David Freeman Talks Writing For Games and Emotioneering

Posted on March 16, 2005

Gamespy has an interesting interview with David Freeman, author of Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering (New Riders).

"Emotioneering^TM" is the term I created to describe a body of over 1000 techniques for making game emotionally immersive. That is, they evoke, in a player, a wide breadth and depth of emotions. I believe that all techniques to make games emotionally engaging fall into 34 categories. These categories include:
-Techniques to get a player to identify with the character he plays;
-Techniques to get a player to bond with an NPC (a Non-Player Character)
-Techniques to give an NPC a quality of emotional depth, even if the NPC speaks just one line of dialogue.
-Techniques to take the player on an emotional journey and many others. Those are just a few categories of Emotioneering techniques.
There are 30 others.

Anyone who wants to write for the gaming industry would do well to listen to Freeman. His background in screenwriting and game development landed him consulting gigs with Sony, Atari, Activision, and Ubisoft to create new games.