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Constraint is Design: Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro on Intimate Relations
GS: Dr. Isbister, what’s your assessment of Half-Life 2’s characters? I think Half-Life 2 is a great example of the tremendous advances that have been made, as well as the challenges. Many of my students commented on how amazingly lifelike the characters were in that game. But I noticed a pattern--the ones who thought so were already hard-core first-person shooter players. To them, knowing the limitations of the medium and the genre, the movement and facial expressions, and the ability to interact during cut scenes were really exciting and liberating. But, I had everyone in my character design class play the demo version of the game and I noticed that students who were not already fans of this genre felt really frustrated interacting with the Half-Life 2 characters. They expected even more interactivity and lifelikeness from them because of how good they looked. And so they were disappointed.
With the power to create such lifelike models and increasingly engaging motion, we run up against the problem that the interaction paradigms that are in place may need to shift, to make the whole experience work for players, and especially for a broader, less hard-core audience. Which makes grounding design in the player's experience [rather than relying on tried and true genre expectations] essential. One other point about Half-Life 2; I had a student write a whole paper on the G-Man, and how amazingly intriguing and engaging he was. This student tracked down everything he could on fan sites about G-Man, and really went above and beyond in his paper. Curiously, the minimal interventions and the ambiguity surrounding G-Man were more powerful for this student than all the fancy graphics and motion of the rest of the game. I'm sure there's something to learn here about creating powerful emotional reactions--how it doesn't always boil down to higher powered techniques and technologies, but depends first and foremost on leveraging human nature in the most clever and efficient ways. NL: Games are already tapping into social cues, and it’s a symbolic thing like recognizing a picture or a cartoon, you don’t need them to look like real people. As long as there’s something about it that gives it an anthropomorphic quality, we react to it and we react with it. A game like Diner Dash really does a nice job of this, a lot of the emotions in the game come from the fact that we know it’s a restaurant, so we have a situational narrative, we know the goal is she wants to build a restaurant and earn tips, and the characters have emotional states. They get angry, they get frustrated, they get, you know, kind of happy, depending on how good their service is. The game uses social cues to communicate that to the player, and this makes the player feel like they’re serving customers. You don’t literally feel like you’re out in the real world being a waitress, with all the stress and everything else, but you feel like you’re doing something similar. A lot of games are simulations of real work, you’re a zoo manager in Zoo Tycoon or a mayor in Sim City. In a sense we’re already there, but not many people can do it yet. Or they go for the obvious stuff, like “lets model hair, lets model clothes, lets model the food they eat,” – what do you want to model? Only the systems that are fun; you need to get these people in there as a basis for interesting choices, and you’ve got the makings of compelling gameplay. Katherine has a great example with Fight Night, where they eliminated the UI and mapped it onto their faces. When you’re boxing you know how well you’re doing based on what they look like, you don’t need a health bar, you see it. KI: I think in the development process you tend to silo off character by character by character, when its really the space between the characters where the social interaction happens that makes it meaningful for the player. Part of it is adapting the design and production process so that the whole team understands the effects you want to create emotionally.
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