Game-state feedback and affordance amplifiers

Apart from our initial objective game study, we haven't looked at how information can be categorized. In this post, I propose an alternative to our earlier taxonomy of internal, external, goal-oriented and non-diegetic information.

The information conveyed to the player can be divided into two types: game-state feedback informing the player about the current state of the game, and affordance amplifiers that re-enforces the affordances of the environment and invites to player interaction. Examples follow below:

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GAME-STATE FEEDBACK
Health bars
Red/blur filtering to indicate critical level of health
Ammo counters
Teammate status
Mirror's Edge checkpoint beacons
Bad Company red overlay triangle to indicate points of interest (if point of interest is also an object of interest, its an affordance amplifier as well)
Overlay radar/GPS navigational aids
Objective instructions
Maps
Pause menus
Dynamic music
Bloody textures on enemies and characters indicating that they're damaged

AFFORDANCE AMPLIFIERS
Shiny shaders on pickups and other objects of interest
Runner vision
Crosshair used to show that an object is interactable/pickupable
Crosshair distinction between allies and hostiles (affordance: kill enemy, talk to friend)
The avatars hand reaching out to pick up or interact with an object
Doom 3 data terminals
Red barrels indicating that they will explode when shot
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Since the nature of individual types of game-state feedback differ quite a lot from each other, this might motivate a sub-categorization within the game-state feedback category. This might draw on the earlier internal (health, ammo, etc) and external (objectives, navigational aid, teammate status, etc) information categories.

This categorization opens up for some interesting borderline cases, when an informational vehicle - a representation - contains both game-state feedback and affordance amplification. Examples of this is an indication of a point of interest (game-state feedback) that is also an indication to an interactable object of interest (affordance amplifier), or the red clouds on enemies in Mirror's Edge indicating both that the enemy must be defeated in order to progress (game-state feedback) and that the enemy is of special interest (affordance amplifier).

I think that this way of categorizing information is more systematic from a UI/game designer point of view than our earlier method.