Showing posts with label Agency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agency. Show all posts
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Lots of interesting reading!
I found this site with the collected works of post doc Rune Klevjer - who has spent most of his academic carer looking at FPS games. I have yet to read his dissertation but I already feel it's a shame we did not find this earlier!
Monday, March 2, 2009
Immersion, agency and affordances.
In the article "Interaction and Narrative" (by Mateas and Stern) the authors talk about the concept of Agency as being crucial to player engagement/immersion in a game experience.
Agency is the players sense of being able to act in, and therefor be part of, the game world. To achieve a high sense of agency there has to be a good overlap between the material and formal affordances of the game.
Material affordances are the things in the game world you can interact with and any effects that you as a player can achieve.
Formal affordances is what motivates the player and help him/her choose between and prioritize between all the available actions.
To give some examples the authors imply that most classic adventure games (Monkey island etc.) have a heavy imbalance between material and formal affordances. In any adventure game there are often tones of items and objects to interact and fiddle with (many material affordances). However, oftentimes players have a hard time understanding why these interactions matter in the overarching plot of the game and how to prioritize certain actions over others (few formal affordances).
On the other hand the authors hail Quake as finding a very good balance between material and formal affordances. Given the plot (more like a proto-plot actually) and setting of the game there are basically these formal affordances: Everthing that moves is trying to kill you, You shold try to kill everything, You should try to move through as many levels as possible.
These formal affordances are perfectly matched by the games material affordances; you can pick up and fire different weapons, you can pick up objects that make you stronger, you can pick up keys and interact with buttons that help you proceed through the levels.
The fact that you can not talk to any of the monsters or reareange the furniture of the dugeons will therfor never bother anyone playing Quake.
The authors also gives the guideline that game interfaces should be transparent in order not to disturb the players sense of agency - witch I have a hard time really agreeing with. A person playing World of Warcraft will have a screen full of icons, buttons and bars - but, I would argue, still has a strong sense of agency in the world.
- I find all this super interesting and this idea of agency might, I believe, be the explanation for why shooters are such a popular genre. In games Agency is Everything and the shooters of today are probarbly the best at balancing material and formal constraints in a way that is possible to realize within the time and budget of a normal game project.
Agency is the players sense of being able to act in, and therefor be part of, the game world. To achieve a high sense of agency there has to be a good overlap between the material and formal affordances of the game.
Material affordances are the things in the game world you can interact with and any effects that you as a player can achieve.
Formal affordances is what motivates the player and help him/her choose between and prioritize between all the available actions.
To give some examples the authors imply that most classic adventure games (Monkey island etc.) have a heavy imbalance between material and formal affordances. In any adventure game there are often tones of items and objects to interact and fiddle with (many material affordances). However, oftentimes players have a hard time understanding why these interactions matter in the overarching plot of the game and how to prioritize certain actions over others (few formal affordances).
On the other hand the authors hail Quake as finding a very good balance between material and formal affordances. Given the plot (more like a proto-plot actually) and setting of the game there are basically these formal affordances: Everthing that moves is trying to kill you, You shold try to kill everything, You should try to move through as many levels as possible.
These formal affordances are perfectly matched by the games material affordances; you can pick up and fire different weapons, you can pick up objects that make you stronger, you can pick up keys and interact with buttons that help you proceed through the levels.
The fact that you can not talk to any of the monsters or reareange the furniture of the dugeons will therfor never bother anyone playing Quake.
The authors also gives the guideline that game interfaces should be transparent in order not to disturb the players sense of agency - witch I have a hard time really agreeing with. A person playing World of Warcraft will have a screen full of icons, buttons and bars - but, I would argue, still has a strong sense of agency in the world.
- I find all this super interesting and this idea of agency might, I believe, be the explanation for why shooters are such a popular genre. In games Agency is Everything and the shooters of today are probarbly the best at balancing material and formal constraints in a way that is possible to realize within the time and budget of a normal game project.
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