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Emotion Engineering: A Scientific Approach For Understanding Game Appeal
[Is there a defining theory for game design? Kalisto and 10tacle designer Bura tries to create a 'periodic table of elements' for creating games - from surprise through dread and beyond.]
This is a very exciting time to be a video game designer.
Video game design is evolving from a barely understood activity done by
genius designers driven by their gut feelings, to a craft with shared
techniques and methodologies. A common vocabulary cobbled from various
fields (interface design, psychology, complex systems, physics, etc.)
is slowly emerging. Successes and failures are analyzed...
But it's still a big mess, a large toolbox where any designer can find
the right tool to confirm exactly what he believes in. There are no
universally accepted truths, only opinions about what makes a great
game, whether or not video games are an art form or whether there is an
effective method to teach video game design.
We lack ways to compare games in an objective manner, ways to describe
them in a shared language. Without proper description, there can be no
true understanding. Success in video games still hinges on applying
traditional techniques, copying, marketing, luck, or genius. And even if
success is achieved, there's no guarantee that we can know why it
happened.
Arts and sciences have rules and laws, not just techniques. But what are the rules of video game design?
Where is our redox law? Our perspective rule? Our theory of relativity?
Where are the formal tools we can use to better understand, analyze, and improve games?
How big is the game design space and can we identify its virgin territories?
What are the rules we can bend or break to create totally new experiences?
This article presents a theory of what video game game design is and explains how to find some of these rules.
Caveat: If I sound pedantic or over-confident in this
article, please prefix any affirmation I make with "I modestly believe
without being able to prove that..." This work has generated many hours
of doubt and self-doubt. I do not pretend to teach anyone the
definitive meaning of trust, catching-up, fear, or of collecting a
power-up. This is an ongoing work, as the article's version number - 1.0.4 - attests.
If you disagree with me, please tell me why and I'm sure you'll be
convincing enough to change my mind.
That said, let's start with easy questions that have clear answers: "What is game design?" and "What is a good game?"
What is Game Design?
Players don't play to complete games, just as readers don't read to
finish books. Players play to feel emotions. Game design is experience
crafting for the purpose of emotion engineering.
Game design is
intrinsically hard because its output is an interactive system that is
twice removed from its goal. The game designer produces rules for
interaction that, with the participation of the player, generate game
states that themselves induce emotions in the player.
Note: In Emotional Design,
Donald Norman describes three different levels of experience
processing: visceral (how it makes the person having the experience
feel), behavioral (how well it suits its purpose or function), and
reflective (how it affects the person’s self-image). Games can have a
behavioral aspect, from being a learning tool to a systemic
demonstration of a concept. This article focuses on the other two
aspects: how games can have an emotional impact on their players.
If we can describe a given game state using a set of gameplay variables, we get the following cycle:
Interactions between the player and the game produce changes in the gameplay variables. For instance, finding a heart container in Zelda and getting a bigger full health bar obviously changes something in the game state. We'll explore below what this could be.
Variations or stability of these variables induce emotions in the player. For instance, having a bigger full health bar could make him more confident.
Player's emotions influence how he interacts with the game. For
instance, being confident might make him take more risks; pride might
keep him chasing a high score; or boredom might make him stop playing
altogether.
Some of these emotions are the result of a carefully crafted
sequence of events. Others stem from the normal moment-to-moment
interaction with the game. Since the players and their playing
experiences are so different from one another, one cannot guarantee that
a given player will feel a given emotion at a given point in a game.
However, from our understanding of physiology, psychology, cognition, or
culture, we can identify situations that create the proper context for
the expression of such an emotion.
Note: This article is not about creating emotions with the content,
the subject matter, or the story, but through interactions with the game
alone. Indeed, these are integral parts of the whole - emotions are
enhanced by the appropriate setting or story - but the subject has been
talked about at length by better qualified people elsewhere. So I'll
skip this for now.
Game design works backwards around this cycle, trying to predict
player emotions from changes in the interactive system. But our
knowledge of the dependencies between interaction and emotion is so
sparse that most changes require testing. Testing in part requires
implementing the changes, which costs time and money. Thus, in a
professional setting where budget is an issue, game design innovation
can quickly become a risk.
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Comments
Yes... This is the very reason why we are in the midst of a creative crisis in games - why games are rehashed, commoditized and "deadly" (qv. "deadly theater": http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902526,00.html). Because of this drive to exclude the individual and at times irrational creative genius element in favor of something systematized, "scientific" and rational but also ultimately lifeless.
