- Rewarding the notplayer...

This is a bit of a brainstorm. Please excuse the chaos.

This is probably not a good idea, but I imagine it may be one that we may run into once in a while, coming from game design. It's probably best to simply design something new from scratch. But even then it may be hard to avoid falling back on old habits.

When thinking about creating an entertaining interactive environment, implementing game elements is an easy way to keep people's minds occupied, to keep them amused. If you've created a game in which people need to find things, you can reward them with a virtual gold coin every time they find something or simply increase a number in the corner of the screen.

But, as an exercise, I want to reject this cheap solution. So players would simply explore and find things. But I don't want the experience to feel like a toy. Like a free-form interactive plaything. I want players to be more engaged. I don't want to engage them be rewarding them with things that form a meta-layer over the experience (points). But I also don't want everything they find to be a kind of key to get to something else (as in adventure games).

I want the payoff to be emotional or narrative. Like in a book: you force yourself to stay awake and keep reading because you want to find out what happened. Or in a film: you pay attention to the mumbling of an actor so you can catch a witty remark, or you watch their faces closely to figure out what they are thinking.

So I guess what this amounts to is a rejection of triviality. If there are things to find in the game, make these things interesting and pertinent to the story, the mood, etc. This may mean that there's not nearly as many things to discover as in a real game (which is filled with trivial things that only contribute to the system, not the story). This may mean that your notgame becomes a lot shorter than a regular videogame.

I don't have a problem with that. Short playtimes make it harder to sell to gamers. But perhaps they make it easier to sell to non-gamers. There must be a reason why a pop song is always 3 minutes long and a film is always 90 minutes. Maybe we should even try to condense our content on purpose: try to make the experience shorter (instead of the usual dragging out that videogame designers tend to do). But more pertinent, more impactful. Dare to change people's whole life in an instant, rather than changing only a few hours of their lives by taking their minds of of it.

But not everything needs to be "heavy". We can still have trivial interactions mixed in with the meaningful ones. As long as they are pleasant in and of themselves and don't require a reward. So rather than making a game+poetry, we make a toy+poetry. Sounds a lot better to me anyway, because the toy will not distract the player from the poetry as much as a game can.

A game has its own logic and you can get lost playing with the abstract system completely disconnected from the representation, while toy-play almost always operates on the level of make-belief, which is exactly where we want our player to be. Toys may not have the same purpose as "notgames" but they seem more compatible than games.

I have been thinking a lot along these lines too.

Using plot twists and revelations as the main type of award worked out reasonably well in my game Blueberry Garden. This way of motivating the player made the playtime become very short (exactly like you say). There simply isn't much more to do when the story comes to an end. In that context it feels very weird to try to prolong the happening of events by adding "puzzles" or "challenges", it would just destroy the rhythm (still that's what most gamers would like, of course).

Me and a friend have been planning for a while to explore some other kind of motivation... more specifically the one that makes us humans want to travel. It almost seems like games about traveling would be the most basic form of notgames, right?

No matter if we go for a walk or travel by train through Europe there is something very goal-less about it. The motivation is too see things (surroundings, places, people, culture) and experience events (sleeping at the floor in some strangers barn, etc), not really to get anywhere. Also, there is something silly and playful about the whole thing: usually we just try to go far away half of the time and then home the rest of it.

Did either of you play Spectre (www.spectregame.com) - it was an IndieCade finalist this year and really very interesting. Made up of very small minigames, as you navigate the memories of an old man to reconstruct his life. What's interesting about it is that is has a huge replay value, as there are so many ways of reading his life and that's what pulls you back in again and again (and the play itself is so simple that you don't have to think about the game at all, just a means of leveraging the story into the experience). Lovely writing too - and similar principle to what we attempted with Esther with the randomisation of the story, so even though the trad. gameplay elements are minimal, there's a reason to revisit. (Interestingly we came in at 45-60 minutes there too)...

What captures a notplayer - also captures a player, but through the fog of microgoal-feedback loops - is a world to wander, an atmosphere. In a way, this is an advantage the notgame has, as it ditches or reduces these loops, allowing space for other experiences and reactions to breathe and grow. We can wander. For me, this was what I liked best about The Path, not Grandma's house (the most plot-like element, I guess) but the forest itself, where the connections were neither fixed nor obvious, but the conjured world was dense and rich and intriguing. Which is a lot like travel, but unlike game travel, where it is all about both the destination, and the struggle (realised in short, short bursts), but the meandering and pseudo-aimlessness.

