Emotional Drivers

Start with the feeling

Before you write a single line, decide what you want your players to feel. The professional writers in this research kept coming back to this. They thought about emotion in two ways:

• The feeling in the moment: what the player should experience while they're playing.

• The change over time: how the player should feel different at the end compared to the start.

Either way, they treated the player's emotional state as a design requirement. It's something you plan for on purpose.

Use emotion as your filter

Ryan Kaufman (2018) calls this target emotion your main anchor. Choose it early, then use it to test every decision: every scene, every character, every line of dialogue. Ask whether it serves the feeling. If it doesn't, it probably doesn't belong. In this approach, a story holds together because the emotion stays consistent, not because the plot is airtight.

To make that emotion land, Kaufman suggests tying your characters to experiences everyone recognises, such as family, loss and friendship.

His example is The Lord of the Rings. On the surface it's a long trek from Hobbiton to Mount Doom. Underneath, it's about leaving home and safety for the first time, taking on adult responsibilities, and the scars life leaves on you. The plot is the journey. The emotion is the story.

No change, no story

Mata Haggis (2017) puts it bluntly: a story where nothing changes is boring. What keeps a narrative moving is the character's emotional journey, and he splits what drives that journey into two kinds:

• External motivation: the character wants to change something in the world.

• Internal motivation: the character needs to change something in themselves. That could mean getting past something that holds them back, like grief or loneliness. It could also mean discovering something new, sometimes a truth they've been carrying all along without realising it.

Let players feel it themselves

Emotional drivers work best with relatable characters whose inner journey unfolds gradually (Kaufman, 2018; Mikkelson, 2020). That's where your intentions as a designer meet the player's freedom to act.

Catacalypto (2018) points to narrative choices as the bridge. A good choice does two jobs at once: it shows the player how the character feels, and it lets the player express something of their own. So the player isn't just watching a character change. They're using their choices to explore that change and shape it.

That leads straight into the other overarching requirement: player expression.