Not that I'm trying to say that this kind of higher-level thinking isn't welcome, but it seems to overshadow everything else in game design discussions these days. First and foremost, game designers need to be educated about how to work with the technical, visually artistic, and pragmatic people on their teams, instead of trying to develop their own esoteric code language to describe their craft.
I think this sort of deconstruction of games is beneficial and insightful, but it has to be married with creativity (which the author does not deny). In the same way that great designers of other industries (buildings, cars, you name it) almost always understand the rules before they bend them to achieve something interesting, I think video game designers can only improve their craft by understanding theories like this as part of the fundamental building blocks of interactive experiences, and then setting out with the intent of exploiting them.
Learning these theories does not result in the same games over and over, because it addresses the deeper motivators for how players typically react; they do not necessarily define how they manifest themselves in the experience.
There's certainly a lot of high level discussion, which is important because game design lacks the years or centuries of theory behind other disciplines (programming, art, sound, management). But you can still find lots of very practical articles. Ernest Adams and Dan Cook are two very good sources for this kind of material.
The notion that this kind of formalizations are the cause of a "creative crisis" in games is laughable. We still need a lot more work in the direction that this article goes; we can't afford 100-man teams flying by instinct. If anything, better understanding and professionalization of the design process may improve our ability to deliver what and when we say we will, and open up the opportunities for more risk taking in large projects.
You've brought up this issue of standardization being a terrible thing, several times before. Without a common language it doesn't matter how creative an individual is they will never get their creation made as those required to actually implement it will not be able to communicate effectively with each other.
David Lynch might make films unlike anybody else but when he tells his crew he wants a Wide Shot, or a POV or whatever they know exact what he means, even if they have never worked with him before. They know because there is a common vocabulary for cinema that they all have to understand. If they didn’t his creation will never be what he intended, and everybody would have to relearn everything from the ground up each time.
Standardization of techniques and tools is a prerequisite for a common vocabulary. Once that vocabulary is in place how people use it is up to them, the language their develop is their own.
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear on this subject: I love genius, I'm a fan of genius and I have no desire of excluding geniuses from the industry. I'm just trying to understand how they make great games.
Basically, gameplay (challenges and whatnot) is a way to generate emotions and immersion. Gamplay is a tool used to "keep the player interested". It's not necessary. Theoretically, you can have an interesting interactive experience on a computer without the actual game. To do this, however, "game" designers need to get better at their craft.
Some thoughts on choices, which you touched on: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/Choices3.htm
I hear the distant cry of ego when I see people say that these metrics, tools and thought experiments are pushing us away from a creative Mecca and instead lead us towards a future of desaturated fun. Truly it is fear of failure on the part of designers that polishes this angle.
A standard language of game design is ultimately what we should be striving for. The English language and its varied usage has not stopped evolving just because it has become familiar to many. Movies haven't stopped getting better because the whole crew understands that a grip isn't just for handles.
We should however as stated above, teach designers how to better communicate with their team members, but the onus shouldn't lie squarely on the designers alone (what are we, the guy that came late to the party and has to apologize and bend over backwards just because his usefulness has most recently been discovered?). Everyone working in the industry should respect its vernacular and immerse themselves in the language of each field if they are to be able to act more than just as a springboard for designers and producers. Artists need to learn to talk to programmers and vice versa.
Thanks to Stephane Bura, my cubicle now has nice new charts to study.
"The use of logical structures to represent design problems has an important consequence. It brings with it the loss of innocence. A logical picture is easier to criticize that a vague picture since the assumptions it is based on are brought out into the open. Its increased precision gives us the chance to sharpen our conception of what the design process involves. But once what we do intuitively can be described and compared with non-intuitive ways of doing the same things, we cannot go on accepting the intuitive model innocently. Whether we decide to stand for or against pure intuition as a method, we must do so for reasons which can be discussed.
I wish to state my belief in this loss of innocence very clearly, because there are many designers who are apparently not willing to accept the loss. They insist that design must be a purely intuitive process: that it is hopeless to try and understand it sensibly because the problems are too deep."
Great quote. Christopher Alexander is a huge influence of mine. Near the end of the article I mention the concept of elegance which I believe is the path to game "wholeness", the concept he develops in The Nature of Order. I'm still struggling to find an intelligible way to describe it, though.
People can comfortably talk about generating emotion through character and story elements, or through a graphic aesthetic - but examining how emotions are tied specifically to gameplay is fairly unique.
