This weekend I spoke at the CHI 2007 conference on the subject of virtual sensation. Specifically, I was at a workshop called “Supple Interfaces”, which was put together by my friend Katherine and Kia Höök. I had a really wonderful time; I met a ton of rather blindingly brilliant folks who are working on an amazing smorgasbord of interactive ‘supple’ research projects, got to chat with Nicole from Xeodesign, whose work I’ve admired for some time, and had the distinct pleasure of meeting Adrian Chan, who made me reconsider some long-held assumptions about the way people interact with complex systems and with one another through complex systems.

All in all, it was sort of a bizzaro version of GDC for me, as it was held at the San Jose Convention center. I knew exactly which room to go to, where to find refreshments, and where the best and cheapest parking was to be found. A great experience all around!

The slides from my presentation can be found here:

http://steveswink.com/PPT/Swink_CHI_2007.swf

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Download Drawing Test here!

This is a small test Matthew and I did. Well, Matthew did the VSL and I made suggestions and then packaged it up and fiddled. It’s really pretty cool.

Click and drag to draw geometry lines. When you release, it becomes physics geometry and the ball will start rolling. Other controls:

R – Reset the ball
Right click – delete/erase
Space – pause time

Even without real camera control, you can get into a nice rhythm of drawing and testing, making pitagourasuichi-style ball rolling contraptions. I find myself drawing large humanoid figures with faces and arms as I go as well. Can’t wait to show this in the context of the full project .

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Lately, I’ve found myself doing a lot of “bizdev” – talking to people, maintaining professional relationships, generating revenue for my company by leveraging contacts to land contracts. It’s a lot of email writing and a lot of talking on the phone, things which, in a former life, caused me embarrassing consternation. I still get a bit wound up sometimes and start talking way too quickly, but on the main it’s like anything else. Do it enough and you get better at it. Mostly, it’s about getting to the core of what concerns people, or what they think concerns them (sometimes I think, people aren’t sure, which provides an interesting interpretive guessing game.) People say things just to say things, sometimes, just to have something to say. Once in a rare while, they say things they don’t really mean because they’re after things that they don’t want to just come out and say. Mostly, though, people just have specific, rational, completely valid concerns. If you can identify what these concerns actually are and are willing to work at making sure they’re addressed (and here there can actually be some good, old fashioned, enjoyable creativity) you can maintain a business relationship where everybody wins. This is, in my limited experience, how the business world goes round.

Earlier this week, I screwed up.

I have a contact at a large company, one with whom we’ve done our most substantial business. I like him; he is an affable, extremely intelligent gentleman who’s turned out to be very open minded and is engaged and interested in what we do (game design) despite having no prior experience with it. He’s put up with my awkwardness and lack of corporate experience and I feel I’ve learned volumes from working with him. Long story short, we made a game for them, one that they were very happy with, and we’re working with them on another game project. So, we’re in the initial phase, work is spooling up, and we’re having a bit of back and forth. I got a call from him and he mentioned being out of town. My brain registered ‘vacation’ for some reason and I sent a follow up email that said something like “hope you’re enjoying your vacation – I wasn’t sure when you were going to be back .” In response I got this:

“Not really a vacation — I was with my father, who passed away on Monday. I will be out Monday and Tuesday for his funeral, but would like to pick this back up again later next week.”

Ouch. When I read his reply, I felt all concern, all my petty bullshit, melt away. I love my father. All I can think about is the moment I had to face, accept, and embrace the fact that his time, like everyone’s, is limited.

So why post this? Well, it’s interesting, it’s something I’m thinking about it, and it occurs to me that there are some interesting dynamics at play here. Lest I wax too lugubrious (and too far from the subject of game design) I was wondering if it would be possible to express the way I felt through interactivity. I will disclose that it was Rod’s “The Marriage” that made me wonder about this. Does a game about something personally significant and emotionally charged like this have the potential to be the most pretentious thing ever? Sure. Does that make it too scary to try? Gosh, I hope not!

So my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer, which was a major drag. It was also surprising as he had completed two marathons earlier that year. Initially, it all felt very unfair, very tragic, very “why me?” But, my dad, he’s a pretty amazing guy. He was cheerful and upbeat; he posted a picture taken of the cancer (from a colonoscopy) on the wall of his office with the words “THE ENEMY” written boldly across it in thick black marker. He continued running at his normal level, ate healthily like he always does, and scheduled his various procedures as soon as possible in order to get them over with. He was upbeat, but not naive. He took my shoulder and told me “Don’t worry about it, I’ll make it through this.” Casually, almost as an afterthought, he added “I’m going to die some day, you know. You’re a great son, I’m happy how you turned out. You’ll do great stuff.”