Final random thought - the core thing that distinguishes the notgame experience, again like the game experience, from other media is embodiment. The projection in some form into the presented world. But here, like in a book, it is the world laid out before us that makes us want to continue to explore. Ironically, this is not something lost on recent commercial games either. But the difference may be that they are tied, perhaps necessarily, to the loop of action that stops us from pausing, taking time to reflect, smell the virtual flowers, taste the air, stretch our backs, maybe sleep and dream....

I'm all for shedding triviality and creating shorter experiences. It seems that's all I have time for these days, anyway. :P I've never liked the triviality in game design, either - while I tend to be very result-oriented in real life, I am very process-oriented in games and I tend to focus heavily on moment-to-moment feel and overriding purpose rather than points and achievements and such.

In the game I'm working on now, in fact, I'm still trying to defend my choice (to myself) to keep the game-ness simple and not to add things like achievements, points, upgrades and all that stuff that I find pointless but that I know will increase the ratings on Flash game portals...

: chineseroom January 15, 2010, 11:26:17 AM

What captures a notplayer - also captures a player, but through the fog of microgoal-feedback loops - is a world to wander, an atmosphere. In a way, this is an advantage the notgame has, as it ditches or reduces these loops, allowing space for other experiences and reactions to breathe and grow. We can wander. For me, this was what I liked best about The Path, not Grandma's house (the most plot-like element, I guess) but the forest itself, where the connections were neither fixed nor obvious, but the conjured world was dense and rich and intriguing. Which is a lot like travel, but unlike game travel, where it is all about both the destination, and the struggle (realised in short, short bursts), but the meandering and pseudo-aimlessness.

This is what I like too, but I don't know that this is all there is to notgames. It is certainly not all there is to games, since it's one of many gameplay types in several classification systems:

Easy Fun in Nicole Lazzaro's Four Fun Keys,
Explorer play in Richard Bartle's player suits,
Wanderer play in Chris Bateman's DGD1,and
Seeker play in Chris Bateman's more recent BrainHex model

Of course, it is my preferred play mode, generally speaking, but I wouldn't assume that that's all notgames can be. Certainly a fruitful starting point though. :)

And walking through a forest, yes. I have to say, playing The Path was an experience that came closest to that of walking through a real forest, more than any other game, though it was more like a hint of the experience than the actual thing. (So many of these games and things I admire are like hints rather than the real thing, really.) But I've had some thoughts about what that would have to look like, for me. Maybe I'll write more about it in another forum thread. :)

I don't think there is (or should be) a single formula. I think we could do worse than concentrate on our content, on the story we're trying to tell and the atmosphere we're trying to create. All interaction design and structure should flow out of that.

This is not necessarily a linear process. You can be inspired by certain mechanic, for instance, to change the setting. But as long as our focus point is the content, and not the form, I think we're ok. The thing I'm starting to realize is that, unlike regular games, notgames require an author. An author to take the place of the format. It's like turning off the automatic pilot. :)

Of course, I'm thinking mostly in my own category here (narrative experiences). There's probably many other ways of making digital entertainment that is not games. But I guess each creator needs to focus on their own talents and desire.

In very rough terms, the difference may be the same as that between a genre novelist and a writer of literature. The former submits their story to the conventions of the genre while the latter works above any sort of genre classification and invents a format to serve their content.

This is too rough for a proper comparison because the technical format of a games is far more restrictive than the narrative format of genre fiction. In other words: the genre novelist has a lot more freedom to talk about the things they want to talk about. Another difference is that there are many genres of fiction while "game" is a single genre. In terms of format, it doesn't matter much if something is a puzzle or an RPG or a shooter. The format is the same. But if you're a writer, you can choose the genre that best suits the story you want to tell.

