Let's turn the clock back about 15 years. I was in college, I was pursuing a Communication Arts -- Multimedia degree, and I was taking a course (in my woefully underprepped department) on writing for games. It was pretty barebones, and I don't even know where my class project wound up, but I did keep the textbook from that class, David Freeman's Creating Emotion in Games. I had some misgivings about it, I had some opinions about it, but I still kept it around. I just decided to crack it back open, and do a cover-to-cover reread. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to find, but let's have a look together.
The thing that I'm most interested to find out is how the perspective of a decade and a half has changed me. I've spent a lot of time thinking about game narratives and playing different game narratives--mostly analog games, but I've also done some analysis of digital storytelling as well. Plus, that decade and a half has seen a large number of narrative-rich games come out, games that defined what narrative means for me, like Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, Toby Fox's Undertale, the Life is Strange series, Obsidian Entertainment's Alpha Protocol, and even Dragon Age. I'm hoping that it'll be interesting to see predictions that were borne out, predictions that weren't, and the way that game narrative has evolved in the 20 years since this book was first published.
The Introduction Part
Creating Emotion in Games is ultimately David Freeman's sales pitch for a technique he calls "Emotioneering™". Yes, that's how it's written throughout the book. Yes, it's officially trademarked. No, I'm not going to consistently dunk on it, because at the end of the day I do legitimately want to explore the techniques it posits--and I do remember there being plenty of good, cohesive ideas in there, even if I found the presentation to be a bit pretentious and even dogmatic. But then again, college me was intensely rebellious against formula writing (do not get me started on Campbell), so maybe it's not as bad as I'm remembering.
These first chapters are really a way of setting the stage for the meat of the book, which is 32 categories of Freeman's Emotioneering™ techniques. From a game design perspective, there's not a lot to write home about, because these are where David establishes bona fides and also puts together a sales pitch--I mean that quite literally. He's very open about his notion that building emotional moments into games is a financially sound decision as well as an artistic one, and he puts that right upfront--the very third section of the intro chapter, in fact. This leads into why I want to still cover this part of the book in blog posts: because it's context. At the end of the day, all of these techniques are coming from a specific perspective, David Freeman's perspective. They've been honed and tempered by experience, but they're still coming from him, and they bear his biases and personal views. I don't have the academic knowledge to point out some of the other options to the ideas he puts out there, but I will try to at least identify places that his confidence might belie an oversight.
The first section (Chapter 1.1) is very barebones, and acts as a primer. It gives two of Freeman's websites (neither of which are operational any longer, which--it's been 20 years, I'm not wholly surprised--and points out that avenues such as art and music are not being considered here. Fair enough! We move into Chapter 1.2, which is the introduction proper to the book. (Side note: there is a surprising amount of time devoted to an honestly kinda cringeworthy joke, where Freeman, recounting the silence of game developers asked to describe a profound emotional gaming moment, quips that they had "become accidental Buddhists". I bring this up because it's another reminder of the limits of his perspective--in this case, culturally. Anyhow, he uses the phrase three or four times in the chapter, and it just turns into one of those moments that starts feeling weird.) The mission statement, as set forth in the book, is to transform game design and writing: Freeman came to games from a screenwriting background, and felt a lack of attention being given to writing in games. This section also touches on the difficulties of emotional design in games, because of the lack of (or changes in) linearity compared to film, and the variety involved.
He identifies two ways that film and TV emotionally engage the audience: creating characters who they identify with, and having those characters undergo emotionally moving (I would also add "resonant") experiences. Based on my vague memories of reading the book previously, these two things will probably be the pillars that Freeman uses to approach creating emotion in games. The challenges in games, he notes, are that you don't always have precise control over the order of events, you can't always control the timing between events, and you can't guarantee that the audience will truly inhabit/identify with characters (although to be fair, this also applies to film, I would think). I've definitely noticed some ways that more modern games work with those constraints, although I'll wait to talk about that until we hit a more relevant chapter.
The Sales Pitch
I'll be honest, I don't much care for Chapter 1.3 ("Why Put Emotion Into Games?"), but that's mostly because it's a sales pitch, and I'm not here for the sales pitch. I've already bought into the idea of building richer emotional experiences in games. Furthermore, I think this is the section that may have been made the most obsolete in the past 20 years, because we now have a wide body of work to draw on that proves there is a meaningful audience for games with resonant emotional beats. From my vague memory, it definitely seemed much less of a given back in the day, though. Most games that were acclaimed for their narrative were games unfamiliar to US audiences, such as Moon and Ace Attorney. Nowadays, we have AAA games like Insomniac's Spider-Man series, which are heavily regarded for the stories they're built around, and are incredibly successful.
However, I do want to pick on Freeman for one little thing, mostly because I think it helps to illustrate some of the author perspective here.