It was a lot to chew on. The cancer was, they surmised, genetic. My grandfather succumbed to a similar malady after a long battle. It felt very recursive; it has ramifications for my father, me, and any children I have.

The following week, we took him down to the hospital so barbarism of the only sort known to ‘cure’ colon cancer could be practiced. They cut him open – the largest and worst injury of his life – and whacked out the offending chunk of colon. They wheeled him out, we were there waiting. He had “done great” and they were “very grateful to him” for being in such great shape. I kissed him. His mustache was prickly. Two hours later, we played a game of chess in his recovery room, and I was soundly trounced. That night, it stormed. Dad had a storm of his own. I think his body finally realized what had been done to it. After that first night, we stayed up in shifts, my mom and I, keeping him company night and day for the rest of his four day hospital stay.

It was harrowing, to be sure, but with the horror came a surprising confrontation of mortality, both mine and my father’s. In a weird way, it was then that I “became a man.” In admitting that my dad is human, that he will someday be gone, I accepted the last bit of responsibility for my own life, my own well being, my own existence. His courage, good humor, and peace with his life are with me every day of mine. It was a passing of the torch. I could imagine vividly a world without my dad. It sucked, it had a massive gaping wound in it, but it was no longer unimaginable to me. When that day comes, as it must, life will go on.

Rod wanted to make a game devoid of representation, that was his criteria. He wants to answer the question “can I express emotion and artistry through rules and rules alone.” I dig what he’s getting at, but I think that his game is incomplete without seeing him explain it in person as you play it. To properly experience The Marriage, you need Rod there coaxing the pink circle “Come on baby, come on, you can do it…” And explaining in complete sincerity each facet of the game and what he was trying to express with it. So, in his own way, he is still representing things. He may not have sound or representational graphics built into the system, but the system he’s constructed needs to include his spoken explanation to effectively express what he wants it to. This is not a criticism, by the way. The Marriage is an extremely beautiful something. I just think that while attempting to express things entirely through game rules is a great exercise because so much stock gets put in representation, one shouldn’t ignore the value of polish.

So what would my game be? Well, I’m not happy with the concept I have at the moment, but I’ll post it here for the sake of continued mulling. An amorphous white shape stands in a storm, absorbing the damaging weather. Underneath it, two smaller shapes huddle, safe from the storm, a smaller version of the white shape, and a soft edged pink one. Over time, one of the small shapes begins to grow larger. As time passes, too, small hands and tendrils are ensnaring the larger shape and pulling it down. Eventually it will be pulled under. As it grows larger, the small white shape can venture out into the storm and collect experiences. If he gets too weather beaten, he will be dragged under, so he must constantly return to the protection of the larger shape. If he never leaves protection, however, he will wither and stay stunted. This is important, because when the large white shape dies (as it eventually must) the smaller shape must have grown large enough to protect the soft pink shape and the tiny white seedling now growing beside her.

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UPDATE: Pictures are here!

Well, that was fun!

We (IGDA Phoenix) put together a little Game Jam last weekend. Nothing too huge, just six or seven of us, friends and acquaintances from local studios. Instead of the traditional ‘pick a theme’ or ‘insert random quantity’ methods employed by most game jams, we decided to make this Jam’s theme “Backburner.” Essentially, pick a game idea you’ve been kicking around for a while but haven’t had time to implement. Then talk it over with some bright chaps, think about implementation for a few minutes, and dive in. Make that sucker in a weekend!

Jamming is fun because it puts the focus on what’s fun about game design and development and provides a hard-as-a-hammer deadline at the back end which really helps design ideas crystallize and prevents any kind of waffle. It’s easy to prioritize tasks and test whether or not an idea is working if you only have two days to make the whole game. I think the games that got completed are unassailably fun. Says me. Anyhow, play em and judge for yourself:

Conformity by Scott Anderson

Download Conformity here!

Controls: Click and rotate

It started out as an experimental abstract game idea that Rohit came up with about not conforming. The core of the game was the shape and I started to prototype it a couple of days before the jam. Manipulating the shape was appealing enough that I decided to work on it during the jam and put gameplay into it.

During the jam I went through a variety of failed experiments, including a raycasting collision system that didn’t quite work. In the end I ended up with something inbetween Rohit’s original experimental idea and a casual game. To me the shape looked like a web or a net and that’s how I thought up the final “fishing” mechanic.

Interestingly enough you can still apply the conformity metaphor to the game successfully. The rest state is conforming, while you conform you are always safe but can never make progress. In order to make progress you need to break the mold, but if you are too risky you will get hurt.