But, more pertinently to my assessment, game designers more or less hide behind the conventions of the game format to escape from their responsibilities as an author. Cliffy B is famous -at least in my book- for saying that the reason why he make people shoot things in his games is because that's the easiest way of allowing them to touch the virtual world. Games are always about some kind of warfare, not necessarily because their creators are aggressive machos, but because violent conflict is about the only thing you can express in the format of games. So rather than being an author and telling a real story, conveying some real meaning, game designers simply accept the limitations of the format.

This is horrible because on the other end, when people are playing these games, they do interpret the things they see as a story, as an experience, as a virtual world, as characters. And not just as the expression of the abstract system underneath. So the player always gets a story about being a hero who always wins and learns how aggressive behaviour is the best way to resolve any conflict, etc. If the designer had taken up their responsibility as an author, they would have portrayed a more nuanced picture. But this cannot be done within the games format (according to me).

I think it should be possible to have knowledge as a reward. One first needs to hint to the user that there is some understanding to be gained and then hint at what needs to be done in order to understand it. Then the world would needed to be explored and interacted with in order to gain this knowledge. Even better would be some kind of layered knowledge where one piece can be used as a building block for some other greater knowledge.

This is not a trivial thing though and I think it is a bit like a puzzle, with the major difference that you can partially gain knowledge of something (not really possible for a puzzle). As for an example of what I am thinking about, it could be some kind of ecological connection in the virtual world or it could be something that connects to the real world more directly (like learning physics). At least for me, knowledge is a great carrot when reading some kind of books, and it also allows one to come back to a work, since the more can be understood each time.

A bit connected to this is listening to classical music and for me there are two things that reward me when listening. First of all it is the beauty of the experience and one can sort of dream away to another world when listening. Secondly, especially on subsequent listening, more details start to appear and one can focus on certain aspects of the music that will reveal more of it. For me that feels a bit like gaining knowledge. Especially in complex music like Bach, it can be very rewarding to listen to a piece several times, each time discovering something new.

Sorry for the rantish nature of this, hopefully something made sense :)

Two things to add.

I don't think the content of a game needs to be something that is known to the author only at first and then slowly discovered by the player. I agree that this is one of the joys of reading fiction. But, thanks to our medium, we are not bound to this logic. Perhaps it sounds a bit utopian, but I believe we can also build applications that allow the player to discover stories that the author did not put in the game explicitly. The key to this is the realisation that good art is about the viewer, not the artist. If our content starts connecting with something in the player's real life experience, we can create very deep experiences. To which the player can add a lot of themselves.

Another reason why I enjoy listening to classical music is interpretation. The choices that the director and the musicians made as well as the sound of the instruments and even the way the music was recorded. I have a few favorite pieces that I've heard many interpretations of and they are very different. I have also had the experience of learning to appreciate classical music when I finally heard good interpretations after a youth filled with Herbert von Karajan and his armies of violins.

Experience is the ultimate award.

Again, do you give candies to the audience in the theatre between acts because "yeay, they made it from there to here!". If you will look at player-rewards you will see how offending this system is. And how much it defines videogames as something that _indeed_ doesn't deserve to be treated with respect.
Again, rewarding a person for playing is offensive to this person. Sure, it feels cool because we got used to it. Sure, it is like a carrot. But if it is like a carrot, who the hell are we? Mules? And we follow whereever our master manipulates us to go? Master = designer. Designer manipulates because he wants money and some shallow fun out of his work (and if he doesn't work 16h a day he gets it). And in the end it seems like we are not in charge of our free time at all.

God... Videogames reached the level of craziness when it comes to treating them seriously long time ago.

Experience should be the only award. Experience is the fuel for passion.

The problem is, with a film we already know how to act - we sit down, are quiet, and just watch. Sometimes you need to steer the player through the game. It is not handing out sweets or carrots, but an understanding between the player and the designer that some level of communication has to exist.

In Dinner Date (beta available shortly!) I have icons on the screen that correspond with actions the player can take. I add new actions throughout the game, even though one could argue the character could have done these actions before and I as a designer simply said "no you cannot". Adding these actions eventually becomes a reward as each new 'paragraph' of the game adds new actions.
Furthermore, I programmed the game in such a way it remembers what actions you took and starts enlarging icons that are underused. This would be a non-tasty carrot; if you do not do certain actions, the icon becomes larger and larger until you are compelled to try it.
The whole game runs on this principle, actually, it is possible to finish it by pressing 6 buttons or so in total, but a normal player will press more than a 100 because each icon promises a new 'interesting thing' to happen - something to lure the player further.

