Interesting game design perspective

This Gamasutra feature has an interesting model of the game design process. The model is a kind of pyramid with the concept at the top followed by paradigms, features, mechanics and finally interface. However, the author also notes that interface choices create an "upward" influence on the mechanics.

Immersion Revisited

Still confused about the term "Immersion"?
- I know I am.

Here are three types of immersion as defined by Ernest Adams:

Tactical Immersion - "Tactical immersion is immersion in the moment-by-moment act of playing the game, and is typically found in fast action games. It's what people call being "in the zone" or "in the groove." It's physical and immediate. When you're tactically immersed in a game, your higher brain functions are largely shut down and you become a pair of eyes directly communicating with your fingers. It's an almost meditation-like state-the Tetris Trance... To create tactical immersion, you must offer your players a flawless user interface, one that responds rapidly, intuitively, and above all reliably."

Strategic Immersion - "Strategic immersion, on the other hand, is a cerebral kind of involvement with the game. It's about seeking a path to victory, or at least to optimize a situation. The highest, most abstract form of strategic immersion is experienced by chess masters, who concentrate on finding the right move among a vast number of possibilities. When you're strategically immersed, you're observing, calculating, deducing. However, this doesn't have to mean that the game is turn-based, nor does it even have to be about conflict. The player who intently studies patterns of traffic in Sim City in order to decide where to build a new road is strategically immersed in the game."

Narrative Immersion - "Narrative immersion in games is much the same as it is in books or movies. A player gets immersed in a narrative when he or she starts to care about the characters and wants to know how the story is going to end. The player who is immersed in the narrative can tolerate a certain amount of bad strategic and tactical gameplay. Few games have stories good enough to excuse really bad play, but people who are hooked and want to know how it ends will usually overlook, say, a slightly awkward interface or a feeble AI."

I think what Adams call Tactical, Strategic and Narrative immersion is more akin to what we would call Engrossment. I would argue that immersion is more than just being totally focused on a task. I am more in favor of Murrays definition of immersion in that it has to do with being "transported" into another world - something that I don't think Guitar Hero or Tetris really does, even though they are totally demanding of your attention.

I don't see that any of Adams cathegories touch on the feeling of awe and wonder that you feel just navigating through the exquisitly crafted worlds of GTA4 or Fallout3, or even the feeling of making a death defying jump in Mirror's Edge.

Threshold objects and sefl-reference

In a previous post I looked at the concept of Suspension of Disbelief and The fourth Wall in order to understand player sensitiveness to (some kinds of) self-reference in games. Something that came up several times during the focus group session.

While doing some more research into this topic I came across this article by Matthew Weise (It references Janet Murray and Jesper Juul, witch is cool).

Here is an excerpt (the article deals alot with the self-reference in MGS):

"The exact nature of Snake's relationship to such objects [game controllers, memory cards etc.] is always deliberately ambiguous. Snake clearly does not have a "controller" with him, yet everyone he meets seems to think he does. Everyone in the world of Metal Gear Solid recognizes the threshold object, but not the one manipulating it, which is, of course, the exact purpose of a threshold object. The only way game characters can recognize the player is through Snake, the "mask" the player wears as Janet Murray would say. The player is an impostor who has, through the magic of the threshold object, entered into the reality of Metal Gear Solid in disguise. Even though the controller should be a dead giveaway, none of the characters break fiction because of it. They all stay in character and play along, treating it as part of their world."

"Metal Gear Solid stretches the membrane between the fictional world and the real world as a way of bringing player and fiction together -- not driving them apart. It does this by reveling in the ambiguous nature of the player-avatar relationship. The player is Snake, but not Snake. Snake is the player, but not the player. When characters look at Snake they often see Snake, but they just as often see the player, staring right through Snake's eyes."

"The message to the player is clear: you are Snake. If Metal Gear Solid broke fiction, like Ernest Adams seems to think it does, the message would be the opposite: you are not Snake. Such views, I feel, are based on a misunderstanding of the inherent ambiguities contained within the medium of video games."

