As above so below

Have you noticed the past two issues tapped on the subject of limits?

I did, but only when I read their titles side by side: No words and No rules, no laws. Funnily enough, today I planned to write about boundaries once more, but this time with a different title. There might be an underlying connection between them all, just let us not read too much into it for now.

I feel, whenever we are creating a character or working with a character that already exists, we constantly walk the fine line of making decisions around their emotions. We all experience emotions in wildly different intensities. There is, of course, a thread of recognition that connects human emotions. We are (usually) able to read someone else by their facial expression, their eyes, their tone of voice, their stance. Human and primate's faces are engineering marvels of muscles that work together to create recognizable signals to communicate. Storytellers are often observing of this kind of detail, how one poses when they are feeling a certain way.

Despite this universal emotion engine we have above our necks, not everyone will experience the same emotions the same way. One might be feeling anger, but wear a perfectly blank face. Or even break this anger down into something else, use it to fuel a particular behavior like fidgeting with the hem of their shirt. And that is where I would say enters the emotional range. We toy around this idea a lot in pop culture with some actors who are not very good at changing their facial expressions at will. Some could argue Michael Cera only has one expression, which is Michael Cera's face, and even if this says more about an actor's technique than their legitimate emotions, it taps on what I mean with emotional range.

What are the extremes of a character? The most "negative" (imagine some frantic air-quoting right now) and most "positive" emotions they express. This is important because it speaks volumes on how this character communicates. It can help understand how to animate them or how a voice actor can modulate their tone. It also reflects on what this character communicates. Once you know the way they think, it's natural to translate this into form, but if a character lives only in your head even you in your almighty creator position might need these boundaries to make the character solid and consistent.

I also find this exercise on drawing the boundaries of emotions very useful to design narrative and find the tone of a game. What is the most negative experience we want the player to have? What is the peak, the best possible they can have? Now take your narrative beats or gameplay moments and plot them in this scale. What is happening in the game when they are having their most negative emotion? You can think of what you can do to cushion this feeling if it could drive the player away when you don't want it to, or how to reinforce it if you feel it needs to land right. It's just a tool and a fun thing to do, but serves me right.

And here is a note on what is negative and positive in your range: it all depends on the message you are trying to get across. Perhaps an emotion that we learned to interpret as negative, such as fear, lies on the most positive of your range because you are making a horror game and people are playing because they want to get shit scared. Or maybe your character is a psycho soab who never expresses anything besides ultimate JOY, no matter the situation. So their range is limited, and that's all right, because knowing that will help you make big and small decisions about them. So. What is your range?

-Maíra