You can be more intellectual about these lures than make them carrots obvious carrots, like Thomas says; knowledge of the situation or something else to do with the actual game. Handing out points is somewhat pointless and I personally always am annoyed at the prospect of having to gain them.

Would it help our thinking if we reversed the roles?

Imagine that we are the game and that we want the player to play us. What would we do? And if we take it one step further and we imagine that we, as a game, want to experience pleasure. How can we stimulate the player to give us pleasure? One way would indeed be to flat out ask the player to press this or that sensitive spot. But there's other, more subtle ways. Giving pleasure is an invitation. If we, as a game, please the player, then perhaps the player will return the favour. If we want something specific to happen, maybe we can do something to the player and hope they imitate us and do the same thing to us.

Maybe it's helpful to think of game design as design of a play mate for the player, rather than design of a play thing.

I think that coming up with good ways of thinking about (and solving!) this is the most important thing for evolving the game medium. Normally in games, you have some slot-machine like additive mechanic that serves has a carrot for the player. I do not like this, because it limits games that can be made and it is also kind of degrades the experience. As Kaworu said, like getting candy for watching a movie. Games like Fallout and Planescape Torment, that has a really interesting worlds and actions have a large part of the game filled with meaningless status upgrading. One could say that the leveling/looting makes you connect to the character/world, but I think it is just a cheap mechanic that adds an additive ingredient to the game. I believe that getting rid of this need for a "fun" core mechanic is crucial to evolve.

Michaël:
I really like that approach! Perhaps one could kind of compare playing a game to having a conversation? If you keep asking different questions and just get the same kind of answers the conversion quickly gets boring. If you are asked questions you need to be able to provide varied and interesting answers that hopefully makes the person talking to you want to ask other questions, tell you about themselves and so. Also, you would like to give them hints into asking talking about certain subjects that might be an area that you are good talking about.

Now, instead of talking, in a game the player has input. Translated into conversion the input could be "So what if I pull this lever?", "I am walking along this lonely road", "I would like to examine that more closely" and so on. The idea would then be to get the player to do the correct input and keep on giving interesting output as they try out things. The game gets uninteresting when the player:
- does not know what input to give
- does not get interesting output from the input given

So, with the game's role as "mate" you have to keep the player entertained and make sure that they feel like they are moving on. Rewards would then be:
- Get meaningful output from input
- Learn new inputs
And you got a sort of input-output cycle and the role of the game is to keep this rolling. It seems to me that just keeping this rolling is a sort of reward for the player. Now this could work on several levels as well. From simple things like: "push forward and the characters moves, displaying a funny animation" to more complex: "Get all animals healthy and watch how the ecology in the nature blooms"

I like the idea of having a game that, while not being on rails, always keeps the player interested and makes sure she has stuff to do. Like a good play mate would do, to use Michaels analogy! This of course gives rise to interesting and hard problems, such as knowing when a player is stuck and needs a push in the right direction.

Jeroen:
I like your idea of underused actions getting larger and so on giving the player of things to do. If I understand, your game is a sort of space of actions that is expanded for every action being made? Would you call it similar to a sort of branching dialog system (as seen in many adventure games), except that entire game is one big dialog? Will be interesting to try (if I get to try the beta that is :P)!

Michael, I really like this comparison to the game being 'us'. I have certainly thought about this subject that way before and you go much further in it than I did. It seems to me to reinforce the thought you have to 'establish a means of dialogue' with the player - so if you do something uncommon, such as a (not)game, you have to 'agree' on this with the player. I am sort-of building an initial model around this dialogue concept. Of course, this dialogue can be, as you suggest, non-verbal; and I argue that apart from hyper-level messages it probably should not be too much literal 'agreements'.

