If we set-aside emotions such as happiness and enjoyment or even tension and excitement, which all games will provoke in some way otherwise nobody would really play them, I think games only really provoke a deeper emotional response if the game has an deeply emotive subject. It’s not so much the game as the context of the game that I think provokes the response. For example you could re-skin the Holding On game to be about a car that’s been sent into the garage and just managing the repairs to the point where the car becomes a write off because it’s uneconomical to repair it. It would be exactly the same game mechanically but because the context is different you would likely not get an emotional response (unless you havr recently been subjected to a massive mechanics bill in which case maybe it might be a bit close to home).

I have always seen games as having two components; the mechanic and the context. The mechanic is the maths and probability engines and what have you on which the rules are based. The context is a wrapper that essentially masks the mechanics and makes us want to play the game by making it relatable to us. For a lot of people, and I see this a lot with 40k players, they can see through the wrapper straight through to the numbers and that’s how they view the game. They talk about damage output in terms of probability, of how many points of damage a unit can reasonably expect to do in a turn, For people with minds like that re-skinning the game does nothing more than change the aesthetic and while that may potentially switch them on or off in terms of having to buy and paint models, to them it’s still the same game. And then there’s people like me who if you re-skin the games they become different games because I view the the game in terms of its context; the goal of holding a persons hand through their final moments is not the same as investigating a broken car and eventually scrapping it even if mechanically the two games were identical. So for me it’s the games context that will provoke, or not, an emotional response.

In terms if my own Wargaming experience I don’t think they have ever really produced anything like the kind of emotion I feel when watching something like Band of Brothers or the Rembrance Day Ceremonies. In terms of miniature painting they definitely have because that’s when I can build little dioramas that tell stories. I recently painted the Salute Armistice Centenary Special miniature and made a small scenic base with poppies. That definitely provoked a response because the model itself carried a message and just the act of adding the small red flowers brought up memories of the closing scene of blackadder goes forth which ultimately fades into a field full of red poppies. But that’s not really the game, that’s a creative process and as such is largely fuelled by emotion, feelings and experiences – being creative is by its nature emotional.

In other news you should all be wary of groups of men who are planning revolutions in pubs. It wouldn’t be the first time a revolution had been started in a drinking establishment with devastating consequences…