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 Features
Principles of Virtual Sensation
 Seven Principles of Virtual Sensation
The seven principles of virtual sensation defined here will hopefully enable game designers – or indeed, anyone concerned with human-computer interaction – to improve the “gut feel” of the interface. They are a conscious attempt to improve the users’ unconscious experience.
1. Predictable Results - Allowing a sense of mastery and control by correctly interpreting player input and providing consistent, predictable results.
2. Novelty – There are an infinite number of results from the same input.
3. Good Feedback – Enabling mastery, control, and learning by rewarding player experimentation.
4. Low Skill Floor, High Skill Ceiling – Making the mechanic intuitive but deep; it takes minutes to pick up and understand but a lifetime to master.
5. Context – Giving a mechanic meaning by providing the rules and spatial context in which it operates
6. Impact and Satisfying Resolution – Defining the weight and size of objects through their interaction with each other and the environment.
7. Appealing Reaction – Producing appealing reaction regardless of context or input.
The application of these principles should transcend different “genres” and types of games, applying to 2d and 3d games alike. Anywhere there is virtual sensation these principles should help improve it.
The practical implications of these seven aesthetic principles are detailed below.
Note: for many of the points made here, there are interactive examples provided. These examples will be crucial to understanding each principle; I encourage playing them as they are referenced in the text. There are hyperlinked images that will spawn in-browser popup versions of the game throughout the paper. Alternately, go here for a master page with links to all the tests. The web version of these tests all require the Virtools web player plugin to run. The web player should ask for permission to install if it isn’t already on your system (installer is 740k). However, if you need more information on the Virtools web player– including compatibility and install issues–visit the Virtools Web Player download page. A downloadable .exe version of the tests can be found here.
1. Predictable Results - Allowing a sense of mastery and control by correctly interpreting player input and providing consistent, predictable results.
This is the cornerstone of virtual sensation. If rotating your car’s steering wheel clockwise switched from steering left to steering right at random, you would not be able to control it. Without the ability to predict the result of your input, there can be no feeling of control or mastery, no virtual sensation. Though this is very intuitive and easy to understand as a concept, many designers hamstring their virtual sensations by mapping inputs to results that are too difficult to process, creating mappings that are unnatural or counterintuitive, or by overwhelming the player with states and possibilities and thus making even consistent results seem random.
One pitfall in creating virtual sensation is relying on the infallibility of the platform on which it resides. It is easy to assume that because the game is technically infallible – it receives input accurately and processes it the same way each time – the input it receives and the results it responds with correspond in a meaningful way to what the player intended.
As Will Wright observes, game design is half technology and half psychology. Even if the result of a given input is internally consistent as far as the game is concerned, if the movement is quick, snappy, or otherwise difficult for the player to perceive, it becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the Cube Movement 1 test, touching the red dot using the normal controls is easy but doing so with the speedy controls is much more difficult and somewhat disorienting. The random controls variant makes it impossible to accurately predict the results of a given input and is therefore the most difficult and frustrating.
Cube Movement 1
Another design consideration that affects predictability is mapping. Mapping refers to the relationship between controls, their movements, and the results in the game. Based on input device and the game’s presentation, you have expectations about what will happen in response to a given action. A natural mapping exploits these expectations to create immediate understanding for the player.
For example, using the normal controls in Cube Movement 1, each of the four buttons is a spatial analogy: pressing the top most button moves the cube up, the left button moves it left, and so on. Another way to achieve natural mapping is through cultural standards, which in games is often referred to as a “genre convention.” Using the keyboard keys W, A, S, and D to correspond to moving an object up, left, down, and right, respectively, is a well established cultural standard in videogames:
Unless you’re intentionally creating a counterintuitive feel to pursue some experiential goal, such as the reverse-controlled beetle golf minigame in Wario Ware, Inc: Mega Microgames or the clumsy, oppressive feel of Resident Evil 4, you should use spatial analogies and cultural standards wherever possible to create mappings that are easily learned and remembered.
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