During the jam I went through a variety of failed experiments, including a raycasting collision system that didn’t quite work. At one point near the end of the jam the game reminded me of cheesy pornographic arcade games, so I threw in a sexy picture as a joke. In the end I ended up with something inbetween Rohit’s original experimental idea and a casual game. To me the shape looked like a web or a net and that’s how I thought up the final “fishing” mechanic.

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Raptor Assault by Matthew Wegner (Art by RC Torres and Wadam Mechtley)

Download Raptor Assault here!

Controls: WASD

Mostly, it was a test in executing a feel. I wanted to do everything I could think of to make it seem more like a helicopter: first with the physics control, and then with additional visuals like the grass. The ragdoll raptors were an amazing afterthought.

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Alone or Gravity Guy by Steve Swink (Art by R.C. “Sharkfox!” Torres)

Download Gravity Guy here!

Controls:

A, D – Rotate
Spacebar – Grab hold (when touching walls)
Click and drag – change gravity direction/amount

I started with the idea of infinite gravity control. I wanted to be able to set direction and amount of gravity at any time as much as the player wanted and see what came out of that. Also, I wanted the player to be compressed by gravity (not really in there at the moment, but I did a spring rig dude that looks pretty cool.) Other stuff I didn’t get a chance to try: enemies who affect gravity in their own way, creating ‘gravity wells’, objects that behave differently under gravitational manipulation, areas with fixed gravity directions, making a traditional platformer guy who was unaffected by his own gravity manipulation. Good times!

We started with five designer/programmers and two artists. Three created something show-able; everyone had fun. Success! I think we’ll plan for another jam in two months’ time. If you’re local in Phoenix, come on down!

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Stuff I’m thinking about: Flashbang’s next project. Innovation in games, and the results of my panel. The lameness of our current set of game genres. A bunch of game designs including but not limited to a game based on the paintings of Chagall combined with Bionic Commando in 3d, a game of ragdoll jousting knights (Shanke), a game based on the Godspeed You Black Emperor song “Dead Flag Blues”, a game where the avatar is invisible/ephemeral (like wind), a game that explores all the possible puzzle permutations of infinite gravitational manipulation, a game about spontaneous improvisational dancing, and a physics game involving a jetpack, a glider, a grappling hook, and a bunch of tall mountains. Whew! More on all that, sooner rather than later.

My panel was a resounding success, all told. It was interesting; I have never run a panel and, quite honestly, haven’t really seen a panel that I felt was particularly useful before, so I was a bit reticent going in. My fears turned out to be unfounded, though, as all the choices I made – participants, format, having dinner with everybody beforehand – turned out pretty well. I had everybody introduce themselves and give a short mini-rant on the subject of innovation in games. It was interesting to me to see how each member of the panel had interpreted that initial prodding. I sent out emails to everybody asking questions like “Is innovation really what we want?” and “How does one generate Earth-shattering ideas that will change the face of gaming while applying the constraints of small team size and tiny indie budgets?” Each panelist chose a different question to answer, more or less, and the answers were pretty damn awesome.

Kyle took the lead, answering a question I’d asked about the future of interactivity and what the unsolved problems are, what the frontiers are we’re trying to navigate. He said “I think I misunderstood the assignment” but, as I said, there was no assignment per se, just a bunch of topics intended to provide hooks for discussion. He did some research about futurists, looking at their predictions about the future of computing and processing power, and inferring some fun stuff about where those changes might take gaming. I’ll post a link to his slides when he’s gottem up. One thing that Kyle said stuck with me (pardon my lazy paraphrasing): ‘I make delicious candy morsels of gameplay. That’s all I do. I’m not interested in art or innovation or whatever, just making things that are fun to play with.’ I was going to say that Kyle has an inimitable style but, as has been proven by Petri and numerous others at experimentalgameplay.com, once people have seen it’s possible, lots of folks have been able to make small, delicious gameplay morsels. Like Roger Bannister and the four minute mile, I guess.

I had remarked to Kyle (who is as genially self-effacing a chap as you’ll ever meet) that before he and the other experimentalgameplay.com guys got the ball rolling, there really wasn’t a notion of “rapid prototyping” in the general consciousness. Indie Game Jams had been happening for years but they had been somewhat criminally ignored. He was like “really?”, with genuine surprise. That’s just so cool. That’s what his games are, and his persona is, self deprecating and unassailably cool. They’ve recently formed a studio, 2dBoy, and are working on their first project, World of Goo. My hope is that they create a sort of everlasting gobstopper of gameplay; delicious candy that lasts forever. You go, (2d)Boy!

