When you want to understand the weight, mass, and texture of something, you pick it up and noodle it around in your hands. You feel its weight, imagine what would happen if you were to throw or drop it, and get a sense of its texture. Size permitting, you toss it up and catch it a couple of times. You roll it.

The same playful process occurs when controlling a game agent via input device. There is another layer of abstraction, of course – the controller, keyboard and mouse, stylus, etc…- but that layer fades to transparency the instant you pick up the input device and you’re left with the same kind of sensory experimentation. Your inputs aren’t button presses or mouse movements, you’re touching something virtual in the same way you touch something physical. You push, pull, and throw the agent. You see how far it goes. You test the limits, boundaries and rules under which it operates, you see how fast or slow you can make it move, how fast you can turn it, and how its mass and weight compare to other things in its virtual world. In short, you’re experiencing a feeling of touch, a purely virtual sensation.

Ipso facto, the important difference between virtual sensation and actual sensation are the worlds in which they operate. Whereas no one can change the rules of the real world, I, as the designer, can change the rules of my game world. For one, I’m always going to make it representational. Simplifying the rules makes things easier to predict and control, which is much more conducive to a feeling of mastery. Want to be able to hit a baseball 100,000 miles? No problem. Want that baseball to float in the air so it’s easy to hit? Done. Want to be able to jump 100 miles into the air and float softly back down? Fly? Spin? Run up walls? These are decimal point changes to my game world’s rules. I can make these changes in real time. I can give you, the player, control of them to do with as you like.

So here’s a deceptively deep question: what is the feeling of controlling something in a video game?

Clearly, it’s a very aesthetic feeling. When describing the control of a game, players often resort to a physical analogy; the control is “floaty”, “twitchy”, “smooth”, “slow”, or “loose.” It seems easiest to describe when it’s gone wrong.

As gamers, we intuitively understand this feeling. Even as I’m typing this, I can easily imagine the feeling, as I’m sure any gamer can. Why, then, do we grope for ways to describe it? How would you describe it? It’s something so base and simple, such a common experience, it blows my mind that we don’t have a name for it.

It’s the feeling that causes you to lean left and right as you play, the feeling that you’re reaching into the game and pulling or pushing the agent with virtual hands. If it’s done right, it’s the best thing about video games, a feeling that has no real analogy in other media. So what’s a good, short name for that feeling? What can we call it?

Look at the word “animation”. Divorced of the context of Disney and Pixar, of bringing life and motion to a series of static drawings played back in a specific order, it’s just delineation. Something is either animate, like a bunny, or inanimate, like a rock. Imagine the context of the word “animation” before cartoon animation developed. These days it’s a great word, rich with context and imagery; it describes a whole artistic medium. Before, it meant almost nothing. Now it’s flexible (it made the transition from 2d drawn animation to 3d computer animation quite happily), encompassing, and powerful. So what about that very physical, kinesthetic feeling of controlling a game agent? What do we call that? What’s a flexible, encompassing, powerful descriptor?

Here are some possibilities:

Input Feel
Input Dynamics
Input Sensation
Virtual Touch
Virtual Sensation
Intent Projection
Reactive Motion

My favorite is “virtual sensation”, so I’m going with that. Anyone have something better?

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