Take a look
at the color painting of a futuristic city with, incongruously, blimps (page 6 in the color section). There's a man on the run.
In this game, we meet the character you play in a brief cinematic set in the present day. You're a scientist with top-secret clearance, researching advanced physics. Your projects, which you pursue in your expansive Boston lab, include work in lucid dreaming, anti-gravity, teleportation, and other cutting-edge research.[1]
Gameplay begins at a futurist convention: You walk through various exhibits about life-extension methodologies, hyper-conductive super-cooled metals, nanotechnologies, and other breakthrough research. You amble up to one exhibit that shows the city pictured in the color-section illustration. Suddenly, a sort of vacuum wind starts pulling you in….
The next thing you know, you're actually in this city (still in gameplay). It's the year 2075. Impossibly, you discover that you have a weapon in your hand. (That's you in the picture.)
In this futuristic city, you quickly learn that you're being hunted by the police. They know you came from the past and want to kill you, for they know why you're here—or at least they claim to know—even though you have no idea how or why this time travel took place.
You'll learn that you've been brought here by a small resistance movement trying to overthrow the oppressive government. They wanted you, because your expertise—your anti-gravity work—could help them develop weapons that could make you the critical cornerstone of their resistance activities and turn the tide of their clandestine war.
Of course you—the player—don't know anything about anti-gravity, and even the character you play had just begun work in the field back in the time period when the game began. So, your character (i.e., you) tells the members of the resistance you can't help them. Nonetheless, they claim that you're an expert, but the time jump buried that knowledge in your unconscious, so they're working on a way to extract it.
Because the government shock-troops are gunning for you, you have no choice but to fight alongside the resistance fighters to survive. Plus, there's a very attractive woman among the resistance fighters, Katrina, who is falling in love with you. She's unique and special; you develop feelings for her as well.
Later in the game, you'll be captured by those government troops, but they don't kill you as the resistance fighters had warned. Instead, they desperately plead for your help. They explain, and give you somewhat credible evidence, that the resistance yanked you from the past because they want to make an anti-gravity doomsday weapon and use it to blackmail the world.
All anti-gravity work was banned way back in 2018 because of a horrible disaster that occurred in your lab that killed you, and took out a quarter of the city of Boston.
As strange as this sounds, things are about to become more intriguing and strange.
You'll also meet some people who visit you in secret and who claim that they're friends of yours—and they insist that neither they, nor you, are actually here! Instead, they tell you that you have a brain tumor, and that you fell into a coma at the futurist convention. The ensuing operation was successful—but you're still in a coma and dreaming up this world.
Using a method that you yourself helped pioneer in your lucid dreaming research, they've entered your mind in your coma state to try and wake you. They lure you into a high-tech building where they want you to sit in a very scary-looking contraption. They claim it will wake you up from your coma.
All three of these groups—the government troops, the resistance fighters, and those claiming to be your friends—try to kill each other on sight. So you know there's no collusion going on here.
A number of Emotioneering techniques are at work here. Let's take a look at them.
NPC Interesting Techniques (Chapter 2.1)
Katrina will have an interesting Character Diamond. Her Traits are:
Bravery; a dedicated and excellent fighter
A keen observer of others; an ability to read their moods
A warm, sensitive kindness
A weird sense of humor, especially when she's drunk
A secret sorrow she won't share
Player Toward NPC Chemistry Techniques (Chapter 2.11)
You should feel a lot of chemistry with Katrina, the woman who falls in love with you. The techniques used could include:
A shared ordeal: She fights side by side with you in a ferocious battle.
Earning a character's admiration: If you fight extremely well, she responds with admiration.
Taking responsibility for another: She gets caught and you need to rescue her.
World Induction Techniques (Chapter 2.18)
This game uses a number of techniques to get the player caught up in the world of the game:
Mystery: There is a big mystery here—namely, what's the truth? Are you in the future, or is this all a hallucination because you're in a coma? And if you really are in the future, then who are these people who are trying to convince you that you're not? And if you are indeed in the future, then who is being straight with you—the government or the resistance movement? Solving these mysteries help make you want to stick around.
Bonding to another: Bonding with Katrina also makes you want to immerse yourself in this world.
A rich world: I won't reprise all the available Rich World Techniques (Chapter 2.18) that could be used in this game, but here are a few:[2]
When you're running missions for the government, you learn their customs. The soldiers pay homage to the sun every morning, the discovery having been made in the year 2056 that there is a spiritual force living inside of every star in the universe, helping animate them. The spiritual forces aren't gods, but they can be communicated with and, if they're happy, they can, to some degree, help control the weather on Earth.
