Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering

Adding Emotional Depth to a Game Through Symbols (Chapter 2.23)

The sun will come to have increasing uses in gameplay:

• As a repository of information

• As a way of teaching you a new language made of pictures

• As a location for you to have an adventure, when you enter the sun and its memories

• As a weapon; after you learn some of the sun's language, you'll be able to use a weapon that channels the far-away sun's force and shoots out fire

But the sun will also work as a symbol, accruing emotional associations as the game progresses.

On a simple level, it will be a symbol of Katrina. She will have a sunny smile, and, at least in the cinematics, there will always be sunlight on her face.

To discuss other emotional associations that the sun will acquire, I need to share more of the plot:

It will turn out that, just as you were told by the resistance fighters, your anti-gravity research caused a huge explosion in 2018. There were two results:

• The explosion didn't kill you. You were in the center of it, where there was a stillness a sort of eye-of-the-hurricane effect. You were, however, knocked into a coma.

• The explosion didn't just knock out a piece of Boston. It split the Earth into two Earths in two separate dimensions. And time runs differently in both dimensions. You're in the future of that second dimension now.

But you're in the other dimension as well, and in that dimension, only three years have passed since the explosion not the more than 70 years that have transpired in this dimension.

So, strangely, you're in a coma in the 2105 in one dimension, and you really are in 2075 in the second dimension. Both realities are true.

In the 2075 dimension, neither the government nor the resistance are totally good or bad. In the game, you have the ability to bring peace to this world and undo the damage you did in 2018 with the explosion you caused.

When it's all over, and a peace is worked out, you've brought sunlight to this troubled world. Various verbal clues (someone actually saying you've brought sunlight) and visual clues (such as the sun shining down lyrically on the singing of a peace treaty) will bring this home. So the sun will be now be associated with peace.

And when you awake from your coma, you'll find yourself in a hospital, looking out a sunny window into a beautiful garden. So the sun will be associated with rebirth.

So, in the game, the sun will take on more and more emotional associations. It will be associated with:

• Katrina and your warm feelings for her

• Peace

• Rebirth

Remember that such symbols usually make their most powerful emotional impact when the player isn't aware of them consciously.