In this chapter Freeman introduces the concept of 'depth'. Depth is a recurring theme throughout Creating Emotion in Games. Decrying the lack of depth in games writing is Freeman's underlying motivation behind the whole Emotioneering show. My biggest general criticism of the book is the lack of attention Freeman gives to defining the almost esoteric terms he bandies around so freely and his failure to properly define what he means by 'depth' is the biggest sin.
In short, he offers Emotioneering as the solution to the 'problem' but he never pin points exactly what he thinks that problem is. Not to my satisfaction, anyway. The first three chapters of the book are an extended forward, pitching the sale for his Emotioneering idea. In them he covers everything from the political difficulties of developers writing their own dialogue (instead of hiring a professional writer) to the dangers of being fleeced by Hollywood agents. Through soapbox oratory and vague anecdotes, heavy with self-aggrandisement, he lays out the reasons for adding emotional 'depth' to games writing, the financial benefits, enhanced marketing, the enrichment of the gaming experience, but not once does he try to pin down specifically what is lacking, or what Emotioneering is going to add.
Here we are at Chapter 2.2, about to embark on the first practical implementation of adding 'depth' and still no definition. What we do get is a series of slightly lame and rambling metaphors, defining 'shallowness'.
“No-one comes to the defence of shallow,” he says. “Children drown in the shallow end.” And “Dive into the shallow end and all that comes of it is an opportunity to get to know your head trauma specialist on a first name basis. Time to give your NPCs a shallow-ectomy.” I mean, what?
What?
And exactly how does Freeman suggest we begin to excise the 'shallow' from our NPCs? We “open an Emotioneering tool chest” of course.
I can understand why people slam this book closed and toss it to one side, to be honest. I guess Freeman's style is supposed to be 'accessible', but without any meat in all this sauce it just comes across as lacking substance. If Freeman wants people to take his ideas seriously then he might have been better served taking them more seriously himself.
OK, rant over. Let's get into the specifics and see if we can do any better. Maybe by taking a closer look at how Emotioneering is going to add 'depth' to our characters we can divine more about what Freeman thinks 'depth' is.
After qualifying the forthcoming NPC Deepening Techniques as 'limited', Freeman offers us 'Emotional Pain'. Oops, I guess the rant isn't QUITE over yet:
'This is all I have space for, there are many more than this' is another recurring thought from Freeman. I find this profoundly irritating. I paid money for this book, being told frequently that it is incomplete does not reassure me that I have made a sound purchase, nor does it serve as a satisfactory excuse if I find it somewhat lacking.
'Emotional Pain' then, what is it?
“Pain, whether expressed or held in, gives an NPC depth” says Freeman, again avoiding telling us exactly what that is.
At this point I'm going to pull out another stylistic feature of Freeman's writing for special attention and that's his explanatory technique of 'interpreting' a particular piece of artwork. Creating Emotion in games is heavily loaded with illustrated plates, including a full-colour section in the centre and an appendix that details the artists' biographies and contact details extensively.
Freeman refers to this artwork in his writing, explaining in detail what is supposed to be happening in the picture and how the characters depicted are feeling in that frozen moment in time.
I think I get this. It seems to me that Freeman tried to draw connections between semi-arbitrary visuals and concepts of emotion as an allegory for a similar process that takes place when you play a videogame.
It was while Freeman was presenting one of these art interpretation episodes that Chris Crawford finally snapped and walked out of Freeman's lecture at the Sydney Opera House in 2004, later offering this scathing criticism in his travelogue:
“What really set me off (and induced me to walk out of his lecture) was the man's spectacularly silly discussion of a bit of artwork he had used for the cover of his new book (which he told us about several times)...
“This comic-book drawing provided the basis for ten minutes of lecture on its deeper dramatic significance. We were told, for example, of the complex emotional conflicts torturing our oh-so-sensitive hero as he contemplates the risks he takes by using but a single hand to wield his blaster. If he were to dump the curvaceous beauty, he could use both hands, the better to blast the beasts with, but after long milliseconds of agonized soul-searching he has decided to risk all for virtue. Even worse, we are told, the slimy green monster he is about to vaporize is actually his boyhood friend and best buddy, who has been transformed into a monster. Oh, the exquisite agony our hero must endure as he stares into the vacant slit eyes of the lizard-creature who was once his bosom buddy! What paroxisms of dramatic sturm und drang this stupendous turn of events unleashes upon our tortured souls! And then, to heap catastrophe upon disaster, we learn that the helpless maid our hero so nobly saves is none other than the ignorant fool whose errors led to this tragic turn of Fate! Yet despite this titanic crush of events, our hero maintains his steadfast commitment to Rightness and Truth, determined to save the maiden even as he dispatches his buddy to hell. What a pinnacle of dramatic power David S. Freeman has forged!
“That's when I walked out of his lecture. As the door closed behind me, I heard him telling his listeners how he had led the way in introducing true drama to the games industry.”
(From: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Miscellania/AustraliaTrip/Australia_Trip.html )
I'm inclined to keep a more open mind about it, probably because i have a tendency to look at artwork in a similar way. When I look at a picture, I like to conjure up private flights of fancy, daydreaming the story behind any given random picture.
