Photo attribution: The MagicImage Collection of Hollywood Memorabilia
What is courage? Is there a difference between courageous acts and acts undertaken because of our basic need to survive? It seems to me that an act which could potentially sacrifice the actor’s security (in person, status, or property) but could potentially produce a benefit to themselves or others is a courageous act. The final ratio of the sacrifice to the possible benefit would determine whether their actions are courage or folly. Though an outcome ultimately beneficial to the actor is not necessary for the act to be courageous.
What is the first thing you thought of after reading the prompt for this week?
“Oh shit.”
Seriously, this seems like a tougher theme than the previous two. The first two themes were emotions. With fear and vigilance I tried to set up situations which would encourage those feelings in the player, but how do you promote a feeling of courage? Courage is a behavior, specifically a behavior that is counter to what we would expect when someone is experiencing fear. So my first thought when I pulled this week’s theme out of the old lunch box was, “How am I going to pull this off?”
Can you think of a situation that you’ve been in that made you feel courageous?
Not really, no. I don’t always take the path of least resistance, but I don’t think of myself as courageous. I think that if there were any times in my life when I did something courageous, It wasn’t accompanied by a feeling of courage, it was accompanied by a feeling of fear and whatever courageous act I committed simply helped to abate that fear.
Can you think of any art, movies, literature or music that illustrate the theme?
Well, there are plenty of examples in history of courage and the art, films, literature and music that depict or celebrate courageous historical figures. Aside from that I would say that most movies play on courage at least a little bit as most narratives require it from their characters at some point.
Added Tuesday, 10:46pm
How will you try to illustrate this theme in a video game?
I’m still not sure. It’s Tuesday after 9pm as I finish this post and I’ve been thinking of a system where the player has the option of taking a safe path where they are guaranteed points and safety, but they have the option to put themselves in harm’s way to collect tokens of an unknown value. I think I’ll doodle in my notebook for a while and see what I come up with.
Read the post-mortem for this courage game and play it here.