Next up was Jenova, who is really focused on emotion created by games. I really, really love the quiet, beautiful, naive quality of Jenova’s games, paintings, and writing. He really sees things in a different way. Here are his slides and a short explanation. What I found most striking was his comparison of film genres to game genres (slides 46-50 on his blog there.) I’ve had a feeling for a long time that game genres are totally broken and don’t do even a passing job of expressing the underlying experience of the games they attempt to categorize. As Jenova points out, film genres (and literary genres, for that matter) focus on emotion, the type of experience you can expect to have with that book or film. Game genres are a weird mash of technology, common rules and formats, and esoteric acronyms. Boo-urns. Our current genres just don’t ‘get it’, they simply don’t speak to the underlying experience. If you classify the game Soldat as a 2d shooter, that lumps it with things like Raiden, Worms, and Contra. The experience of playing Soldat, however, is much more like playing Tribes, Counterstrike, or Quake 3: it’s visceral, heart-pounding, a twitch-based game of skill. So, twitch-based is obviously not a good classification, but it’s certainly better than lumping Soldat with Cave Story. Heh. So, in the end, Jenova didn’t really address innovation per se, but said that emotion is the key. Good stuff.

Jon Mak did not use Powerpoint, bringing as he said, ‘my own innovation to this panel.’ My take on Jon’s mini-rant was that he doesn’t think we need innovation. Rather, that if you as an artist (in the more general sense, not in the sense of a craftsman who creates textured polygons or sprites or whatever) are true to your vision, your individuality will make whatever you create unique. So, he says, we don’t need intentional innovation, we just need people to “Don’t innovate; go home, play a bunch of games, figure out which ones you like, and make a game based on that.” I like Jon’s slant on things because it jives well with my own take, which derives in part from my background and training in art rather than programming. If you were to write a detailed design document or detailed pitch for a game idea and give it, without further explanation, to two competent game creators, odds are they’d create wildly different games. This has been my experience both professionally and personally. Ideas != Execution. Everyone talks about the need for more programmer-designers; I think we need more artist-designers. This does not mean game designers who don’t know how to program. Rather, this is game designers who take an artistic approach to design, like Keita Takahashi or, arguably, Shigeru Miyamoto.

Finally, John Blow concurred that innovation for innovation’s sake is a red herring. He noted the fine line between innovation and gimmick, and that being successfully different is more important than just being different. I think that at some level just being successful – making a great game – is a kind of innovation. Since the medium is so new and there are so many things that we haven’t tried and (as Eric Zimmerman noted) “games are fucking hard to make!” it’s a little miracle each time a truly good game gets made. That a merging of art, rules, programming, design, and whatever else has come together to create a meaningful experience is amazing; regardless what homage (or rip-off) is apparent in the final design, a good game is a rare and beautiful creature. So, innovation is perhaps not what we’re really after. Maybe we just want good games. Being different is just a reaction to the fact that so few of the games that have been made to this point have been good.

Or maybe we do need to actively, aggressively pursue the new, the radical, the innovative. I’ll save that counterpoint for another post.

- Swink

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Naughty blogger! I’ve been off doing all these cool things, meeting all these cool people, and I haven’t taken the time to blog about it. At this point, most people would apologize and promise to do more writing more consistently in the future. I started thinking instead about why I hadn’t posted. My relationship to my blog, as it were.

I think the real reason I haven’t posted recently is because it takes a lot of energy to write a post. And energy equals time. Would I rather spend time writing about games or making them? That’s not an excuse, mind you; it just occurs to me that this is the reason. In my mind, writing a post is a large, exhaustive endeavor. So, that identified, I need to find ways to make writing about stuff less exhaustive.

I tend to write things and then delete them, or rewrite them many times. One short piece of writing can take a few hours to complete. I guess it’s the sense that what I’m typing is binding in some way, like it’s adding to my voting record or something. Of course, that’s predicated by hubris; there really aren’t that many people who really care what I have to say . So, hey, I’m just going to start talking about things that I’m thinking about, which is what I do when talking to friends about games. Bollocks to authoritative writing, bollocks to being too meticulous. I don’t work for EA/Maxis, I can rant about whatever I want without fear of reprisal . Besides, I do enough writing of articles and things for various publications to see my need for anal-retentive writing well filled. Blog as design diary rather than soapbox. Huzzah.

So, stuff I’ve been thinking about recently (in no particular order and without much editing):

Emotion in games. I went to a killer round table at the very end of GDC, run by my friend Katherine, where the topic was emotion in games. She promised to tabulate all her results and observations from the roundtable and put them up in blog form, so I’ll link to that when it arrives. This is a topic people are hungry for, and one which gets folks pretty riled up. The discussion seemed, to me, to ping pong back and forth between being far too narrow in scope and far too broad. It was dizzying. At first, people were having it out over what the best way would be to increase player empathy, emotional connectivity in over the shoulder 3rd person action adventure games. Next, we’re talking about every emotional moment ever in any game, and whether or not games are capable of emotion without story.

