I’m just going to go ahead and post this. I’ve got some other stuff I want to write about .

Tight and Responsive
“The controls feel tight and very responsive; there’s almost none of the “lag” that you get in some other simulation games where you need to wait for a player to finish his animation before passing or shooting.” (World Tour Soccer ’06)

“The ships have an appropriately floaty feel to them, without completely sacrificing responsiveness.” (Quantum Redshift)

Tight and responsive seem to be on the same spectrum as floaty and twitchy, possibly in the center. Both floaty and twitchy feels are generally considered negative, whereas a tight, responsive feel seems to be highly desirable. There is just the right amount of lag between input and action and the level objects are spaced in such a way that the player feels they have ample time to respond to obstacles or changes in the terrain when moving at speed. In many games, such as Grand Theft Auto, this feeling of responsiveness comes from a non-linear mapping between forward motion and turning, as described above.

Loose, Fluid, Relaxed versus Sloppy, Sluggish, Unresponsive

“…the controls feel kind of sloppy and loose at low speed, but the plane gets tight and responsive as you speed up.” (X-Plane)

“Unlike Tony’s game, which revels in its tight fluid-like controls, ESPN seems to almost fight against you with its sluggishness and unnatural feel.” (ESPN X Games Skateboarding)

“You’ll find that the controls are just a little too sluggish, making it feel as though you’re driving a run-down school bus instead of a quick and nimble jet fighter or helicopter.” (Aero Elite: Combat Academy)

This feeling comes from a delay between input and reaction, often caused by dampening or softening of motion (as described earlier – a way of attaining more reaction sensitivity.) A rough way to measure this is timing the delay between input and complete reaction. In some instances, this seems to be a good thing, such as the controls of the Warthog vehicle in Halo. In these cases, the descriptors tend towards loose, fluid, and relaxed, and are generally understood to be positive. Again, this seems to have a lot to do with context: if the obstacles and challenges presented are spaced such that the player has plenty of time to react, the feel will be good. When the challenges come too quickly or when the dampening is overdone, players tend to describe the controls as sloppy, sluggish, and unresponsive.

Stiff

“…while the gameplay is basically similar to the TH games, ESPN’s controls are tragically stiff and unresponsive.” (ESPN X Games Skateboarding)

Stiffness is the opposite of fluidity or a relaxed feel and often arises when a triggered action locks the player into a predetermined path or action for some duration, when there is little or no reaction sensitivity. As noted earlier, in the game Ghosts and Goblins Arthur always follows the same trajectory in his jumps and comes to a complete halt upon landing. This, especially when compared to the reaction sensitive Super Mario Brothers, is an extremely stiff feel. Instead of disconnecting the controls for a certain duration, consider changing to a reduced value (a state change – more below) or adding global dampening to the system (and raising the movement parameters commensurately to compensate.)

4. State Management & Transitions – Altering mapping and/or tuning in real time to afford the player more expressivity and manipulate the game’s feel.

When a state change takes place, it alters either tuning or mapping. The classic example is jumping in Super Mario Brothers. When Mario is in the air, the speed of his left and right movement (local tuning) is reduced. Functionally, we’re mapping more reactions to a single set of inputs. We still have the same input device, the controller, which still has its two buttons and directional pad, but now we have two different feels in one. Mario feels different in the air than on the ground. The change in feel brings each feel into greater relief and context. In Mario this is a harmonious juxtaposition, each complimenting the other. This shows that there can be a great beauty in switching states and experiencing different feels in rapid succession.

Another benefit of switching states is greater expressivity. Using the same set of inputs, we’ve achieved greater reaction sensitivity. Some games take this even further. For example the Tony Hawk series provides five different main states (air, ground, grind, manual, run) from which each button and each combination of buttons on the controller triggers a completely different move. Interestingly, the transitions are seamless: the player simply views it as an ability, available for use at any time.

Once again returning to our simple Asteroids game, let’s add a ‘turbo’ state. We need to modify our system design to accommodate three new parameters: turbo thruster, turbo left, and turbo right, and add another button to our mapping, the turbo button. When held down, the turbo button will change the values of rotate left, rotate right, and thruster to our modified turbo versions of those same parameters. When released, they revert. Because we’re doing the rotational dampening globally, we’ll still have the benefits of the rotation gradually speeding up to its maximum and slowing gradually back down when the button is released. Once we have this set up, we tune the new turbo numbers and test, honing in on the feel we’re going for, which is an increased sense of speed with a reduced rotational control. Perhaps we reduce the left and right rotation as we increase the forward speed. And we may need to adjust our level design to accommodate this new higher maximum speed, spacing the asteroids further apart.

Again, because these are virtual sensations, impression is the only thing which conveys feel. Switching from one feel to another aids impression by providing context for each separate feel. A feel which would otherwise be considered floaty becomes tight and snappy when juxtaposed with one which is much looser, which has less carving.

CONCLUSION
“Feel” is an aspect of games that players and designers discuss in abstract, intuitive, subjective terms. Mechanic design consists of four major disciplines that inform the feel of interactive aesthetics: system design, mapping, tuning, and state management. Feel is one of the most interesting emergent properties of human-computer interaction and the methodical categorizations of its components will assist gamers and designers alike. I would be excited to pursue a deeper, more structured study of players’ descriptions of the easily recognized but poorly articulated phenomenon of feel in digital games.

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