To see Freeman use the same thing as a method of illustrating an idea from his book is a bit odd. He uses an authoritative tone, as if what he sees in these pictures should be obvious to anyone. I can understand people whose minds are not given to this kind of daydreaming rejecting the approach out of hand.
In the context of NPC Deepening Techniques Freeman shows us a picture of an alien girl and explains that she is in Emotional Pain, because the other guy (your friend) just killed all her friends. Her pain gives her depth. Apparently. Easy as that, and that's all we're getting on the matter.
Next up is the concept of Technique Stacking. Put simply this is the process of using one or more Emotioneering techniques together. I get the feeling this is Freeman's get-out clause. Throughout Creating Emotion in Games Freeman is continually trying to reduce the frightening complexities of human interaction to very simplistic symbols, like 'Pain' and 'Regret' and 'Shame'. Unavoidably this approach implies exclusivity. 'Technique Stacking' appears to be Freeman's method of including concepts as complicated as he finds necessary to describe believable interaction, e.g. 'Shame that causes Regret and Pain' or 'A Secret Shame that leads to Tough Choices'. The explanation of Technique Stacking left me with a sense that Freeman is artificially forcing structure onto concepts that are, by nature, amorphous and unique. Is that a useful thing as far as writing our script is concerned? Don't know yet.
This could easily turn you off Emotioneering, this artificiality. Freeman is trying to draw a map here and pave pathways in territory that some writers like to think of a wild domain that must be hacked through instinctively. Trying to reconcile Freeman's structures with a usually less structured approach is confusing and leads to an overwhelming urge to reject everything to do with Emotioneering out of hand.
'Regret' and 'Hiding a Secret' are two more examples of NPC Deepening techniques, dealt with together. Freeman uses this section to illustrate how his Character Diamond concept can be used to implement another specific technique. He conjures up an imaginary NPC whose five major Traits (Suicidally Brave, Superlative Warrior, Altruistic to a Fault, Emotionally Distant and Obsessive Over Comrades Deaths) are used to guide the writing of dialogues such that it points to the character hiding a secret. The secret turns out to be that the character was once responsible for the deaths of several men under his command in a friendly-fire incident. His Emotionally Distant trait reflects his unwillingness to attach himself to people who might die, his Suicidal Bravery is born of his guilt, his Altruism to a Fault and his Obsession too, all pointing to the hidden secret, later to be discovered by the player.
The next to NPC Deepening Techniques are Appreciation and Wisdom, and are covered in a similar vein and then the idea of Covering a Real Emotion with a False One. These are the only specific items that come under Freeman's heading NPC Deepening Techniques, although he again implies that he knows many more he doesn't have room to detail.
His next tack is to talk about Combining NPC Deepening Techniques, which is effectively just using two or more of the above situations in a character's development. In the examples he also lists 'Fear' in what I can only assume to be sloppy editing, a closer examination of Fear as an NPC deepening technique is notably missing from anywhere else in the chapter. That's a shame in a lot of ways, because I think that might be the most useful NPC Deepening Technique we can use for our trapped Angels.
Freeman rounds off his chapter with a section headed: “Having Emotion Relate to Player Actions and Decisions”. Now maybe it's just me, but when I read that I thought Freeman was going to wax lyrical about the entirely reasonable notion (to my mind) of engineering NPCs to react emotionally to actions a player might take. He doesn't, in fact he does the reverse.
Freeman's Holy Grail is to provoke an emotional response on the part of the player, reminiscent of Spielberg's famous quote about 'crying on Level 17'. In this section, Freeman implies that correctly constructed Emotioneering can be used to compel and direct a player's actions during the game. The player will want to save the girl because the player feels emotionally /for/ the girl. Hmm.
We get to the end of the NPC Deepening Techniques chapter and what have we learned? According to Freeman we have learned that major NPCs must be 'deep' as well as 'interesting' if the player is going to engage with them emotionally. And in the concluding paragraph we learn that this is because the emotional 'depth' triggers the player's own emotions, a startling revelation to appear in only the final paragraph of the chapter and more than a little presumptuous, maybe. We learn that there are a vast number of ways to give depth to characters, even if Freeman is only going to tell us about half a dozen. We learn all these things but we're still left without a clear definition of what 'depth' is supposed to be.
We've got a mod to make, so in the interests of getting enough of a handle on Freeman's techniques to make some progress we're going to have to speculate a little bit. Let's have another look at his examples and find some common thread between them.
Emotional Pain, Shame, Regret, Hidden Secrets, Wisdom, Fear; what ties all these things together? In a way, what these things are seems less important to me that the fact we're being asked that the NPCs /demonstrate/ them. We could say that what connects them at the lowest common denominator is that they represent an emotional reaction by the character to the world he or she inhabits. These example techniques represent specific feelings about things that happen or have happened to them in the past. Seems to me that by 'depth', all Freeman is asking us to do, is create specific opportunities for our characters to demonstrate that they have feelings too. Freeman believes that by doing this a player will find empathy with his fictional co-actors. Does that seem like a reasonable interpretation of the NPC Deepening Techniques?
Next time we'll try and implement this idea on a practical level.
Next: Part Twenty-One (coming soon)