For my part, I don’t necessarily think that games are the best medium in which to express classical dramatic emotions, and I don’t think that “story” in games should have to mean story in the classical sense, or in the Interactive Storytelling sense. My favorite emotional moment comes from X-Com, a game in which the game rules and system give rise to a powerful emotion bond to certain characters you control, but which is constructed in a very simulationist way. There’s almost nothing linear or triggered in the whole game. Because the characters are visually generic and ambiguous and do not speak, they are essentially blank emotional canvases on to which to project. This is something Will Wright has mentioned many times as one of the primary successes of The Sims as a design – because the characters don’t speak a real language, and are intentionally abstracted representations of humans, they invite emotional interpretation. Lots of people who play The Sims construct their families and friends, and play out elaborate scenarios. Because the characters are emotional whiteboards, and because the game rules tolerate a bunch of different activities, The Sims is designed to give rise to all kinds of emotional connection with the player. As Wright has said, ‘designing games is half programming the computer, half programming the player.’

So, in X-Com, the rules underlying the simulation are structured such that it’s a rare mission where every member of your landing party survives. If they do, they are recognized by the game and are given a rank up, from private to sergeant, sergeant to lieutenant and so on. As they rank up, so their stats go up; they become more accurate, stronger, and calmer under fire. In this way, the game encourages the player to have favorites, to project a story onto those members of the squad who survive, to imbue them with personalities of their own and to imagine how they feel about surviving so many missions, about having seen so many comrades die while they alone survive. This points to a different direction for creating emotion in games, one which Rod Humble is trying to isolate with his games A Walk With Max, and The Marriage: it is possible to express emotion, to convey emotion purely though game rules and structures.

This is another great direction to explore, one that I think will ultimately turn out to be more fruitful than milking canned, linear story, or attempting to shoehorn drama into interactivity. I’ve noticed many instances in games where rules, systems, structure have given rise to particular emotional reactions. One example that springs to mind is the game Hitman, in which, once costumed in something intended to fool other people (a busboy’s uniform, or a cop’s or whatever) you must walk painfully slowly to avoid arousing suspicion. In addition, other people of the same function (another cop, for instance) cannot be allowed to scrutinize you for extended periods of time, because they will realize you are not a friend or colleague. So you end up walking long, painfully slow stretches, through crowded spaces, aiming your face away from people who might out you, trying to ‘look busy.’ It’s a wonderfully claustrophobic feel, one that indicates to me a possibility for subtlety and heightened awareness heretofore unseen in games. Would it be possible to create a game about eye contact, where the player expressed themselves by where they looked, what they looked at, and how quickly or slowly they did so? Would it be possible to embed some kind of facial expression system in this? What would a game be like where the players cared whether or not you looked them in the eye? Interesting questions, ones which would need solving with system design, not story writing.

All that said, I think there’s a huge value in using story to “prime” players for emotion. For example, if you removed the Miyazake-like intro sequence from Cloud, you would not be primed to enjoy the serene, unfocused gameplay. Blizzard uses this kind of priming to great effect in all of their products; they have an entire department dedicated to creating brief, trailer-like short films that precede and punctuate gameplay in their games. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying that this strategy has worked out well for them. Too hook this concept back in to personal anecdote, each time I teach a class, I prime the class for enjoyment. The classes I teach last for four hours at a stretch; even with the most amazing, enthusiastic students, it’s hard to get buy in and keep engagement high for that long. So at the start of each class, I show a funny internet video or an irreverent picture. This gets everybody laughing and engaged and makes the class run smoothly. If I don’t do this, people start losing focus and it takes a great effort on my part to keep the class moving forward.

Woah, and that’s a post’s worth right there! Miraculous.

Other stuff I’m thinking about: Flashbang’s next project. Innovation in games, and the results of my panel. The lameness of our current set of game genres. A bunch of game designs including but not limited to a game based on the paintings of Chagall combined with Bionic Commando in 3d, a game of ragdoll jousting knights (Shanke), a game based on the Godspeed You Black Emperor song “Dead Flag Blues”, a game where the avatar is invisible/ephemeral (like wind), a game that explores all the possible puzzle permutations of infinite gravitational manipulation, a game about spontaneous improvisational dancing, and a physics game involving a jetpack, a glider, a grappling hook, and a bunch of tall mountains. Whew! More on all that, sooner rather than later.

