This is a blog dedicated to my time at University studying BSc Game Design. It will be a non-scheduled look into my life as I discover new things. The basis will be focused on the things I've read, new games I've experienced, creative processes, just an insight into my mind as I develop really.
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Emotional Design In Games
Recently I have played four different games that are centered around emotional design and evoking a feeling from the player. These games are:
Love
Machinarium
Allegory
Loneliness
I’ll use this post to discuss my thoughts and opinions on the games and whether they succeeded in emotionally involving me in them.
Love
I’ll start off with ‘Love’ the first game I played out of the four. My first play through the game I accidentally completely missed all of the emotional connection and story of the game. This was because the menu prompts you with three options: ‘What is love?’, ‘Play’ and ‘Credits’. Wanting to jump straight in I chose ‘Play’ as I presumed that the ‘What is love?’ tab would just be an explanation behind the crew and their intent with the game which I think is better to experience first hand. It was however, the tutorial and narrative builder, explaining the meaning behind the game and adding story to the strange blocks you stay close to. It was fair to say playing the game blind to this, I was confused on what to do and couldn’t really understand how this evoked emotion in any way, I especially missed the advice at the end’s point and assumed it was solely talking about the game. Needless to say, I decided something was wrong, restarted, completed the tutorial and everything clicked into place.
I find it strange, not the game, but how applying such a simple narrative pretense to something like a game where you have to stay near to moving objects without touching them can completely change an experience. All of a sudden everything mattered so much more. It was all a painful description of love. Just the explanation that is given stating that if you get too close to someone in love you get hurt as the reason why you can’t touch the moving squares is brilliant to me. It means that every time you lose you are given a solemn reminder of the pain that is caused by such a feeling. Paired with the advice I talked about earlier that has fantastically been crafted applicable to both the game and love in general. If you read them without context they just seem to be cryptic and vague advice on the game, yet after the tutorial they are given new meaning and appear as extremely important life lessons.
I thoroughly enjoy Love’s way of emotionally connecting a player, I feel that it really succeeds in its intentions as I struggle to fail the game and read the tips without feeling grounded and a need to change.
Machinarium
Machinarium is another on the list which succeeds in evoking an emotional response from me, I would say the main reason for this would be the absolutely stunning visuals:
In this one frame of the starting level you immediately get a sense of this dark, cruel and twisted world. With a muted colour palate everything feels bleak and dreary, the sight of the robot being in multiple pieces and having to put himself back together in this cold wasteland really drives home a feeling of isolation. Coupled with this art is an animation which somehow feels very creepy and sad, a single drop dripping over and over is done in such a way which makes me feel very uncomfortable.
When these elements are put together with quite hard puzzles which sometimes feel a little ridiculous in their fairness (A spoiler quickly: My example of this is the second zone where you have to paint your cone blue somehow after already painting it white, the answer lies under more cones which is quite an uncommon thing to do, as generally games like these wont require you to interact with areas that have already given you completed parts of the puzzle) just to clarify I am not saying the puzzle design is unfair, I enjoyed it as it was relatively unexpected and wasn’t impossible to figure out. By unfair I mean in terms of the world, it seems sneaky and out to get the robot by hiding things in places you wouldn’t think of.
The ‘Unfairness’ of the puzzles as well as the way the second zone ends with the robot slipping and falling really does make this feeling of paranoia stand tall. The world is brought alive to feel cold, unforgiving and brutal in an extremely elegant way. I think this game goes above and beyond in evoking feelings.
Allegory
Allegory failed to evoke a real emotion from me. I would like to say I have a feeling I may be missing something, the game’s little notes at the bottom certainly feel quite existentialist and jaded. Yet that’s all they are to me, notes. In love, a game I realise I praised for it’s notes above, the game established a narrative for the game and made the notes impactful. In Allegory there is no connection made. Unless I completely missed it or I’m just not smart enough to comprehend the narrative. From my point of view the game and these notes are completely detached, I could be playing Soduku whilst someone reads these to me to the same effect. As I’ve said I have a feeling I’m missing something but I played up to level 15 and still didn’t experience any emotional connection so that is where I’ll leave it. If the emotional development becomes brilliant and suddenly appears after level 15 then that is something I’ll just have to live without and say it’s my fault. However if that was actually true then I’d like to point to the strongest game of the lot I’ve played which is coming up after this. The game managed to completely invest me in 2 minutes. Meaning this has no excuse for such slow engagement.