"Because games are complex artifacts that function on different levels of reality simultaneously they are not "breaking" anything by sliding between the different levels of reality already at play. They are simply making use of the unique affordances of the video game medium, and trusting the player to be able to parse the different levels of reality into a coherent whole. The games that make the most effective use of these affordances, only a few of which I've discussed here, serve as a model as to what video games can be if we shed our simplistic notions of reality and fiction inherited from traditional media."

Given this interesting take on the topic I would argue that self-reference is not such a big No-No as I would have previously held it to be. The self-references that exist in MGS is, in my mind, more than just tongue-in-cheek but rather what makes the MGS games such a unique experience. The player-avatar ambiguity is a design choice coherent through out the game - and, I would argue, the exploaration of this ambiguity is what playing MGS is all about (the examples that Weiser give are the most memorable moments in the entire game).

In the end the player-avatar and player-game(world) relationship is a very complex one indeed and so much is dependent on the preferences of the particuar player. However, I still think we are on to something very interesting in trying to understand what frame slips and drifts that affects immersion/engrossment in negative ways for players (in general).

Singel and multiplayer games explained!

Having come to the realization that a multi-player and singel-player session of a game are two different experiences, dealing in different frames as well as motivational factors, I found this article by our friend Jesper Juul. (It's not access restricted).

Here Jesper explains this difference in that, what we call, multipayer games are games of Emergence whilst singel-player games are games of Progression.

Jesper summarizes like this: "As a rule of thumb, the simplest way to tell games of emergence from games of progression is to find guides for them on the net. Progression games have walkthroughs: lists of actions to perform to complete the game. Emergence games have strategy guides: rules of thumb, general tricks."

And here is how I think this ties into our hypothesis concerning Hud elements:

- In any given situation in a game that leans more towards emergence there are so many more choices for the player make than in any given situation in a progression based game. I can win a game of counterstrike in a million and one ways, but I can only complete a dungeon in Zelda by doing certain things in a certain order.

This difference in freedom of choice creates a need for more and clearer information to base these choices on when playing emergent games. Since this information is so crucial to the players performance he/she is not too bothered by the the way it is presented. This will therefore, in general, tend to generate more Hud elements.

- I'd bet that all of the games in our HUDless list are games of progression!

Immersion user study tied to imagination, challenge and perception

In the article mentioned in the previous post, the authors also conducted a user study partly with the purpose of proving their sensory/imagination/challenge gameplay model. The results of the study show the balance between the three different gameplay experiences for a number of games:


While the results of this study shouldn't in any way be taken for the absolute truth (and I'm a little bit skeptic to the sensory immersion category as it only seems to take the pure audiovisual quality of the game into account), it's interesting to see that in games like Halflife 2 and Halo 2, players are immersed through challenge rather than imagination.

http://www.uta.fi/~tlilma/gameplay_experience.pdf

Another taxonomy of gameplay experience, tied to immersion

Two finnish researchers proposes a taxonomy of gameplay experience quite similar to the one we are looking at (competition/mimicry/vertigo), in which gameplay experience is divided into the following three components.

Sensory immersion: according to the authors this more or less corresponds to the audiovisual qualities of games.

Challenge-based immersion: the balance of challenges and abilities, striving towards goals and achieving them.

Imaginative immersion: becoming absorbed with the stories and the world, feeling identity for the game characters, etc.

It's easy to draw comparisons to Caillois' game taxonomy of competition, mimicry and vertigo, which we currently feel can be of use as a base for understanding when different HUD approaches are appropriate. However, the authors of this article seem to speek of sensory immersion as the audiovisual qualities of the game, while we speek of sensory-rich experiences beyond that. I still think that this can be of use to us.

http://www.uta.fi/~tlilma/gameplay_experience.pdf

Affordances, spatiality and player manifestation tied to Caillois

I've re-read the previously mentioned article "Computer Games as Playground and Space", which discusses the spatial quality of games tied to Caillois game taxanomy, affordances and player manifestation in the game world. As our ground of knowledge has grown considerably during the last few weeks, this article now seems highly related to our work!

I've also contacted the author of the article, a senior lecturer at the university of Skövde, who has mailed me his PhD thesis "Enacting the Point of Being: Computer Games, Interaction and Film Theory", as well as a link to his article "Roger Caillois ur en narratologs perspektiv". The PhD thesis seems especially relevant for us.