But I am including an extra section in my game I had not planned that tells the player he is not controlling a character, he is performing the subconscious actions of a character. I was thinking for a while this would be obvious to the player whilst or after playing, but why should it be? To go with your metaphor, which sounds as I am sure you are aware (;)) somewhat sexual to my by now British-trained ears, you can give pleasure, but if the person is not aware of the type of pleasure you are trying to give he may be unaware of your efforts and not reciprocal. But if you tell your playing partner what type of thing you are doing, without letting it rely on the norms of the other person (the player expecting a game-like experience), you can hook in on other types of activity or create concepts of new ones. Hence my 'you are subconscious' message, which is me as a designer saying; this is our common ground, do not ask me for anything outside of this. If you do not like it, I will not force you but then we have nothing to give one-another.

As to my work on symbiosis, this 'common ground' you agree upon would be heavily influenced by the temperance and capabilities of a person - finding that you cannot smile unless the character is happy, or that walking is slower when not happy. This all works theoretically but not unless you agree with the player that there will be no challenge hanky-panky going on where you reward him for walking; then the character being happy becomes a subservient goal.
(But perhaps we are just so used to looking at games like this this becomes our own faulty interpretation? Like only having seen soft sci-fi films and then watching Moon.)

Thomas:
In the game you perform the normally subconscious actions of a character who is waiting for a dinner date to show up. I give the player actions like tapping and looking around, and increase this palette throughout the game. At first I felt there was too little to do, but many test players found the story to be written well enough and the voice acting hooking enough (both are my work so I am happy about that result) to be lulled into doing exactly this; I can see them experimenting with how to eat soup or dunk bread in it.
But this is mostly open-minded gamers or non-gamers, I notice. What people do and expect is very much dependant on their background. The best player I had never played games.

I will certainly release my work on this forum! I think your responses will be very valuable to me, since I will be researching design techniques that I derive from my theory.

Yes, I was definitely thinking about sex. Not just because soon we will start working on a prototype for a game for which sex is one of the main inspirations. But also because sex, like games, is about playing and about pleasure. It's more open than a game while still consisting of a continuous feedback loop. I realize that a computer can never be as clever as a real person, but a computer has other qualities that can perhaps compensate (especially in the realm of the fictional: a computer can be anything and do anything).

Games are usually presented as objects, objects with interfaces. So players tend to be very selfish. They basically think they are alone and don't need to do anything for the game. If we can get them to voluntarily do something for the game (instead of for themselves), I think we go very far, together. There's several levels in this: you can give the game pleasure once in a while, and you can make the game happy over time. Maybe the goal of a game is to make it happy. :)
(which I guess implies that, at the start, the game is sad and needs something from you... -or maybe it was fine, and you made it sad by starting to play ;) )

All excellent thoughts... I find it very interesting how this is developing into you looking into a relationship between the player and game, with the game as an agent, and I am looking into achieving symbiosis with a character with whom you go through the game, without necessarily personifying the game. It would not be about pleasing the character, rather learning to live with the mentality and physiology of the character, as it were.

I feel like narratively with this I am on the safe side, making your exploration of 'personified' games more exciting.

On the subject of the new game, have you by any chance read Lost Girls by Alan Moore? It was the first substantial work I read that was absolutely 'about sex', even classified as pornography, without giving up being 'far more'. Even if you will just allude to sex it may be interesting to see how open a book can be about the subject without being tacky, vulgar or mystical. I think as taboo subjects go, the greatest dangers for people trying to break them are that they are merely a counter-culture, incapable of being positive about it in its own right; unless they encounter previous artefacts of this nature on which they can build. Perhaps that is even a bit of a danger with notgames themselves.

Michael, Jeroen (and anyone else who thinks similar to them), I don't know what you guys want to achieve my making something interactive but notgame. What I know, though, is what I want to achieve and these are digital interactive stories that do something different than stories tell with any other medium, while in the same time try to offer what any good story would have to offer. Which means that I don't give a shit, absolutely don't give a damn about something a trivial as FUN. Dear player, want to have fun? Go and buy yourself "kill more Germans" game or jump from one platform to another with your exciting Mario. But, if you want to read my interactive stories, interact with them, participate in them and explore my artistic vision, then I want you to laugh, to cry, to feel melancholic, shocked, moved, touched, surprised, etc. I don't want you to feel happy. What am I, a pet? I want you to feel exactly what you would feel in theatre, cinema, reading a book, observing a painting/graphic or listening to music, but in different, new way as all mediums differ one way or another. And that's it. I'm not a clown, I'm not an entertainer, I do not perform on the street. I write stories and begin with the stories because story is always the most important part of experience to me. I believe that problem with interactive medium is that:
1) It can be treated as a vessel for stories. BUT also...
2) Can be treated as a medium to show beautiful artwork or groundbreaking special effects.
3) Interactivity is something unexplored.