-Swink

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…the panel!

So, I’m moderating a panel at the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developer’s Conference this year. The topic is “Innovation in Indie Games.” Here is the brief, per the gdconf.com:

“Join the luminary creators of the Experimental Gameplay Project at CMU, IGF-winning Braid, flOw, and Cloud, and the brilliant Everyday Shooter as they dissect innovation in indie games. How do we generate Earth-shattering ideas that will change the face of gaming? Can small teams innovate? Is ‘innovation’ really what we want?”

Needless to say, I’m over the moon. I got exactly who I wanted for the panel:

John Blow – Co-founder of the Indie Game Jam and Experimental Gameplay Workshop, creator of the IGF-winning “Braid“.

Jon Mak – His works include Gate 88, ToJam Thing (a Toronto Game Jam ’06 contribution), and the soon-to-be released (and highly IGF-winning) Everyday Shooter.

Kyle Gabler - Co-creator of the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon and the accompanying website, games, and, arguably, the whole rapid prototyping craze that’s been sweeping around lately.

Jenova Chen – Co-creator of flOw and Cloud, founder and creative director of That Game Company, and designer on the DS version of Spore.

I’ve designed the format for my panel and written a long list of questions, such as:

Do constraints breed creativity? If you had unlimited resources, what game would you make?

What are the metrics of success for innovation?

The Independent Games Summit has sold out, meaning that it has 500 attendees registered. What, I wonder, would everyone else like to ask these amazing, creative, luminary designers? If you’re in the audience you’re free (but not guaranteed) to ask your questions in person. If not, I’d love to hear from you.

Have anything you want to ask John, Jon, Jenova, and/or Kyle?

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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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3. Tuning - extensive, minute adjustments of the specific parameters governing the movement of the player-controlled avatar.

Once our system is designed and our motions mapped, we are left with a set of parameters. Ideally, these parameters can be viewed simultaneously, because what is important is to view them as a cohesive whole, to understand the relationships between them. Balancing them against one another – making small alterations, testing the results – is the primary way to arrive at a certain feel.

At this point, is useful intellectually to delineate between local and global parameters. Local parameters apply only to the specific avatar object which is being controlled. Mario’s jump, for example, is a local parameter, as is the speed of his left and right movement (which will be tuned as one parameter as it should always be the same left as right.) Generally speaking, any motion that is directly triggered by the player is a local parameter. It is in these parameters primarily we can address player feedback about feel.

A global parameter is one that affects all objects equally, such as gravity. Oftentimes, pairs of parameters work as foils to one another and must be balanced in pairs. Gravity versus jump power, for example. Less gravity means greater jump height and vice versa. Remember, though, that gravity is a constant that every object in the game uses and therefore changing it has significant ramifications for the interaction of all game objects. To return to the system design for our Asteroids example, do we want all objects in our world to be dampened? For this game, probably not. We want the asteroids to float around as if in space, and the ship to continue forwards endlessly, frictionless, until the player fires the thruster while facing the opposite direction to slow down or change course. So, all we really want is rotational dampening on the ship, a local parameter. We alter our system to accommodate this, and re-tune all our parameters to achieve a more responsive feel.

One final consideration for tuning is level design. The spatial context in which the movement of the avatar occurs is of paramount importance. Much as the sensation of speed in an airplane at 10,000 feet is less than a car on the freeway, the feel of a mechanic needs context to have meaning. The plane is moving much more quickly than the car, obviously, but there is no impression of speed because there’s nothing flying by the window to use as visual reference. Virtual sensation is entirely comprised of these kinds of impressions, so the design of the level, the layout of objects around the avatar, their size and so on, is the framework for processing the feel of a game. A driving mechanic may feel clunky and unresponsive if obstacles are spaced too closely relative to forward speed and turning (causing constant collisions.) If the obstacles are spaced further apart or the forward acceleration and steering parameters are adjusted, the feel becomes smooth. In this way, level design is simply another parameter to balance local and global values against.

Player classifications of feel and their meaning:
Below, I have classified the common player descriptions of feel mentioned earlier by attempting to correlate them to the parameters, global and local, which give rise to and affect them. There seem to be some redundancies and overlap, such as between “twitchy” and “touchy”, and in many cases the descriptors seem to pair off as opposite extremes (tight versus loose, stiff versus smooth and so on.) A possible next step in formalizing these descriptions of feel in game could be survey and interview-based study looking for more native categorizations and attempting to further correlate them to parameter relationships and known behavioral phenomenon.

