Will Deus Ex: Human Revolution make you cry?

In our E3 demo, you're in an island near Shanghai and your goal is to locate this hacker. You've been directed to go to a nightclub because its owner is part of a black market operation. The owner, Tong, probably has the information you want. So your goal is to get to Tong.

But he's not just going to talk to anyone, so you have to find a way to do this. You can do it by exploring, through secret stealth, or you can talk to one of the bartenders and convince him to let you speak to his boss.

Right from the beginning, he's like, who are you and why should I do this? He starts trying to say there's no way I'll do it because you're not important enough and we don't care about your goals. As you start looking at it, you start reading the personality of this guy and you start realising he's trying to stop me from this by either bull*****ing me by lying and telling me the boss is nowhere near here, or he's maybe trying to put me down by saying I'm a foreigner and what right do I have, or he's taking this other tack.

Every time he does that you have to counter his argument in a way that will make him go, oh, well OK, that didn't work, so let's try this. Ultimately you're able to convince him or not.

There's great potential to go beyond what films can do. The difference games have versus movies is, when you're playing a game you're an active participant and what's happening to it is happening to you. There's an aspect of it that's so much more personal once you get into it.

The way we've told stories in the past through film is, the author of the story is in complete control of it and they can craft something that pulls on your heartstrings. They know the craft and they know the way to give information, reveal it, hold stuff back, characterise their characters, and they know they can feed this to you in a way that makes sense, that builds that questioning inside you to say, 'Where's this going? What's happening?' The revelations are very powerful and hit you when they hit you and make you feel an emotional response.

But games, we have the dilemma that we can't control what the player is looking at and seeing, and we have to find new ways of doing it, and find new tools of storytelling that enable us to have those reactions.

The more we're working on it we're getting better and better at it, but we have to work more closely with the other members of the team. All sides have to understand we are working together to create a powerful emotional experience and there are times that execution is very important and there are times when the gameplay is what's going to have to do it. So, how can we work together to get that?

There are certain times when it struck me and really made me go, wow, and gave me a chill. I don't know. I certainly hope it will. But I won't know until people play it.

I certainly hope it will and I think it explores some pretty interesting issues and if we can manage to get you connected to those issues and get you to feel those issues, then we will succeed in stirring some kind of emotional reaction.

Will we? I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping we do.