"But gamers complained that the story [of Metal Gear Solid II was unengaging--even trite and silly... And how much damage was done to the brand? How much will the next sequel not make because of the lessened passion U.S. game players felt for Metal Gear Solid II? (Freeman, Chapter 1.3)I get that it's an attempt to tie concrete numbers to things. And yeah, I have my own issues with Hideo "you will be ashamed of your words & deeds" Kojima. But c'mon now. Making the story of this series less trite and silly would actually be fundamentally damaging to the brand, and probably do an even worse number on sales--the memetic silliness of the story crossed with its commentary on geopolitics is what makes it fundamentally compelling to most of its fans. Which is an important reminder, going through the book: while Freeman's perspective is that games need these emotioneering techniques in order to engage the player and be more appealing, it's key to remember that they need to be applied in pursuit of the game's core themes/atmosphere/approach. Indeed, the Metal Gear games are prominently known for using novel and sometimes obtuse gameplay mechanics in order to communicate narrative in idiosyncratic ways. You can make a game emotionally resonant, but true resonance doesn't come without a stronger purpose behind it.
The Trouble With Screenwriters
Wrapping this post up is Chapter 1.4, where we get a slight detour to talk about the specific challenges that games writing poses to screenwriters (the writing culture that David Freeman is most familiar with). There's a few more sections to Chapter 1, but we'll cover those in another post, and then start moving on to the actual Emotioneering™ techniques after that. Here, the book addresses the question, "Why isn't simply hiring a screenwriter--even a famous or a talented one--always the 'magic pill' that games need?" (Freeman, Chapter 1.4) It's still part of the sales pitch, but what makes this bit interesting to me is that it sheds light on the unique perspective of comparing and contrasting two types of writing.
The first major category called out is linearity: while (most) film and TV can rely on a linear progression to tell a story, calibrate tension, establish moods, and draw viewers in, games are often unbound by these constraints in one or more ways. I'm currently playing Dragon Age: Origins, a game with several major storylines that can be played through in whatever sequence you want--or even sometimes in parallel, with you hopping back and forth between some of them. On top of that, the linearity of story exists not just in chronology, but in the way that players interact with the story--Freeman points out the varying ways that players interact with the game Grand Theft Auto III as an example, and there's many others in modern game design. The "nice/mean" playthroughs of Bioware-style RPGs (e.g., Open Hand/Closed Fist, Paragon/Renegade, and so on) represent radically differing takes on a game's themes and the way players interact with a world.
Next up is a very interesting, subtle point: while screenwriters might have notions of getting a player to inhabit a role, that's a big ask from a player perspective, and absent the presence of techniques to get the player directly invested in playing the role of the main character, they're likely to bulldoze over any work done by the writers, in favor of substituting a simplistic role onto the character. In my experience, the most successful games at doing this are ones that use small, gradual reinforcement. One of the reasons that Life is Strange: True Colors engaged me so thoroughly is that it gave me gradual invitations to interact with people, places, and things in the town of Haven, each time revealing a bit of main character Alex's perspective and thoughts. It's a very different kind of writing from the more directed tactics employed in screenwriting.
There's a few more miscellaneous points here, about dialogue (games dialogue can't usually afford to be lengthy and detailed) and screenwriters wanting to use cinematics (not to be relied on in games, because they pull players out of the game). But what really gets the next chunk of description is a heading about the games-writing process. Like TV writing (and some film writing), it's a group process, but games need a large variety of things, from overall narrative to plot-important dialogue to incidental NPC dialogue to audiologs/lore snippet text. On top of that, the book points out that there's a sort of programming logic to games writing: like some gamebooks (e.g. Lone Wolf and others) or the well-explored ground of dating sims, player choices can have tremendous impact on things that aren't plot, such as the intensity of character reactions.
This is all actually really good stuff to chew through, and while writers have been adapting to these challenges, these are fundamental things that narrative design always needs to keep in mind. There are processes being developed in the games world to have clear tools for these challenges, but anyone coming to games from another writing background still has to deal with them.
Then the book goes into a weird tangent about why the author doesn't like hiring comic-book writers (which is odd; I wasn't aware that comic-book writers were particularly considered for games writing, back in the day, and I suspect this is more of a personal bugbear of his), and wraps things up. It's the first substantial section of the book, and though I disagree with the pat method of "use these 17 easy points to identify the struggles of a screenwriter you're bringing onto a project", I think there's some important abstract topics here.
Next Time...
And with that, the first segment of this retrospective is done. We'll finish the introductory chapter in the next post, which hits topics like:
- Why letting game designers do the writing can be a problem
- The importance of the term "Emotioneering™"
- Other miscellaneous things
After that, we'll start diving into the meat of the book, the 32 Types of Emotioneering™ Techniques.
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