I will be interested to see how this discussion continues.
"But Mendel had an advantage over us: being a botanist, he had a fairly good idea of what to observe and measure: colors, shapes, textures, size, growth rates, etc. (Furthermore, he didn't care if his peas looked or tasted great, while game designers are trying to understand what make games good while making good games.)"
A game designer cares if his peas look or/and taste great.
Some experienced designers will no doubt insist that game design is an artistic act that can't be reduced to picking boxes from a chart, but saying that doesn't make it so. (Nor do I think the author was suggesting any such reductionistic thing.) Let's see some games designed using, among other tools, the concepts described here. Then we can decide whether the concepts are sound, bogus, or basically accurate but would benefit from some tweaking.
Not incidentally, the four "levels" that Stéphane Bura describes sound very much to me like Richard Bartle's original four player types:
Action = Killer (tool-use, tactical flexibility, sensation/experience-orientation)
System = Explorer (experimentation, exploration of the underlying rules of a system)
Self = Achiever (acquisition of skills and trophies, operational control-seeking)
Social = Socializer (personal relationships, community, role-playing that respects the magic circle)
In this light, the three modes -- Freedom, Mastery, and Data -- appear as different gameplay contexts in which the four fundamental player motivations can be expressed.
I'm currently exploring a theory that these four player motivations are game-contextual subsets of the four "temperaments" described by David Keirsey, and that the general temperament model offers some useful knowledge about the play features that different kinds of gamers enjoy (or not) and why. If anyone else is interested in this line of study, I've put together a couple of essays (http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/01/styles-of-play-full-chart.html and http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/01/bartles-player-types-and-keirseys.html) that try to explore the possible congruences among the various theories of styles of play.
This article tells us about the "notes" (emotions) in the music of gaming; but we can't make a good song by just assembling these notes for the sake of manipulating the player. The player may be in it for more complex reasons than just raw emotions; such as insight about him/herself, the world, or life--at least in story-based games. The aesthetic experience comes from the sympathy generated between the creator and the audience, and the audiences' willingness to explore a new perspective.
Anyway, that's my two cents. Great article!
One suggestion: be leery of the Meier quote's implications as a be-all solution to what makes a good game design. It is an excellent summary of a good game, but it does so because the word "interesting" is one that each person adapts to themselves. Both Koster and Cook did great work trying to nail that concept down, but personally I think it's better left to the realm of plot or visuals. Any person trying to explain the interesting part is going to get sucked into bias. I'd yammer about complex moral dilemmas, other people talk about strategic challenges, you get the idea. What makes it a good quote to throw out is that its implications are vast and customizable.
Again though, excellent break down of numerous theories into a coherent whole.
1. It's actually pretty simple. Most if not all games revolve around a balance of some simple activities in a manner that players can understand and it isn't - despite appearances - a complex subject to understand.
2. It requires a genuine creative talent. Although simple, game design is one of those things - like music - which you either have a knack for or you don't. Like musicians, good game designers just have a sense of game rhythm and they tend to apply that sense of rhythm without references to text books.
In short, I don't think game design is really a science. The article above, while certainly very long, isn't really telling me anything other than yet another set of theories based on a series of assumptions. It won't make anyone a better designer, sorry.
Game art already has got its common set of building rules: they are called programming, software engineering, level design, etc.
There are a lot of absolute rules on making a movie or a painting, but none about how to create really good ones.
Once you have developed the basic tools to build a work of art, you have no more theory to learn; there is only experience, inspiration, creativity.
"Game art" itself is a misnomer. You could say that game development, rather than game art, is the parent class for game design, programming, sound design and art. Each of those are the parent classes for another subset of skills; game design is the parent of level design for instance.
Speaking to the game design part, as a method of design comparable to architectural or industrial design, it does not yet have established methods and procedures that can guide creation.
Having those rules obviously helps. Miyamoto has a background in traditional product design, and it shows in the way he works.
Establishing methods that can be reproduced allow teaching. you always have theory to learn, and game design and development is young enough that we can say it still has a long way to go.
If the game industry weren't so intent on preying on the young, and inexperienced, burning them out and spitting them out of the industry 5 years later, there might be more EXPERIENCED designers around who have refined their craft, knowledge and instincts. (Even then though, just as anyone can practice the piano and still never be good at it, same applies to game design, but it's much harder to figure out someone is mediocre at it, huh?)
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