writers in yet another great game series. The release of this new series was on July 11, 2007, and had many emotional scenes. The one that gave me the most emotional response to was in the end of the series released September 20, 2011. This was not a relationship between lovers like my last one, but instead a relationship between best friends. If you haven't guessed which game this is yet, it's Gears of War 3. The scene I have chosen contains spoilers and will be disclosed after the spoilers line.

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The scene chosen was when Dom makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his squad from imminent death of the lambert and locust and kills himself as well as the enemies enclosing Delta squad. Here is the scene from the game.



The way how the designers and story tellers had constructed this scene to be so emotional is to bring back as much from the past as possible to stimulate more emotion to the viewer. For example, the most obvious part was when Dom brings up his wife Sofia. He has gone through a lot in the second installment of the gears series looking for his wife. This search results in finding his wife did not make it. Again, in the initial trailer of Gears of War 1 they released it with the song Mad World playing in the background. This became something like a theme song to the first Gears game because of that trailer. They later made it an easter egg in the third game when you played on a certain multiplayer map Gridlock. So to hear this song playing in the background of the scene brings back all the memories of Marcus and Dom together. These memories will further grow the emotion of the viewer for this scene.

During the scene they show that everyone is affected by the death of Dom but Marcus is the one who is most affected. This is because the designers wanted to focus all of the emotional feedback and response to the player. Likewise in my last blog, they put the focus of the emotions on Kerrigan because during that scene, they had you playing as her and it will impact you greater if the player you are controlling is going through these emotions.

The sacrifice Dom made for his best man and his squad could really emotionally impact those who have served in the military before and went through a similar scenario. I could only imagine the flashbacks of a soldier having their best friend saving their life. I can see that a friends sacrifice wouldn't even be necessary since it would be such an emotional topic to begin with. But to have lost a best friend so you could live on would really get to the viewer deep.

I think this scene is the most emotional cutscene in any game, more emotional than the loss of Cortana or the loss of Tycus. This game is about war and sacrifice. There are many more scenes of loss that Marcus and other people in the Cog army have experienced loss.

If you are interested in viewing the full cutscenes of this game to understand how this one scene can be so emotional to players, I will leave a link below.