Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering

The better you are, the less they'll think you did.

No one expects

the game player to pick out every instrument in the game's score, nor every sound used in the game's sound design, nor notice every tiny shadow configured by the game's art team.

So too, an extraordinary amount of Emotioneering is designed to emotionally affect a game player, but not to be consciously noticed.

Almost all the techniques in this book, when used well, will operate either just on the edge of or, preferably, just outside of a game player's conscious awareness.

As discussed previously, one of the prime reasons that beginning screenwriters usually do such artless work is that they've only noticed the obvious aspects of films and television shows. They are unaware of the 75% of techniques that create powerful emotional effects but that are designed not to be noticed.

When examining Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in the previous chapter, we looked at an example of one of those "hidden" techniques: the Plot Deepening Technique that I call "Two Major Characters Change Places."^[1]

^[1] That film uses many more Plot Deepening Techniques as well, and all of them could be applied to games. Some of these techniques will be examined in Chapter 2.17, "Plot Deepening Techniques."

To be artful as a writer is to have most of your work go unnoticed, for it operates outside the conscious awareness of the audience. Skillful Emotioneering will encounter the same fate most gamers won't notice the techniques that you employ.

If you do your work well, the gamers will be drawn emotionally into the game, but they will have no idea why. They'll have no idea that you did tremendous work over countless hours to cause that effect.

So, oddly, their thinking you did almost nothing will be your greatest reward.