First way shares the path with literature and theatre. And most likely with the cinema which, although tries to be more and more pretty in look, is highly acclaimed by unique stories and ways they have been presented (camera work, music, lighting, etc.). Paintings and this part of cinema that looks concentrates on looks seems to share the second path for (not)games.
Third one is a big problem so far.

So now, I can turn every single story that I use for my interactive stories into a play, novel or a script. And if the story isn't compelling enough for my reader/viewer/player, then there is nothing more I want to do. As a creator and author I would be seriously offended to give my reader candies for getting through another chapters of my works. If he/she doesn't appreciate, understand, response to my work because of what it is and what it represents, then OK, alright, doesn't have to. But if she/he response to it, understand it, interpret it, then I want it to be done because of the story and the way I present it with the interactive medium, not thanks to manipulation. Not by a carrot that offends me and my audience. My and their intelligence and emotions. And, what is worse, wastes their time and is obvious waste of my time that I have in my life to do something more. Much more.

That's what I believe in and I speak for myself. If you find it interesting or inspiring (one way or another), then it's fine. If you don't, it's fine as well. We are all different and difference should not be lost in the world of ours that tries to be more and more unified and alike.

: Jeroen D. Stout February 13, 2010, 06:21:39 PM

On the subject of the new game, have you by any chance read Lost Girls by Alan Moore? It was the first substantial work I read that was absolutely 'about sex', even classified as pornography, without giving up being 'far more'. Even if you will just allude to sex it may be interesting to see how open a book can be about the subject without being tacky, vulgar or mystical.

Our new game will not be about sex at all. :)
It will be far too abstract for that. We're just thinking of sex as an inspiration for the structure of the game. The aesthetic inspiration comes form flowers (which are sexual symbols, sure).

: Thomas February 13, 2010, 03:40:21 PM

I like the idea of having a game that, while not being on rails, always keeps the player interested and makes sure she has stuff to do. Like a good play mate would do, to use Michaels analogy! This of course gives rise to interesting and hard problems, such as knowing when a player is stuck and needs a push in the right direction.

This sort of thing *is* possible though. And it doesn't have to be sophisticated or accurate to be effective either. I'm doing something similar in my own game right now, and even though my approach is very simple, it still enhances the experience far beyond how it would be without the dynamic pacing system.

For example, the AI Director in Left 4 Dead:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of_l4d_mike_booth.pdf

Or even the very rudimentary player-directed system used in flOw:
http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/thesis.htm

Some good info in those links, by the way. Worth reading. ;)

: axcho February 14, 2010, 03:53:12 AM

Or even the very rudimentary player-directed system used in flOw:
http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/thesis.htm

I just read this -for the first time.
I'm especially intrigued by the last paragraph:

: Jenova Chen

The Flow researches have been mainly focused on the relationship between challenge and ability, which naturally assume the interaction. However, Flow-like experiences also exist in passive media like movie, literature and music.

Games like Sims and Cloud has already proven that there are more interesting aspects in the field of Flow that are beyond challenge and ability. Thus, the soul of video games should also be able to leap far beyond challenges and conflicts.

It makes me think that, perhaps we can replace the words "challenge" and "abilities" (as well as "boredom" and "anxiety") in the typical Flow chart by others that are more appropriate to the particular content that we're dealing with.

(http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/images/flowchart.gif)

Because I just don't want my games to be like tests. It's often not appropriate to challenge the player or to require that they prove their skill. And I don't want to be forced to choose my subject matter just because it needs to work with the Flow model.

So it would be interesting to me if other flow models can be imagined with different terms but that still apply to interactive media.

: Thomas February 14, 2010, 09:45:58 PM

You probably mean "game world" knowledge, right?

If real world stuff is needed, than the game world needs to be real and allow the player to find this out through the game interactions..

Do you have a reason for this?

