Emotioneering fluff

I just finished a rather quick read-through of David Freeman’s “Creating Emotions in Games” since I have heard and read people talk about it for some time now. The opinions differ greatly about it so I felt I had to read it…

There is really not much I can say about the book that has not been said before so I will keep this short. Basically I feel that this is quite a bad book. I am going to give you the reasons why:

• The title states that the book is about videogames, yet there is nothing in there to back that statement. Freeman writes about scenes that are nothing less than short cinematics which in turn is no different than movies. The problems videogame storytelling is struggling with is because we are dealing with a totally different beast (read “media”) than movie storytelling. There are already tons of books about movie scriptwriting and this book is just one more.
• Mr Freeman clearly has written the book with no other intention than to sell his consultancy services. If I paid money for the book, I’d feel ripped off (my company paid for my copy). It’s like paying for a sales brochure, albeit a very thick one with many, many pictures.
• Mr Freeman is repeatedly talking about avoiding clichés in game stories, yet his examples are just about as cliché as one can imagine. He gives examples of “bad writing” and “good writing”, both almost equally bad in my opinion. (I don’t consider myself a good writer, but as Mr Freeman is so keen on telling the reader how good and marvellous he is, he deserves to be scutinized).
• The term “Emotioneering” is bothering me. The whole concept of applying techniques on top of a story seems extremely superficial and cannot yield truly genuine and deep results – other than by accident (it might be better than nothing though.) However, I believe the process of story building starts with the plot, character definitions, back stories, themes and so on. Of course Freeman is right in that it gives depth and solidity to think about more than the surface, but his method seems totally backwards and exactly one of those simple “patent-solutions” he ridicules several times through the text.

I should say that the book might actually do some good after all. It might get some people in the videogame industry to give story more attention. It might also make them realize that there is more to storytelling than just hacking away a couple of pages of plot and dialog. I don’t know how much of a problem that is nowadays. It definitely used to be, but today most AAA titles make serious storytelling efforts. I also believe Freeman is right when he says that screenwriters and novelists (“linear writers” as he calls them) are generally not fit for the job of writing for a game, at least not without guidance from someone who understands games. But from my read-through of “Creating Emotions in Games”, I’d have to say that David Freeman is definitely no fit either.

(NOTE: When I looked up the book on Amazon I was amazed to see a group of reviews from anonymous people named “game_programmer-designer”, “Lead Designer” and so on. These all gave the book the top score and suspiciously enough, they seemed oddly like one another, like they were written by the same person. I can only think about two parties that would benefit from trying to raise the scores in such a dirty manner: 1. Someone from the Freeman group, or 2. The publisher. I instantly get an extremely sour taste in my mouth when I see such things and it might have biased my reading a bit.)

— sicher