We may call films movies because the term describes a series of moving pictures, but I always like to think that we also do so because they move us emotionally. The medium’s greatest minds -- from Kubrick and Scorsese to Tarantino and Lynch -- know how to pull our emotional strings with great effectiveness.

Video games, on the other hand, struggle. I can name few which have actually made me feel something over the course of my playthrough -- Shadow of the Colossus and Valkyria Chronicles come to mind -- but I can think of tens, maybe even hundreds, that left me completely untouched.

I’m optimistic, though, after seeing two games at this year’s E3: THQ’s Homefront and Thatgamecompany’s Journey. Each aims to provoke a churning of feelings within those who experience them in entirely different ways.

Homefront

Set in a fictional, near-future United States, Homefront is a story of when the familiar becomes alien. North Korea unites with the southern half of the peninsula and proceeds to militarily dominate the immediate region. After much war, they launch an electromagnetic-pulse attack on the U.S. and occupy the country.

The game tells this backstory through a series of manipulated television images, which gives the illusion that this is real. I couldn’t help but slip into the occupation fantasy and feel sadness as I watched my country fall.

Homefront, a first-person shooter, also takes a page from Half-Life and relays its narrative to the player from within the game. This was a conscious decision by single-player Lead Designer Chris Cross, whom I spoke with about the title.

He told me that Homefront will not make use of any cutscenes. Instead, the story will unfold in front of the player’s eyes to further immerse him in the occupation fantasy.

Cross also described the development team’s decision to move away from a standard military shooter by putting the player in the shoes of a civilian turned freedom fighter. He says that Homefront will be about normal, everyday people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

This approach again reinforces the realism angle the development team wants to present. Cross wants players to feel as though they are scraping by -- only gathering just enough scarce resources, like weapons and ammunition, to barely get through. He’s even toying with a cracked-lens sniper rifle, which he thinks would support that notion.

Your squadmates, also average Americans, aren’t trained soldiers. They will make mistakes, speak their minds, and have personalities outside of action-game archetypes. Through their dialogue, Cross hopes to inject emotion into the player.

In one sequence during the demo, your ragtag group launches a surprise white-phosphorus attack on a Korean encampment. As the chemical rains down on the enemy soldiers and they slowly burn to death, one squadmate pleads with you to “take them out of their misery” with your sniper rifle. But another yells with a mix of disgust and anguish: “Let them burn.”

Players can do whatever they want without an impact on the game, since that isn’t Cross’s focus here. In what he’s dubbed the “drama engine,” his team has designed exchanges like this one to make players think about the larger issues at play -- such as the human cost of war -- and hopefully stir an emotional response from within.

Through another character, Cross again hopes to raise deeply personal issues. A Korean-American will accompany players in their war-torn journey. He has a scar across his face, which racist Americans inflicted upon him during the race riots succeeding the invasion and occupation. Cross doesn’t intend to dehumanize the player’s opponents as many other excessively popular shooters do.

Onboard the team is John Milius, who has penned the screenplays for Conan the Barbarian, Apocalypse Now, and Red Dawn. Cross envisions the game unfolding much like a miniseries, with many story and character arcs of highs and lows defining the experience.

In the end, he wants to sell this fantasy to players and so completely immerse them in the game that they feel something.