User Study: Visual Attention

I found a user study of visual attention in action/adventure and FPS games (using eye tracking), with two quite interesting conclusions:

1. Players' visual attention in games is top-down to a higher extent than bottom-up; players tend to primarily turn their attention actively to goal-oriented objects (i.e. potential 'area exits' such as doors, fireplaces, etc.), at second hand the immediate areas near the goal-oriented objects. Highlighting objects with color, light or contrast in other ways isn't very effective from an attention point of view, according to this study.

2. In FPS games players tend to concentrate their visual attention only to the center of the screen - compared to people that played a third person action/adventure game, the FPS players rarely took their eyes off the area surrounding the cross-hair. This of course might have to do with the fact that the tested FPS (Halo 2) is slightly more high-paced than the action/adventure game (Legacy of Kain Blood Omen II).

The first conclusion is interesting, and could be quite useful concerning visual navigation-aiding solutions such as runner vision. It should be noted though that this user study is not quantitative in any way, consisting of only six participants.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1178823.1178849&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=22708584&CFTOKEN=25078168

Justifying the Significance of Spatiality

In the essay Game Design as Narrative Architecture, Henry Jenkins speaks of the game world as a kind of information space, in which narrative clues can be presented to convey the story of a game. While the narrative aspect of games is not of direct interest for our thesis, this essay helps us motivate the fact that we consider information not only presented as UI elements layered on top of the visualized game world, but also spatially in the game world itself.

In his argumentation, the author touches on signifiers. For example:

Staged areas... [can] lead the game player to come to their own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger just ahead. Some examples include... doors that have been broken open, traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from a great height, charred remains of a fire.

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair

Put on your goal-glasses

In an article by Delwin Clarke and Robert Duimering studying user preferences in FPS games I found the following quote of interest. The authors invent the concept of "genre models" to describe the conceptual model a player have of a specific game genre. (In fps games red barrels explode when shot etc.)

"Gaming goals appear to have influenced significantly the structure of gamers’ FPS genre models by shaping how they perceived and evaluated various properties of the gaming situation. Specifically, it is proposed that FPS gaming goals influenced gamers’ perceptions and evaluations in two ways. First, aspects of the gaming situation perceived to be most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment were seen as most salient to gamers and aspects seen as less behaviorally relevant to goal attainment were less salient. In other words, goals acted as perceptual filters, such that players paid most attention to aspects of the gaming situation perceived to influence most their attainment of gaming goals, and ignored or paid less attention to aspects perceived to have little or no influence on goal attainment. "

When discussing goals in this quote the authors intend both long term (mission objectives) and short term goals (imediate survival - health, ammo etc.).

Affordances and Signifiers

Here is a short post commenting on Normans article about Signifiers.

I also like this quote explaining the difference between affordances and signifiers.

"I have a milk container in my frig. I know intuitively how to use the container because of the affordances embedded in the design. The handle indicates how I should pour the milk. The formation of the lid implies that I should grip and turn it. Yet, one of the most important aspects of the milk container to me is the fact that it is made of clear plastic. Milk is a staple grocery item for me (and I bet quite a few others). If I am out of milk, I know I need to go to the grocery. The clear plastic allows me to see how much milk I have left, so I can plan a trip to the grocery. This aspect of the design doesn’t really have anything to do with affordance. Regardless of whether or not the plastic is clear, I still know how to use the container based on its form. According to Norman, I think the clear plastic would be a “social” signifier because it provides me with additional information that is relevant to my life."

Ambient Information

I found an article about ambient/peripheral displays, mapping out the design space of 'ambient information systems' in a quite interesting way. The authors speak about:

Information capacity, representing the number of discrete information sources that a system can represent.

Notification level, the degree to which system alerts are meant to interrupt a user.

Representation fidelity, the level of abstraction of the information carriers - how the data from the world is encoded into patterns, pictures, words, or sounds.

Aesthetic emphasis, relative importance of the aesthetics of the display.

