One day, I was playing Dragon Age. I made a City Elf character. Spoilers follow:

At one point early in the game, your soon-to-be-wife is kidnapped by the son of the lord of the town outside which the ghetto in which you live is located. He is going to rape her and several other young elven girls he has kidnapped. You break in to his castle and confront him. He offers you a ridiculous amount of money(especially to an elf to whom any money is an enormous amount due to their poverty) to just leave. A friend that was watching me play was wondering what happened if you took the money. I saved and tried it to see what would happen. I immediately felt as remorseful as if I had brutally tortured and murdered a dozen baby kittens. Even my friend was similarly horrified. I was absolutely incapable of continuing to play past the end of the conversation. The moment I was able to, I loaded the save from before the conversation and saved the young women. Even now as I type this, I feel physically nauseated just remembering it. I'm not crying(although I have before as a result of video games), but nonetheless, just a beginning of Dragon Age had more emotional effect on me than any film I have ever seen.

I cried on Disc 2 of Final Fantasy VII... and that was well before GDC 2004.

Thanks for sharing that. My interpretation of what Spielberg is saying is that he means when that kind of emotional response is mainstream - which will happen when tools to create emotionally-involving games are more powerful and it is almost expected to provoke a strong emotional response in the game participant. Somewhere between Farmville and the Holodeck.

Is a Tamagotchi a game? People have been crying over dead tamagotchis for almost 15 years now.

Good point. Not all games have to be theatrical, visually evocative to be immersive and emotional. I remember many times getting worked up over a game of Risk or Monopoly. The pieces on the board and the board itself were just proxies to stimulate our imagination and competitiveness. Games may never reach real-time you-are-in-a-movie status; maybe it's enough that they are fun to play.