The spirits in suns have symbiotic relationships with planets. Planets need suns to nourish their life forms. But as the life forms evolve, the spirits in the suns are nourished from the life energy of plants and animals, as well as the more evolved emotions of higher life forms.
Information about how a star or sun thinks and feels—a way of thinking and feeling quite alien to a human—will become critical in solving the mysteries around you. Stars and suns think in terms of pictures and symbols, which conjure up feelings (happiness, sadness, and so on) and ideas (truth, bravery, betrayal, and the like).
You must learn this new way of thinking—learn to interpret images and symbols—to figure out what's going on in the world and which of the three groups are telling you the truth. After all, the sun was here long before the birth of the Earth, and knows its entire history. The sun holds the secret answer to the riddles as to whether you're in the present or the past, among other things.
This civilization has mastered space travel. One of the missions will take you inside the sun, which is nothing like what you'd expect. You'll enter right into the sun's memories.
First-Person Deepening Techniques (Chapter 2.21)
At one point you'll have to choose between saving Katrina or saving some other members of the resistance who have saved your skin on many occasions, and whom you've come to care for. That's very tough decision. As such, it's a First-Person Deepening moment.
Also, you'll see that the war between the resistance and the government is much more complex than it seems. Both groups have valid points:
The government feels that the resistance is holding the world back by not participating in the spirituality that has taken root on the planet since the discovery that the sun is alive. In fact, they have proof of this.
The resistance fighters believe that one's personal beliefs and practices are no business of the government and that the government must be brought down for violating key provisions of the Bill of Rights.
The government feels that the resistance, because they're using arms, must be crushed.
The resistance, on the other hand, took up arms only when every peaceful means of enacting change and bringing the country back to its constitutional guarantees of liberty had been stymied.
As you get to taste both sides of this debate and see the validity of both points of view (Multiple Viewpoints), the resulting wisdom that grows in you is a form of First-Person Deepening.
Player Toward NPC Relationship Deepening Techniques (Chapter 2.13)
When you're running missions for the resistance, Brandon, the resistance's leader, is arrogant and thus unlikable. On the other hand, he's brave, inspiring, and risks his own life several times to prevent you from being killed.
You'll have a variety of feelings toward him simultaneously, such as disgust, admiration, and appreciation. Having various layers of feeling toward an NPC is the essence of Player Toward NPC Relationship Deepening.
Emotionally Complex Moments and Situations Techniques (Chapter 2.15)
When, near the start of the game, you're running missions for the resistance, Katrina is captured by government troops. They threaten to harm her unless you do a mission for them, and spy on the resistance. Being forced to violate your integrity like this is an emotionally complex situation.
Later the leader of the government troops will explain that they never were really going to hurt her. You'll be able verify that this is true. And, in fact, whatever you learned on that spy mission does, in fact, plant seeds of doubt in your mind about the motives of the resistance.
Plot Deepening Techniques (Chapter 2.17)
Halfway through the game, you'll find out a shocking secret: Katrina, just like you, was brought here from another time (if that's really what's going on).
She didn't tell you this originally because, like you, she has also met people who act familiar and who claim that she's in a coma. They even show her pictures of her “real” life, including her fiancé, her friends, and more. And, to her, these pictures are somehow emotionally moving. Unlike you, however, she doesn't clearly remember them. Still, she wonders—could she really be in a coma?
On one hand, she's a strong resistance fighter. Secretly, she's confused and lost.[3]
So Katrina's plot-line parallels your own. Parallel plot-lines is one of the many available Plot Deepening Techniques.
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.
Emotional immersion in a game is created by the artful employment of many Emotioneering techniques in unison.
In this fictional game, I mention 13 different Emotioneering techniques. But, if this were a real game, I'd be more likely to stick in 20 or 30. And that doesn't begin to take into account actual lines of dialogue that would employ many Dialogue Interesting Techniques and Dialogue Deepening Techniques.
[1] Lucid dreaming means staying awake, or conscious, in a dream and in control of it.
[2] This example exists simply to demonstrate various ways of creating a rich world, including complexity and detail. Remember that it's optimal if these details have value in gameplay.
[3] This is the source of her secret sorrow she wouldn't share, which is part of her Character Diamond.