I enjoyed the game and there were some quite challenging puzzles at some points which was nice, I just don’t feel that putting philosophical quotes over a game with no relevance makes for a very emotionally engaging game.
Loneliness
Play this game, seriously. If you haven’t played it yet you honestly shouldn’t read this. The game is about 2 minutes long and super easy to play. Yet it completely wrapped me up in it emotionally and had me in the palm of it’s hand. I have the highest recommendations for it. Anyway, spoilers from now on so yeah.
I don’t even really know what to say about this game. With just the title of the game and watching the black dots move away you immediately understand exactly what the narrative is. It’s extremely smart and intuitive. However I didn’t even realise how involved I was getting until close to the end, at the beginning I just chased all the blocks away and thought nothing much of it. Then after a big herd had run off out of the corner of my eye I saw one had stayed behind and was hopping. I immediately thought that I had found the hidden block that was the point of the game, I went back to it and it stayed there until running off at the last second. I laughed and thought it was a funny trick of the devs to put in.
More situations like this happened for a little while longer, the game was kind of dragging on now, not in a boredom way but I just wanted to find out how it ended. Eventually the groups started thinning, I didn’t even bother chasing a group of dots as I knew they would run away, in fact. I avoided them. I realised immediately afterwards that I was caught. I actually just avoided some pixels because I didn’t want to disturb them as if I got close they’d just run away. This kind of pissed me off, so I said I would just avoid all of them from now on. And then the groups were gone.
Every now and then I would go past a single dot running around by itself, yet every time I tried to avoid it I thought to myself that this might actually be the one, it looked alone too. I thought I was about to finish the game if I got close. Yet still they ran away. And then the game ended.
I won’t explain what this game did in terms of emotional design, it is so wonderful and subtle that pointing out the frame of mind it put me in wouldn’t really do it justice I suppose. All I can say is it completely manipulated me and controlled my emotions perfectly with such limited time, narrative, mechanics, everything. It is a beautiful insight into someones lifetime. And I suppose I’ll leave it at that. This game seriously is disgustingly interesting in the way it does things. Definitely play it if you still haven’t.
The End
Yeah, those were the games I played that dealt with emotional investment from a player. It’s really interesting to see how different designers combat such an issue, everyone has their own unique way of doing it. Give the games a go if you want, they’re pretty good fun and it’s fun to see how easily we’re all controlled emotionally. Thanks for reading - Geo
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Rock Paper Scissors - Redesign
For one of our tasks we were asked to take either the game ‘War’ or ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ and redesign it to make it a less ‘broken’ game whilst making sure it was still the game we chose (We can’t just make a different game, it still must resemble the game we started off with). In this context broken describes how random the game is and that draws happen far too often.
We chose ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ and came to the conclusion that making it into a card game and changing a few elements would change the game enough that it would be different whilst still containing the core game of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’. Below are a bunch of screenshots of our design document showing our method of creation and planning from start to finish. It’s a long read so prepare yourself:
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Reading: ‘The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses’ - Jesse Schell, Chapter 3
Currently halfway through the chapter, I wanted to take a break and quickly discuss my thoughts so far. From what I’ve read so far Mr Schell seems to hold quite an unsavoury view for ‘academics’ who call the lack of concrete definitions in game design a ‘crisis’, when in his experience they are generally the furthest removed from the actual process of game design.
He proposes quite an interesting idea that definitions are not the thing that are important, but that an individual’s mental process behind trying to find a definition is more helpful. He gives examples of words which we use every day such as ‘Fun’ and ‘Toy’ and breaks down definitions of them to show that they are such abstract concepts that even though we all know what they mean, we still can’t express what they actually are. What I personally take from this is that it is much better to actually sit down and think about what a game is to you and challenge your own ideas. After all, he reminds us multiple times that thinking makes better designers.
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Monday 2nd Oct - Friday 13 Oct
This is going to be a relatively quick overview of the research I did into games during my first week of Uni. The short answer : Minimal. Though not much of an excuse, I’ve been caught up by an extremely late move into my new house as well as just the unstable lifestyle that comes with moving somewhere new. I ended up not finding the time to start this blog until now and haven’t had a chance to read any of the material given or play any of the games in the week since they were set. However, I’ve found my stepping now and I’m ready to catch up on everything by the time the weekend ends.