Floaty
“…the action in the game just feels too floaty overall. There’s very little sense of speed or acceleration, either while on the powder or in the air.” (Amped 2)

When a player says a mechanic feels too floaty, they are often referring to the relationship between forward movement and rotation. Specifically, how quickly a player’s turning input causes a change in direction. If the avatar object can pivot a great deal before a change in heading occurs, as though it is sliding across ice, it will feel floaty. If instead it “carves”, seeming to grip the terrain, dig in, and cause a quick, arcing direction change, it will be perceived as being tighter-feeling. If the object being controlled is in contact with the ground, we can emulate the natural phenomenon that causes cars and other vehicles to make sharp, arcing turns, friction. It is also possible to add a dampening force proportional to the amount and/or duration of turning. For example, if a turning force is applied while a car avatar is moving forwards at 10 units per second, an arbitrary force could be applied in a direction opposite to the car’s forward movement depending on the sharpness of the turn, assuming that the input device being used has enough sensitivity to accommodate a nice range of turning. This will cause the car to appear to carve as if on dry asphalt rather than sliding sideways, as if on ice.

Twitchy or Touchy
“Unfortunately, these games are also the most unevenly re-created, with spotty and unfaithful sounds and–worst of all–twitchy controls, regardless of what input method you select…as previously mentioned, the controls for all of these games are very twitchy and overly sensitive.” (Atari: 80 Classic Games in One)

Twitchy seems to be the opposite of floaty, when the controls are too responsive and the player feels as though the slightest movement will send them veering off their desired course. In this case, we would seem to have too much sensitivity, or not enough range of sensitivity. Try making the range between the smallest and largest possible force applied (especially applicable to turning forces) larger, and mapping it non-linearly, such as with a Bezier curve.

For small movements of the input device, the reaction is very slight. The stronger the input (the farther a thumbstick is pulled away from its neutral position, the faster a mouse is dragged, the longer a button is held) the stronger the turning force.

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Part 3 of 3 coming on Saturday (I teach from 8am to 10pm Fridays).

- Swink

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As promised, here’s the text of my submission to Supple Interfaces. I’m experimenting with a good way to divide by pages; I’ve sunk a surprising amount of time into trying to get various WordPress plugins to do this properly, but it seems to come down to something in the Theme. If you know a good way to do this, please let me know . For now, I’m just making seperate posts.

Part 2 = Wednesday. Enjoy!

ABSTRACT
Digital games are a new medium and, as such, include many unexplored areas. This paper examines one such area, the aesthetic properties of interactivity, more commonly known as the “feel” of controlling a game. While the descriptions used to articulate this feel are often vague and esoteric, they tend to be consistent across players and game designers. I will attempt to classify these poorly articulated descriptions in systematic terms, correlating them to four specific, practicable disciplines of interactive aesthetics.

INTRODUCTION
There exists in the collective minds of video game players a deep and nuanced classification of the “feel” of the games they play and enjoy. This feel is afforded by real-time interactivity. A player is able to trigger an input – move a mouse, press a button – and the game reacts immediately. With the barriers between intent, action, and reaction thusly removed it is possible to experience a kind of “virtual sensation”, exercising kinesthetic control over a purely digital entity in the same way you would steer a bike or drive a car. Like cars, each controllable object in a game has its own feel, based on things like weight, turning radius, and suspension. The similarities continue: virtual sensation can give the same pleasurable feelings of mastery and control, challenge and reward. In many ways virtual sensation is better equipped to create pleasurable experiences than real sensation. In a virtual world, any property of any object can be changed in a heartbeat in favor of one that feels better to control. Gravity can be reduced, friction eliminated, difficulty can be adjusted, reality changed. Physical danger is removed. Feel in a digital game, then, is an evolution of the satisfying, life-enriching sensation of skillful manipulation.

Feel is not artwork, immersion, or theme. The interactive aesthetics that give rise to feel must be separated from traditional visual and aural aesthetics. The quality of the painting and drawing, musical composition, graphic design, sound design, character design, and animation; these things are traditional aesthetics, not interactive ones. There’s no question that the character design and texture painting in a modern Final Fantasy game is well executed from an artistic standpoint, but this has no effect on how it feels to control a character in the game. Also, players will invoke feel to describe the theme of the game “a cool Western feel” or the qualities of immersion (flow) they’re feeling while playing a game “You feel like you’re really there, like you’re in the game.” “The HUD It´s frickin ugly, it totally spoils the feeling of being there.” These are red herrings when discussing feel in digital games.

