Emotion Tracking in Causality (upcoming)

This forum post is about the final design of Emotion Tracking before it goes into Causality.

• You need to imagine what it will be like to use this.

• You need to identify story phenomena that aren't captured by this.

• The goal is not to be 100% precise. It just needs to be good enough and nearly automatic, or nobody will use it in reality.

• The design is not entirely flexible. This is the 10th design over 5 years, and it’s possible this is the best design that can be done, period.

• Read this carefully.

WHAT IS EMOTION TRACKING?

Emotion Tracking gives every Tag usage a value that can go up and down, in order to represent an emotion or an objective. This results in curves in the timeline showing activity. It also means tracking Tension and Conflict, which is the coloring behind the lines:

The way you use it is that you enable Emotion tracking for a Tag. I’ll come back to Tension and Conflict in a moment. For now, just imagine that a Tag represents e.g. the character’s Confidence Level.

Every time a Tag is used, you can edit changes to this value, either in the Inspector, or possibly inline in the beat in the script. Tags with Emotions or Objectives are also separated under different headers.

You can either select Relative or Absolute changes. Simply set what the change feels like to you. Adding all the beats together, this produces a curve that goes up and down. Absolute is used for resetting hard to a certain value, like if time has passed in the story.

The scale isn’t important. Initially, all values go from 0-100, but they can go from anything to anything. So +4 means whatever it means to you. Somewhere else, you might have a +8 event. You could also have everything be +40 and +80. The scale doesn’t matter, only the going up and down.

TENSION

Every Emotion, Objective and Conflict can produce Tension. All tension from each of the storylines is then added together to produce the tension of the story as a whole.

Note that this picture is from an old prototype. Tension graphs now better represent how the story feels.

TENSION FROM EMOTION

If you enable Tension for an emotion, tension is produced when the emotion is high or low, depending on your setting.

If it’s a positive emotion like love or self-confidence, tension comes from it being low. If it’s a negative emotion, like anger, tension comes from it being high. Chandler Bing must get the people at work to like him (low is bad). The Hulk must not get angry (high is bad).

Tension strength sets the contribution of this tension to overall tension. If it’s a small tension like being annoyed at someone at work, it might be 20%. If it’s your intimate relationship going sour, it might be 200%.

PERCEPTUAL BLENDING OF TENSIONS

Tensions are blended perceptually. No matter how tense something is, it goes away the moment we cut to something else. So tensions are weighted heavily towards events where we’re “on”, and in-between, we feel the background pressure of all the growing tensions from all storylines.

OBJECTIVES

Objectives are like Emotions, except that they start low and end high, and then they’re done. If you’re trying to get a girl, that’s one Objective, until you get her. And if it then turns out she’s a Nazi, it’s a separate Objective to get out of the relationship, again time-limited.

Objectives track tension in a completely different way than emotions. Whereas Emotions are passive, and you just feel what you feel, Objectives are active, and you really want it.

For Objectives, tension increases dramatically when you get closer to your goal and it becomes a make-or-break moment, where the beginning of the journey produces almost no tension.

Objectives also produce brief tension (a dramatic spike) on loss or setbacks. You use this when you encounter obstacles, and the Objective has negative values like -10.

This is a curve of how tension increases over the journey of an Objective:

ADJUSTING TENSION

Remember that the goal isn’t for this system to be 100% perfect. The goal is to be close enough, but VERY easy to use so that you’ll actually use it.

Instead, you can tweak the tension of any event. For example, if you have an event where an emotion ALMOST moves, but in the end doesn’t, that kind of tension is invisible to Causality. But you can add it yourself, just for this event. You can even do full manual tension tracking this way. For an objective, you’d use this brief tension for an obstacle that isn’t overcome, but is still a battle.

CONFLICT

Finally, Conflict is to measure the relationship between Emotions or Objectives.

For example, in order for Rachel and Ross to get together, they have to both be into it. It’s a conflict if any of them are not at a high level. So we have tension when they’re different.

Or if this is a power struggle and both the protagonist and antagonist are winning. They each have a Success emotion. Then we produce tension if they’re the same. Separately, the antagonist can also produce their own tension when their Success is high.

Another example is a moral argument. If this is Star Trek and we’re weighing planetary suffering against the Prime Directive, you could of course make a single emotion that goes up and down to represent viewpoint A or B. But you could also make two SEPARATE emotions for each argument, and then make each argument extremely well. The better an argument you make for each option, the greater the conflict.

TENSION COLORING

Normal Emotion or Objective tension is drawn as increasingly intense red glows behind the line. Tension from Conflict is drawn in a brighter orange color. You can then hover the graph to both read the values and see where the conflict is coming from.

You can also start your work from the graph by creating the "melody" you want before you've even written anything, and then go write the beats to satisfy your curve. This allows you to draw storylines intuitively and then fill them in.

That’s it!