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Chapter 2.27. Emotioneering Techniques Category 27: True-to-Life Techniques

Chapter 2.27. Emotioneering Techniques Category #27: "True-to-Life" Techniques

A realistic talk about realism .

Adding a sense

of realism to the NPCs' emotional actions and reactions helps create emotional immersion.

Certainly, in the past, one of the primary ways of making a game immersive has been to make it look, sound, and feel realistic.

This effort has prompted successive innovations in creating software that emulates the refraction of light, the textures of buildings , and the semi-random animation of fire, or of waves on the ocean. It's this effort that has prompted games to include changing weather, or to make day in a game turn into night.

The bottom line: Realism creates emotional immersion.

In Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force , you go on a variety of dangerous missions as part of a small squad. There are a few places in the game where you can overhear some of the other team members talking among themselves before a mission.

In one of these situations, you hear a character named Chell expressing his terror at the upcoming mission. Hearing him express his fear actually ups the fearfulness of the mission itself.

The moral of the story is that having NPCs undergo appropriate emotions can make the game much more realistic. This means, for instance, having an NPC express such things as:

Fear before or during a frightening situation or event
Relief after it's over
Sorrow for a wounded or killed comrade
Exhilaration after a difficult mission or piece of a mission is over

Remember, however, that when a character expresses fear, sorrow, or some other powerful emotion, quite often the way it's best expressed isn't by the character stating his feelings directly. For instance, having an NPC say "I'm afraid" is usually weak writing and, thus, can undo efforts to create emotional immersion.

The same emotion can often be expressed much more powerfully by such techniques as:

Having the NPC feign that he isn't afraid, yet have something about his tone of voice, his wording, or his actions contradict his statement.
Having the NPC's pent-up emotion erupt inappropriately toward someone else. For example, before the big, looming battle, which your squad expects to lose, NPC "A" erupts angrily toward his best friend NPC "B," as a result of his inner tension.
Learning that the NPC, despite his cool demeanor, is actually terrified—from a report by another NPC who saw evidence of the first character's terror.
If the NPC does express his fear, "less is more" (having the NPC say few words) almost always communicates strong emotion more realistically and more powerfully than having the NPC go on and on.

Remember that your NPCs should have different Character Diamonds and, thus, would show fear in very different ways. (For more on making NPCs sound unique, see Chapters 2.1 through 2.4.)

Final Thoughts

When characters go through emotional situations but don't react with appropriate emotional responses (or react with no emotional responses at all), it causes the game to have a cartoony feeling. That's okay if that's the effect you want, but most of the time I've seen cartoony reactions by NPCs in games , it's a result of poor writing or design.

Once you decide on the emotional response you want, then you've got to find an artful way to communicate it.

Chapter 2.28. Emotioneering Techniques Category #28: Cross-Demographic Techniques

What teens and adults have in common: Hopefully, your game.

This chapter

focuses on techniques to make games appeal to both kids (or young teens) and adults.

At one of the game conventions I attended, a talk on how to make a hit game really caught my attention.

The speaker was the president of one of the most successful game development studios in the world, specializing in platformers. His company had just released a high-budget platformer whose sales, while significant, hadn't measured up to the very high expectations that had been set for it.

The company head's postmortem was that his game needed more violence. He pointed out that Grand Theft Auto III , which had debuted four months earlier to massive numbers , had a lot of violence and was selling quite well. He said that his next game would have more violence, so that his games once again would be in sync with popular tastes.

I thought there was one thing right with his analysis, and three things wrong.

The right item is that, as this book is being written, platformers are indeed not performing well. Whether this will change in the future is hard to predict.

But I also had a couple problems with his analysis:

There is no shortage of violent games on the market. Many sell well, but many sell poorly. So violence in and of itself isn't enough to, in any way, guarantee game sales.
Grand Theft Auto III and its sequel Vice City use tons of Emotioneering techniques. It's the artful blending of great gameplay and Emotioneering that has resulted in these games' success, not violence in and of itself. To take another example, there are many games more violent than Max Payne , but it sold very well.
I'd seen such attempts to find "magic pills" (easy solutions) in the film business, and they always fail. Various executives, in substitution for their lack of knowledge about story, characters , suspense , and the creation of emotional experiences, have tried relying on simple formulas. Or they'll become obsessed with one genre as the way to guarantee success. One year they might think it's big action pictures, the next year it's feel-good movies, or teen comedies, or films based on comic books, or romantic comedies, or whatever their idea of a sure-fire hit is.

Yes, there are trends, and it's great when you can ride one. But these magic pills rarely work. It turns out that films also need (what do you know) good writing. ^[1] This lesson applies to games as well, in that a search for a single formula to make a great game won't work.