When players do describe the feel of exercising control over a game avatar, they do so in kinesthetic terms. The game feels “floaty”, “loose”, or “twitchy.” When players say things like “the controls feel tight and very responsive”, “the controls feel sloppy and loose”, or “that crisp feel of control”, they are responding to the interactive aesthetics that give rise to feel. Floaty, loose, twitchy, sloppy, tight, sluggish, responsive, relaxed, stiff, fluid, unnatural, smooth, clunky, touchy; these are the common, recurring descriptions players use when attempting to articulate the feel of controlling a game. As a game designer, these descriptions are frustratingly vague. If a player tells you that your game “feels too floaty”, how do you reconcile that with the abstracted variables of your system? What numbers do you change, and by how much? How do you know when you’ve got it right? How do we as designers come to terms with how players feel our games? How is feel in games created?

Disciplines of Interactive Aesthetics
Below I have outlined four practical disciplines that, in my experience, must be applied to create a good feeling game. In addition, I offer anecdotes, examples, and advice for practitioners.

1. Mechanic System Design – Creating a framework or system in which it is possible, through mapping and tuning, to produce the desired feel.

This is where the feel of a game begins. Before any tuning or tweaking of parameters can occur, we must first define what those parameters are and the relationships between them. Game Designer Chris Crawford suggests first constructing a “verb list”, defining all the actions that will be available to the player. For example, defining the verbs for a simple game like Asteroids would yield something like this:

• Rotate (Left or Right)
• Fire Thruster
• Fire Shot

Ignoring the shot, we’re left with the motion of the ship, where the feel of Asteroids primarily resides. To construct this system, we will first need an object that can be rotated left and right and moved forwards, so the object needs an obvious forward-pointing direction. A triangle fulfills these requirements nicely. Also, there are certain assumptions underlying the relationships between these parameters. For example, the speed of rotation for left and right rotation needs to be the same. When examined, it seems somewhat arbitrary, but the user will expect it because the two rotational values are presented as mirrored. So, the “simple” act of designing and setting up a system belies a series of subtle design choices: what actions will be available to the player, and what will be the relationship between them? What will the object being controlled look like does it have any special functional requirements (such as having a clearly defined front and back)? Mechanic system design, then, is the big picture; it is informed by the disciplines of mapping and tuning, but is arguably the most important. It is impossible to arrive at a desired feel through tuning if underlying system is not capable of producing it.

2. Mapping – Defining the relationship between user input and game reaction.

To return to Asteroids, we have our triangular object and it will rotate and move. How are we going to trigger these three motions (rotate left, rotate right, and thruster)? This question indicates another set of small, subtle design decisions. Assuming that the input device is a keyboard, which buttons do we choose to map to which motion? Where are they positioned relative to one another? Does the rotation of the ship start when the button is in the pressed state and stop when the button is released? Or does the button press start the ship rotating, waiting another press of the same button stop it? What happens if both rotate buttons are pressed simultaneously? This is the discipline of mapping, defining exactly what response the game will offer given a particular input. When a player says a game feels’ unnatural’, this is the culprit.

Mapping marries the physical motion afforded by the input device to some corresponding reaction in the game. This is neat because, as mentioned earlier, motion in a game is bound by nothing. Anything can be a good positional metaphor, anything can make sense, there are no physical laws binding what can and cannot happen in reaction to a given input. We can control a beetle pushing a golf ball or a star flying through the night sky. The only thing that matters is that there is a strong, intuitive, easy to understand correlation between physical manipulation of the input device and reaction from the game. In addition, it is useful to utilize accepted standards and conventions wherever possible (such as using the keyboard keys W, A, S, and D to control forward, backwards, left, and right motions respectively – a common convention.) If the mapping has gone awry users will inform you immediately and vocally. They will be frustrated and confused, asking very basic questions about how to jump, how to get around. So mapping acts as a gatekeeper: for a player to enjoy the feel of a game, the mapping of their input to game reaction must be so intuitive as to be transparent.

Another consideration when mapping is finding the right amount of expressivity. If we consider, in the most general sense, the expressivity of a mechanic to be the sum total of the physical sensitivity represented by the input device and the virtual sensitivity afforded by the reactions to that input by the game, we can get a rough estimate of the expressivity of a given mechanic. For example, a mouse is a highly sensitive input device, especially as compared to a standard two-state button. Jumping in Super Mario Brothers is highly reaction sensitive (the longer you hold the button, the higher the jump, Mario slides gradually to a halt) whereas the jumping Ghosts and Goblins has far less reaction sensitivity (Arthur always follows the same trajectory in his jumps and comes to a complete halt upon landing.) Very little reaction sensitivity results in what players describe as a stiff or unresponsive feel. The trick is to strike a balance; we want as much expressivity as we can get while keeping the simplest, most intuitive control mapping possible. The lower the barrier to entry, the more quickly they can experience the intended feel of the game and appreciate its beauty.

Continued Wednesday…

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