Object Taxonomies and Gameplay

Every videogame creates some kind of world, be it one that somewhat resembles the real world or an abstract puzzle world. The definition of this world consists of the kinds of objects that can inhabit it and how those objects can interact with one another.

The first part of this definition can be thought of as a taxonomy, or a way of organizing objects into categories and subcategories. For example, an object taxonomy for Pac-Man might look something like this:

The Art of How

Form and content in the visual field of videogames

There is a fairly solid consensus now in cognitive science that visual information (and perhaps information from our other senses) takes two distinct pathways through the brain. The ventral pathway runs along the lower part of the brain, and carries information about things. This pathway focuses on what objects are: that is, what they’re called, what categories they fall under, and what they remind us of. It connects up with the language areas of the brain and those most closely associated with memory. It’s commonly called the what pathway.

Five Questions: Empathy

1. I’m on the theme of empathy because I’m interested in how emotional engagement works in games as opposed to non-participatory media, and empathy with the emotions expressed is what comes to mind when talking about emotional engagement with art. But is that too limiting a view of emotional engagement? What other kinds of emotional responses come up when we’re perceiving art?

2. When it comes to empathy specifically, are we talking about empathizing with the emotions of the characters, if there are any, or with the emotions of the artist or designer?

3. If we are talking about characters, what about a character makes us able or unable to empathize with it? Is our ability to engage with game characters different from our ability to engage with literary characters, and if so, why?

4. Does empathy with an avatar character work differently than empathy with an NPC?

5. If differences like this do exist, that may imply that we experience sudden shifts in style of emotional engagement when switching from gameplay to cutscene. If this is true, how does that affect our emotional experience of a game as a whole?

Sketch: Empathy

“(2) The “Heads in the Sand” Objection

‘The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so.’

This argument is seldom expressed quite so openly as in the form above. But it affects most of us who think about it at all. We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position. The popularity of the theological argument is clearly connected with this feeling. It is likely to be quite strong in intellectual people, since they value the power of thinking more highly than others, and are more inclined to base their belief in the superiority of Man on this power.

I do not think that this argument is sufficiently substantial to require refutation. Consolation would be more appropriate: perhaps this should be sought in the transmigration of souls.”

– Alan M. Turing, On Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

“Preliminary Evaluation of the Interactive Drama Façade“, by Rachel Knickmeyer and Michael Mateas.

“Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases”, by Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal.

The Men in the Green Visors

At the beginning of any medium’s lifespan is a period of rampant, unstructured experimentation. Creators work by trial and error, and in the absence of strategies that reliably work, they follow their own whims and interests. Over time, ideas about what does and does not work build up and are taught to future generations as rules or guidelines. For each medium, this process plays out differently, but in each case it is motivated by the need for some relatively reliable system to predict the profitability of a given venture. Once some novel venture starts making enough money, the accountants are going to start taking over.

The hope is that whatever system gets produced will be flexible enough to allow for innovation. American comic books provide a good example of how badly this can all go; in the beginning there were crime comics, horror comics, detective comics, romance comics, adventure comics, etc., all of which eventually gave way to the domination of superhero comics above all else. Innovation in mainstream comics has been an incestuous mess of deconstructing, reconstructing, recontextualizing, and rethinking superheroes, then repeating the process on whatever new ideas about superheroes came out of the previous cycle. This makes for an output which appeals to a fairly narrow segment of the audience, and has left the entire medium in the undignified state of mainly providing characters and ideas for other media in order to eke out a living at all.

Using the Game

Earlier this week I linked to an article from Wired entitled “Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play.” For all the hyperbole of the title, the gist seems to be “they’re play-testing it a whole lot.” The new science of play would appear to be the reasonably well-established science of human-computer interaction (HCI). What makes this endeavor remarkable is probably the fact that usability principles are being applied to a field which is not often thought of by either its supporters or detractors as being especially useful.

While HCI researchers have been trying to steal ideas from game design for years, under the reasoning that videogames are the class of software that people seem to enjoy interacting with the most, it seems that the interest has been rather one-way until more recently. Some researchers have been working to develop heuristics of gameplay analogous to Jakob Nielsen’s well-known usability heuristics, but being outside the industry I don’t know if these efforts have had any effect on actual practice yet. The techniques described in the Wired article, though, sound unmistakably like classic HCI evaluation methods: having the user think out loud while interacting with the software, administering subjective surveys of satisfaction and enjoyment, and recording keystrokes.

And whether or not usability is being explicitly considered in the process of game design, it’s clear from a player’s perspective that games have been getting substantially more usable since their inception. As John Harris points out in his piece on difficult games for Gamasutra, videogames have gradually transitioned from being seen as tests of skill to being seen as providers of an experience. When a game’s purpose is to put you through hell to see if you can survive it, ease of interaction is obviously the last thing on the designer’s mind. When its purpose is to immerse you in a world or storyline, there should be no barriers to that immersion in the form of excessive difficulty or awkward interaction.

The big question all this raises is this: what are we talking about when we talk about interaction? It isn’t just a matter of the interface; the Halo 3 team, at least, is also testing gameplay, level design, and mechanics with their analysis. And the changes alluded to by Harris encompass the basic philosophy behind the design of a game, not just how that design is presented to the player. I’ve been using the terms HCI, interaction, and usability pretty interchangeably throughout this post, mainly because I’m uncomfortable applying any of them to what goes on between a player and a game.

In any case, these ideas come from the analysis of software which is designed to aid in some specific set of tasks, and task orientation has been built into the fiber of HCI from the word go. The implicit assumption in the application of HCI to gaming seems to be that the task is to finish the game, or some subset of the game. After all, what else does the user do with the software that you can actually quantify? And if enjoyable finishability starts becoming the gold standard of game design, what kind of games are and are not going to get produced?

A turning point approaches

“Filmmakers proceeded blindly, with little to guide them in the way of either precedent or theory.  They did not exactly know what effects they wanted, nor, to the extent that they knew, did they all want exactly the same effects.  As a result there were many experiments – in technology, in dramaturgy, in narrative, in set design – some of which proved to have no sequel.”

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ”The Heyday of the Silents,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema

Halo 3: How Microsoft Invented a New Science of Play, by Clive Thompson for Wired.

Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games, by John Harris for Gamasutra.

Man, talk about videogame logic!

The careful pilot of my proper woe

Earlier this week I linked to an article from The New York Times, written by the sort of Times writer who says things like “to use the vernacular, I almost lost it.” Seth Schiesel, the monocle-popping writer in question, feels that emotional involvement in videogames is limited compared to other media, and that this limitation may be inherent. He suggests that the most powerful affective reactions to art come from what he calls “emotional surprise,” and that in a medium where the audience’s choice determines the outcome, this surprise is impossible.

Should we really be crying more?

“Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.”
– George Lucas

Even Games That Have Everything Are Still Missing Something, by Seth Schiesel for The New York Times.

More on this later!

What makes you believe now I am just talking nonsense?

The theme of Corvus Elrod’s Round Table for this month (which I may as a tendency take as a general monthly theme) is the role of artificial intelligence in gaming. In this context, as I understand it, AI most often refers to intelligent agents specifically; that is, the decision-making processes behind enemies, allies, social NPCs, and any other game objects meant to project an air of sentience.