Allthough the authors are describing the design space for what is called ambient information systems - ubiquitous computing systems more or less - I do think that the described dimensions are quite important for game interfaces as well. The notification level is especially important from an immersion point of view, and the semiotic aspect of representation fidelity is relevant for diegesis.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1133265.1133277&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=20369361&CFTOKEN=36793872

Article: Games as Playground and Space

This article discusses game environments from both a narratological perspective and - perhaps more interesting for us - a gameplay perspective. Among many things, the author discusses environmental affordances, and coins the expression 'Game Ego' to explain the part of the player that acts within the game on a motoric/sensory level. Throughout the whole article, the author exemplifies with games and draw comparisons to childs play, movies and novels.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1234341.1234353&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=19883058&CFTOKEN=75684218

Game Audio Connected to Diegesis

I stumbled upon an interesting Gamasutra article proposing a framework for game audio. The IEZA framework splits the audio design space into a) a diegetic/non-diegetic dimension and b) an activity/setting dimension, resulting in the sound categories below (quoted from the article):

The Interface category expresses the activity in the non-diegetic part of the game environment. In many games of today this is sound that is synced with activity in the HUD, either as a response to player activity or as a response to game activity.

The Effect category expresses the activity in the diegetic part of the game. Sound is often synced to events in the game world, either triggered by the player or by the game itself. However, activity in the diegetic part of the game can also include sound streams, such as the sound of a continuously burning fire.

The Zone category expresses the setting (for example the geographical or topological setting) of the diegetic part of the game environment. In many games of today, Zone is often designed in such a way (using real time adaptation) that it reflects the consequences of game play on a game's world.

The Affect category expresses the setting (for example the emotional, social and/or cultural setting) of the non-diegetic part of the game environment. Affect is often designed in such a way (using real time adaptation) that it reflects the emotional status of the game or that it anticipates upcoming events in the game.

As the notion of diegesis feels more and more relevant for the project, this article could serve as a good base for argumentation and inspiration.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3509/ieza_a_framework_for_game_audio.php?print=1

The Auditory Dimension, Part II

It seems like most written material covering a deeper exploration of audio as an information channel comes from the 'games for visually impaired' community. The authors of this Gamasutra article reflects on game audio by looking at the results of developing a blind-accessible first-person 3D game. Might spur some ideas for us.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3493/playing_by_ear_using_audio_to_.php

The Auditory Dimension of Games

The article "Audio Games: New perspectives on game audio" provides some potentially usable terminology for the auditory dimension of the game design space. The article discusses two different design strategies; a) using auditory icons and earcons, or b) dividing human listening into casual listening, semantic listening and reduced listening. These strategies are combined into a so-called "sonic triangular vocabulary", a format common to the visual triangular vocabulary used by Scott McCloud (author of "Understanding Comics").

When it comes to the auditory dimension of interfaces, conventions seem to exist only to a very small extent. In order to explore the possibilities of using audio as a carrier of information, I think that this sonic triangular vocabulary - and its comparability with McClouds visual counterpart - might be useful. The link to the article follows below.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1067343.1067361&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=18462546&CFTOKEN=50433615

Article on Rumble

I found an article/column on Gamasutra about how rumble can be used for conveying information to the player to a higher extent than giving simple feedback for shooting, being shot, etc. The author mentions Ocarina of Time, Wii Sports and Rez as games that use vibrations on a higher extent than low-level tactile feedback.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3652/persuasive_games_texture.php

Engagement - Engrossment - Total Immersion

During our tutoring meeting this Tuesday, Staffan mentioned engrossment as a term worth checking out.

The following article is based on a user study of gamers, in which immersion is mentioned as a three point scale where the lowest level is 'engagement', followed by 'engrossment', and the highest level is 'total immersion'.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985921.986048&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=19056125&CFTOKEN=32395460

Article: Flow in Video Games

An article on flow in games, and games and player interaction as information systems. It covers information processing on a cognitive level, and connects flow to information systems, which makes it seem highly relevant.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1371216.1371223&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=18428489&CFTOKEN=57378857

Article: Invisible Walls

An article about maintaining immersion in games and problems with it, touching on the subject of removing HUD elements among many things. Might not be credible enough for referencing, but worth reading.

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/593/invisible_.php?page=1