Features

Principles of Virtual Sensation

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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.

The best games are simple, can be learned in minutes, and take a lifetime to master. Being easy to learn, a game captures players of all skill levels. Being difficult to master, it can keep them playing their entire lives, driven always to improve. In games where it’s featured prominently, virtual sensation is a kind of microcosm for this phenomenon. It’s the first thing that players will have to master, and the basis for all their interactions from then on.

The overall experience of playing the game is an amplification of the success of the virtual sensation on which it sits. Goals, levels, scenarios, items, weapons, and other changing contexts may highlight various aspects of the virtual sensation, but underlying it all is the same core, the core that existed at the beginning of the game, the same virtual sensation that had to provide traction in two minutes or less.

A low skill floor simply means that a virtual sensation is easy to learn. There are different dimensions here: a virtual sensation may be very complicated with many different inputs and states but still relatively easy to learn because it starts with a natural mapping, provides predictable results for input, and avoids state overwhelm with good feedback. Conversely, a very simple virtual sensation can quickly become confusing and difficult to learn if it lacks clear feedback or uses a mapping that is too arbitrary. The skill floor of a virtual sensation is not necessarily a function of its underlying complexity.

A high skill ceiling means that completely mastering the virtual sensation is extremely time consuming, if not impossible—for example, the original “Pong” game. The controls could not be simpler but how does one ‘master’ Pong? The only way to measure is through competition. In this sense, mastery exists as a sensation within the player’s mind. If they feel there is always some way for them to improve, and feel rewarded for doing so, they will continue to play. The player’s idea of mastery may be the ability to consistently beat their friends, to end a game of, say, Counterstrike with the highest score on the server, or to “beat” a game by completing all the tasks the designer has set – getting all 120 stars in Super Mario 64, for example.

Players choose all kinds of goals to represent various levels of mastery, and game designers are good at supplying challenges to match and exceed those levels (or the means for players to create their own challenges.) Providing varied challenges is only half the story, though. The other thing that’s necessary for a long-lived game is a virtual sensation that has enough sensitivity to provide a large number of skill layers.

A skill layer is a chunk of skills and learning that must be mastered before the player can graduate to the next layer of skills and challenges. For example, in the game Ski Stunt Simulator, the first layer of skills is learning how to bend the skier forward and backwards, getting him to assume various positions and to shift his weight forwards and backwards on the skis. Next, you learn how to cause him to jump by quickly shifting between ducking and standing. Once you’ve “chunked” the various complicated motions necessary to jump into a single action and can reproduce it with ease, you learn to lean forward and back as you jump, tucking up to do a forward flip. Next, you learn how to back flip. Soon you’re doing multiple flips of both types, and so on. There are many, many skill layers in Ski Stunt Simulator, yielding a near-endless “replayability.”

One way to create a game that has a lot of skill layers is tuning the relationship between input and reaction sensitivity. In the Cube Movement 2 test, the normal controls have low input sensitivity and low reaction sensitivity. The input sensitivity is low because there are only four buttons, and each of which only has two states, on or off. The reaction sensitivity is low because the game’s reaction for each button has only two states, moving at full speed or not moving at all. This is not a very good virtual sensation, very stiff with very little fluidity or appeal. In some instances – the original Legend of Zelda, for example – this grid like rigidity is desirable because it allows for a more contemplative, less visceral feel. As in Pacman, all rotation and superfluous directions of movement have been stripped away for simplicity. The result, however, is not very a very compelling virtual sensation when removed from its context.

Cube Movement 2

Now try switching to the “Low Input, High Reaction” controls. The input sensitivity is still the same as it was – the four keyboard keys with only their on and off states – but now the mechanic feels much more fluid and organic, much better. This is because the reaction sensitivity is much higher. When a button is pressed, it’s no longer just starting and stopping movement, it’s ramping up to full speed gradually and taking a while to settle back down again once all input has stopped. There’s a lot more subtlety here, a lot more to master. It feels better, much more like the original Super Mario Brothers than the normal controls. The game is reacting to the simple button inputs with longer, more fluid states that have a bit of play in them. Because each state now takes a while to resolve (forward movement will slow but not totally stop before a sideways motion is started), it has a lot of interesting state overlaps that give the player a great sense of momentum:

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