Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very disturbed by the reviews here, February 18, 2005
This book has about 10 anonymous, 5 star reviews that all sound the same. I'm VERY suspicious that these are fake reviews.
I've read parts of this book and I understand why most of the non-anonymous reviewers have problems with it. While it has some interesting aspects, it doesn't go very in depth and the amount of ridiculous buzzwords (like Emotioneering) make it hard to swallow.
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52 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Meant to Impress, not to Educate, February 28, 2005
If books had a dressing contest, this one would surely take first place. It applies every imaginable gimmick for the sole purpose of impressing the reader. There are many pictures in it, all of which are sensational adolescent fantasy material, many filling a full page and sometimes in color. The text is broken up in various ways, with intervening boxes and sidebars in incosistent shapes and sizes, as if designed specifically to distract you. Its "techniques" are trademarked under the bombastic name "Emotioneering", and worst of all, the author makes a point of repeatedly flaunting his screen(game)writing prowess.
But what are these "Emotioneering" techniques? has freeman actually invented a set of technical rules which applies to drama? No, that would be Aristotle. If you're really interested in the rules of drama, that's whom you should read. What Freeman refers to as "Emotioneering" are nothing more than a pile of bad screenwrting practices you can pick up in any second rate screenwriting book - except for two differences; first, in this sorry book they are given mind-blowing names like "technique stacking" and "Emotionally Complex Moments and Situations Techniques", and second, the examples used are said to be taken "from games" instead of from films, but, of course, all of these "games" have been imagined by Freeman for the purpose of the book (which he expressly admits), because there IS no real world game that would serve his purpose - he is really talking about films.
But when it comes to films, Freeman seems to think the The Lord of the Rings trilogy is about the best you can get. Ask any amateur screenwriter and they'll tell you that the one award these films honestly deserve is Worst Screenplay. The Lord of the Rings, like Freeman's book, is all spectacle and no content.
What kept me trudging through the morass of simpleton notions and overflowing filler text was the hope that, as a man who has some experience with writing for games, Freeman would have a few words to say about the intersection of stories with interactivity - the most alluring aspect of combining games with stories. Although he doesn't take up the subject directly, he does mention at some point that writing for games is complicated by the need to accommodate for the actions of the player. He says that he uses branching statements in his scripts for this, and that this is a very tough problem. Other than that, there are some minor points like how to allow the player to experience the events of your computerized screenplay in several different orders (which is made possible only by the ridicules simplicity of the story proposed as an example), but nothing which actually deals with letting a human have a meaningful interaction with a story.
To summarize, except for the pictures (if that's your cup of tea) I really can't see any reason to buy this book over any other random heap of text. If you want spectacle, you got it. If you want knowledge, you do yourself a favor and read three books: The Poetics by Aristotle, for the real "Emotioneering" techniques, Chris Crawford on Game Design, for an understanding of why the problem is not nearly as simple as Freeman pretends it to be, and Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling for the best solutions to the problem currently available.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Mostly Useless, October 6, 2006
I'm surprised by the reviews from people claiming to be game industry veterans who say they've found this book to be useful. Either they're not really in the game industry (possibly PR flaks?) or they haven't learned much in their time here.
General comment on content: Between the massive amounts of interior artwork, the big body type, the big (and frequent) headers, unusually wide margins, and lots of white space, there's probably only about 75 pages of actual information in this "500-page" book. Think of it as more of a booklet.
Mr. Freeman's credits are hard for me to verify. Web searches turn up some titles he's gotten credit for contributing to, but none of them were AAA titles. And there's no way to know for sure how much he actually contributed to them. Having been both a freelancer and internal writer/designer, I know outside writers who've been completely useless to games' development, so a claim of credit doesn't mean much, IMO. I have no clue what expertise he has with movies or other media, but I'm not too hopeful after reading his book on game writing.
One big problem I have with his book is the jargon he insists on excreting everywhere. This isn't game industry jargon, movie jargon, or any sensible jargon that I know of. It's jargon he seems to have made up to try to claim writing techniques and mechanics as his own. And he really, really likes to capitalize the (sometimes excruciatingly long) names of "his" techniques. A sense of impending doom approaches when you first see the word "Emotioneering" (capitalized, of course), looms high overhead when you see such phrases as "Plot Deepening Technique" and "Dialogue Interesting Technique," and crashes down with skull-crushing force upon reading the phrase "Player Toward NPC Relationship Deepening Technique." Ouch. Lack brilliance? Try BS!
How can anyone read a sentence such as "A Character Being Genuine is an NPC Rooting Interest Technique, but not a Character Deepening Technique" without laughing? (And, yes, the capitalization and comma fault are the author's.)
The bottom line is that this book doesn't seem (to me) to have much of value to offer anyone who's been in the industry for any length of time. If you're trying to break into the industry, however, you could be deluded into thinking that you're learning something useful here. FWIW, that's the opinion of someone who's actually been in the games industry since 1984. I keep trying to read this book, hoping to get something out of it, but can't get more than 20% into it before giving up.
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