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Principles of Virtual Sensation

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Now try the “High Input, Low Reaction” controls, which are driven instead by the mouse. With this combination, you have very high sensitivity with the input device, the mouse, but almost zero reaction from the game. The cube has become essentially a very large cursor.

This is a very natural mapping; the position of the mouse on the screen matches the position of the mouse sitting on the desk, so it’s very easy to feel oriented and get a sense of mastery and control. In addition, using a mouse like this is one of the most fundamental skills of computer use, so we’ve got a global cultural standard to help make this mapping feel natural. Pretty boring, though, isn’t it? Because the mapping is so internalized from years of computer use, there’s nothing to learn, no motion translation to master. There’s very little virtual sensation to mouse movement; it is quick, snappy, and has almost no feel of mass, weight or presence.

The “High Input, High Reaction” controls, on the other hand, have some play to them. There’s a very interesting motion here, one that requires a bit of mastery. It feels nice to whip the block around again and again to hit the red dot and to experiment with trying to slow the block down again and reverse direction or to make little figure eight patterns. Even a game with high input sensitivity and low reaction sensitivity (a first person shooter that ties mouse movement directly to looking around a 3d space for example), smoothes that snappy, jerky input with a little bit of reaction from the game.

Another way to get a lot of sensitivity in virtual sensation is rapid state switching. As noted before, players are conditioned to tolerate changes in mappings during gameplay. As long as there’s good feedback telling the player that a state switch has occurred, it’s ok to change the meaning of the controls on the fly. The benefit of doing this is that you’re increasing the reaction sensitivity a great deal as you do so (though in a much less obvious way than having the object speed up and slow down gradually instead of turning movement on and off discretely.) In Super Mario Brothers, there are ostensibly three controls: left, right, and jump. On closer examination, though, we see a bunch of different states that overlap and interact in different ways to create a nice, sensitive feel:

When Mario is not in contact with the ground, the strength of his left and right movement is greatly reduced: a different state. This is a very simple example of increasing sensitivity through state switching. Left and right movement means something different when Mario is in the air, meaning that one input is actually mapped to two separate actions that change depending on context. While the input sensitivity is the same, the player now has two entirely different sets of actions in the game and, in fact, two slightly different virtual sensations that are interwoven to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Another type of state switching is “chording,” creating new reaction types by having certain inputs act as modifiers for others. When Mario is in contact with the ground and the B button is held, he moves much more quickly, a modifier that causes him to enter another state: running. This would seem only to affect Mario when in the ground state but it has also been tied into the air state: the speed you’re moving when you jump effects how high you can jump. By remapping the same inputs on the fly to create different results, you’re actually creating a much greater possibility space for the player, one that has many, many more skill layers than a static mapping.

Finally, note that it’s possible to trigger state switches across both time and space. The most common example of state switching across time in games is a combo: certain sequences of button presses have different meanings if they’re pressed within a certain time of one another. This form of state switching relies not on deeper reaction to certain combinations of simultaneous input, but to sequences of input across time. The result is the same, though: greater sensitivity and more skill layers.

The same thing can be accomplished spatially, giving different inputs new meanings depending on their spatial relationships. The ultimate example of this is the game Strange Attractors, a game with only one button for input. Pressing the button turns the “the attractors” on or off – they’re gravity wells of sorts – pulling the player’s ship towards them or pushing the ship away. How much pull each gravity well exerts is affected by how close the ship is to it. This simple system, through huge reaction sensitivity, makes even a single button a conduit for a strong virtual sensation.

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