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 Features
Principles of Virtual Sensation
 The Importance of Ownership
The underlying goal of all the principles discussed above is to create a feeling of control and mastery so powerful that it transcends context and platform and becomes a powerful tool for self expression. This feeling creates a strong sense of ownership, which is what happens when players can express themselves in a meaningful way through a game. Any artifacts the game creates based on their inputs (replays and so forth) become an important commodity, and players begin to identify with the game and their achievements in it in a very powerful, transparent way. Players start to feel pride in their accomplishments, and develop a desire to share them with others. The ultimate example is The Sims franchise, which has sold millions of copies based on the feelings of ownership players have over their digital creations and stories.
The best virtual sensations contribute significantly to the feeling of ownership. This happens after the player has fully learned the mechanic and mastered most of the challenges presented by the game, at the point most games get put down. In the game industry, this is often termed “replayability” and is spoken of in hushed tones because of the obvious correlation between games that have this quality and games that do very well financially. Really, this phenomenon is all about ownership: if a player feels a personal investment in a game, they’ll keep playing it. If they keep playing it, they will start to evangelize it. Once mastered, a virtual sensation that has enough sensitivity allows improvisation, which often gives rise to unique forms of self-expression.
Improvisation in a game is the ability to create new and interesting combinations of motion in real time, adapting and reacting to the game’s environment in a fluid, organic way, without forethought. This is an intensely pleasurable experience, a flow experience. When your skill is matching up well to the challenge you’ve undertaken, you get into the flow state, which is universally described as being a wonderful, life-enriching experience. To allow such improvisation, a mechanic needs to have not only a lot of sensitivity (between its input and reaction) but to be very flexible in how it interacts with objects in its environment.
Some games, like Tony Hawk’s Underground, achieve a sense of ownership through a huge number of states and a context that’s well spaced with a lot of utility in a ton of different instances. The player can use any number of states to traverse the environment, using each object in many different ways. All the objects are well spaced relative to one another, which again fosters improvisation by making it easy to transfer successfully between any two objects from any direction of approach. Invariably, no two combos will be the same because you’ll use different objects in different ways, and choose different paths to take depending on the situation. You improvise, making snap judgments about which objects to traverse. At the highest level of play, this becomes even more expressive, with players finding and practicing long “lines” of chained moves used on certain objects. They seek out aesthetically appealing states rather than high scoring ones, recording videos of their most appealing lines and uploading them to the web to share. To these players, Tony Hawk is a form of interpretive dance, enabled by the fact that all the objects have a very high degree of utility from just about any state or relative position.
Other games, like Ski Stunt Simulator, are more fluid and achieve ownership through extremely high input sensitivity and subtlety. Minute differences in the angle of skis to ground, for example, produce a totally different kind of landing. Because there are global rules about object interaction in Ski Stunt –a crash occurs if the skis hit at a certain angle or when the skier’s head hits the ground – there’s a lot of space for interesting improvisation and expression. For example, when the skier is extended, standing his full height, he raises his arms in the air. If you’re in the air, about to hit your head and trigger a crash state, you can extend the skiers arms to prevent his head from hitting. This ability isn’t explicitly defined but, instead, is a product of the recombination of a few simple rules (e.g., you can move the skiers arms up, crash is only triggered when his head hits.)
Finally, when multiple players are involved, expression becomes communication, which opens a whole new realm of powerful social experiences. In Battlefield 2, for example¸ if you sneak up on someone and stab them with a knife, their state goes from alive to dead. In that context, knifing an enemy player is just playing the game, and slightly embarrassing the enemy player who allowed himself to be snuck up on. If once the player is dead, however, you continue to knife the corpse, this action has a totally different meaning. It’s directly insulting and belittling to the player, who has to watch from his corpses’ perspective as he’s stabbed over and over again until he can respawn.
Here’s a personal example: I once got very lucky sneaking up on someone who was clearly an experienced player and very difficult to sneak up on. I climbed up a ladder behind him just as he turned away. As soon as I reached the top of the ladder, I pulled out my knife in preparation for an easy, embarrassing kill. To my surprise, he immediately turned around again, sweeping for enemies behind him. I had just enough time to stab before I was gunned down. His avatar jerked wildly, translating the actual jerking motion of his mouse hand swinging wildly in real surprise and alarm across the internet and back to me.
Conclusion
The goal of any game is to provide entertaining, life-enriching flow and social experiences, experiences that don’t exist watching a film or reading a book. Compelling virtual sensation is a great foundation for these experiences, providing feelings of challenge, mastery, and control as well as a beautiful kinesthetic experience unique to any medium. The game designer, then needs an understanding of what gives rise to these experiences and the tools and skills to create them. I hope these principles of virtual sensation can be such a tool.
Throughout the paper I referenced Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” theory where appropriate. In games, this is often referred to as “immersion”; so, for the purposes of this paper, consider those terms interchangeable. For a detailed description of the flow state, how you can tell if someone is entering or exiting it, how it enriches people’s lives, and the conditions necessary to achieve it, reference Csikszentmihalyi’s original work on flow, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. For more information about how flow applies directly to games, reference Sweetser and Wyeth’s Gameflow: A model for evaluating player enjoyment in games.
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