Anyway, I did in fact consume forms of media this week even during the stress of every day life. This first post will be a documentation of said media.
University:
At Uni, during our first lecture we dove straight in and started using a piece of software called ‘Adventure Game Studio’, this is a tool based around a custom language similar to C. It was a warm welcome to programming as I haven’t properly touched scripting for nearly over a year now, seeing familiar syntax and the layout of the program made the experience oddly nostalgic. Looking into adventure games and actually creating the beginnings of one (though we were using a tutorial) was really engaging and I’m excited to get started with the assignment.
Games:
In terms of games I haven’t had a chance to experience something completely new recently. However, before Uni started I stumbled upon ‘Street Fighter’ with my friend, I’d never played fighting games growing up and never thought they’d be the kind of thing to catch my attention. However, I was instantly hooked and have been playing almost daily. It’s a completely new experience and I’ve never felt so invested in a game consistently. The desire to win is something I haven’t experienced so strongly for a few years now, it’s extremely refreshing and a lot of fun. I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to the human psyche as weird as it sounds, but I’ll write a note on that later.
Controllers:
From my new love for Street Fighter I decided to invest in buying an arcade stick. Something I also have never touched in my life, it’s an extremely curious controller. It felt so foreign in my hands as all of my life it’s been Analogue Controllers or Mouse/Keyboard. The idea of using my whole hand just to move a stick was worrying and after failing to even stand a chance against my friend anymore I worried that it wasn’t for me. However I’ve gotten a little bit more used to it recently and I can already say I’d never go back (In terms of fighting games of course). It’s been a strange experience learning how to use something new to me like this, but I’m happy I did especially as it now has expanded my knowledge on a rather niche area of the market.
Media:
I’m going to keep this section short as it hasn’t been too big an influence this week and the post is getting a little long now. This week I started watching a new anime, it’s called ‘Kaiji’ and focuses around a man who has a debt forced upon him when he cosigned for a friend who then ran away. He is then given one chance to earn enough money to cover the debt, Illegal gambling with his life on the line. Various things happen and I won’t talk about the end due to spoilers. However it was a really interesting show as they weren’t scared to make the protagonist lose, it made every game they played that much more intense knowing he isn’t always going to make it out safely. The reason I bring it up is due to the games they played, they were quite interesting ideas for games that really made me think, their focus was more on bluffing and reading your opponent and was extremely interesting to watch. I won’t describe the games here as I’ve stated I wanted to keep this segment as short as possible. However, I might discuss them later on. Kaiji has been extremely interesting and has made me think of designing games I probably wouldn’t have given consideration to before. I would highly recommend it.
Extra Thoughts:
This isn’t really a segment I just wanted to have this to discuss something about Street Fighter, it can also be a good way to conclude the blog post I suppose. Anyway, as I said before I was playing Street Fighter against my friend as usual. He was using a new character however, someone who can grab in the air and slow their fall. This mechanic ended up being my downfall. He would jump in the air and I would go to grab him as he reached the ground, yet by delaying his fall I would miss the grab and be completely open for him to punish me. The first few times I assumed it was just because I’d never fought this before. Yet as the match went on I realised, I wasn’t reacting to his falling frames. I could see that he was grabbing and slowing his fall yet I’d still naturally grab for him when he would hit the ground if he hadn’t slowed. I realised that I was using internal timing unconsciously, even though I could see he wouldn’t be where I thought he would, the timing in my body is so used to the standard jump time that it would react even when my eyes were seeing something different. It’s extremely curious to me that in the short time period I’ve been playing this game my body has developed it’s own timing, this isn’t just muscle memory, I actually unconsciously register as soon as he jumps and attack at the time he will hit the floor every time. And just by changing the jump speed for a character you can completely mess that timing up and take advantage of it. I know is a relatively simple concept to grasp however it really made me think.
End:
Okay I said the extra thoughts would be the conclusion but this actually is haha. Don’t worry the blog posts will probably never be this long again. It’s just I had to do a week’s worth in one post. I plan on just updating this blog with small posts whenever I feel I’ve experienced something worth it. Thanks for reading. See you in the next one - Geo
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