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 Features
Principles of Virtual Sensation
 What is Virtual Sensation?
Driving a car, you have a very strong sense of the position of that car, the feel of steering and controlling it, of mastery. This is the ability that every person who’s ever learned to drive a car has: the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body. There is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation.
Very abstractly, when you remap your neural pathways, you are feeding your brain, and it rewards you with pleasure. So much so that people often seek out new and increasingly complicated mappings to master: sports, rock climbing, juggling, riding unicycles, and so on. Many people also find this pleasure in video games, where it is both distilled to its essence and free of the constraints and dangers of more physical activities. You can change the turning radius of a car, but you can’t change gravity. This experience of control is derived from an artificial kinesthesia.
This is the “feel” of the game, the thing that makes your mom lean left and right in her seat as she tries to play Rad Racer. While accessories have evolved to enhance and support this virtual sensation – controller shake, for example – its essence has been the same since the creation of Spacewar and oscilloscope table tennis.
When describing the control of a game, players often use a physical analogy; the control is “floaty,” “twitchy,” “smooth,” “slow,” or “loose.” Accompanying these descriptors are very powerful “gut” reactions. Terms like love and hate are often used, with superlative emphasis. Best game ever, worst controls ever, worst camera ever. These are plainly aesthetic judgments, judgments that indicate some kind of inviolable rules are in play.
To define those rules, we need to delineate traditional cartoon animation, from Bugs Bunny “shorts” to full-length films like Snow White, from virtual sensation in video games. By definition, traditional animation plays beginning to end, linearly, as a series of images. By contrast, virtual sensation in games is driven primarily by the player’s input. If there’s no input, there’s no movement.
This delineation, between animation and virtual sensation, is a significant red herring in video games because there is a large amount of crossover from traditional animation. Many games layer linearly animated objects and characters on top of their reactive components.
For example, in the game Street Fighter 2 there are large, detailed sprites with many different animations, the playback of which are triggered by specific button presses or player input sequences. Underlying this system of “pose boxing,” though, is a very basic virtual sensation. The movement of the joystick maps directly to the character’s movement on screen, and that movement is extremely simple in nature. Imagine Street Fighter with simple grey boxes instead of detailed character animations (figure 1) to get a good sense of what is purely reactive and what is baked-on animation.
While the shape of the character changes depending on moves triggered by the player, the underlying motion is very simple.
The other thing to keep in mind is that while virtual sensation can provide a great foundation for a good game, it is separate from the concerns of other types of game design. Virtual sensation is not concerned, for example, with the tweaking of abstracted variables to achieve “balance” in a game. Virtual sensation occurs primarily at the lowest level of interaction, what you experience from moment to moment, representing a gut feel rather than a conscious experience. This is, perhaps, why it is extremely difficult for players to articulate why they like or dislike the feel of a game.
The following seven principles of virtual sensation are a first attempt at creating useful guidelines for developing games that “feel” right; or at the very least, to avoid common mistakes that interfere with the player’s experience of the game.
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