When, in Amnesia, e.g., you expect the player to look in drawers for items, are you relying on real world knowledge, on knowledge of your specific game world, or on game cliché's? A reliance on game cliché's could be very useful for the seasoned gamer because the interaction comes almost natural to them and doesn't remove them from the narrative too much. But I can imagine a novice gamer would have a hard time suspending disbelief if they realize they need to go through each and every drawer.
(I'm not criticizing your design at all -on the contrary: I think you've achieved a masterful balance between interactive storytelling and symbolic gameplay. Just using the drawers as an example.)

(http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/images/flowchart.gif)

So the vertical axis is the negative element offered by the game.
While the horizontal axis is the positive element offered by the player.

The thing that bothers me about this representation is that it casts the two elements of the interaction into very specific roles. Surely it's possible to achieve flow in a conversation, for instance, where the elements are equals. And both speakers feel the flow! Is this because, in a conversation, the speakers alternate between offering challenges and meeting them with their abilities? If so, would it be possible to implement this in a game? Can the player challenge the game once in a while? And could the game be required to use its abilities to meet the player's challenge? Can a game be "in the zone"? (hope I'm not bothering you all too much with my obsession with "living" software... -feel free to ignore)

Do you have a reason for this? [...]

This is of course a fuzzy line here and one could question how universal drawers and such things are. But I think that opening stuff is a basic sort of interaction and exploring hidden spaces is a kind of human instinct. Just see how children tend to pull out any drawer and open any door that they find. Who knows what goodies that are hidden? :)
As for how it works in our game, the idea is kind of that player could (if they wanted) only examine drawers that are at interesting places. For example, if found in a work worm, it seems more plausible that the drawers will contain interesting things, than drawers in a hallway. Right now we have spammed items everywhere just to reward whenever the player takes time to examine the environment more closely.
I have managed to get my father to play the game, and he seems to be doing fine so far :)

What I meant with world knowledge was mostly specific facts or practices that might be common in the real world. For example, if that player had to do a thumbs-up-movement (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mplemmon/231740358/) in order to get a ride, I would consider that bad design unless the game world had somehow stated this fact. The same would be true for an action that required the mixing of chemicals without stating a formula in the game (for example assuming that all knows HCl is an acid).

an the player challenge the game once in a while? And could the game be required to use its abilities to meet the player's challenge? Can a game be "in the zone"?

I really like questions like this and I really think your analog of the game as something living and emotional as really good and helpful. It might be that I am somewhat of a sci-fi junkey, but I do not see that too far fetched that killing enemies in games might eventually even become a moral issue. Do not wanna go off-topic about that now though :)

How would one go about challenging a game (given our current technology)? I think think the first step is having some kind of adaptive element in the game (which could perhaps be quite simple) that would try and keep the experienced focused on certain things. The challenge would then be that when the player chose to interact, the game would have to adapt itself and make sure the focus was intact. There could be a sort of exchange in this manner.

I do not think it is all that far from how some IF games work. Since you can type whatever you like, when ever you do an interaction it does not feel like pressing buttons (even though that is essentially what you are doing), but rather rather an action of "free will". Then when you try out crazy stuff and the game is able to respond, it gives me a sort of warm fuzzy feeling, almost like the game met my challenge and is playing with me. Also note that IF games are very close to a conversatiion (as you essentially "talk" to an interpreter). One example game would be Lost Pig. It is a really charming and cute game and allows for some really funny interaction. It can be played online here:
http://jayisgames.com/games/ifiction/game/lostpig?game=lostpig

: Thomas February 15, 2010, 10:22:07 AM

What I meant with world knowledge was mostly specific facts or practices that might be common in the real world. For example, if that player had to do a thumbs-up-movement (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mplemmon/231740358/) in order to get a ride, I would consider that bad design unless the game world had somehow stated this fact. The same would be true for an action that required the mixing of chemicals without stating a formula in the game (for example assuming that all knows HCl is an acid).

Interesting point. I definitely agree with this if the knowledge is required to solve a puzzle or otherwise essential for playing. Because you can never be sure what the player knows and what he doesn't.
But how do you feel about less essential things? Interactions that are not required to make progress?
(I'm interested because my ideal game contains zero essential interactions: everything should be optional and the game basically becomes whatever you make of it)

But how do you feel about less essential things? Interactions that are not required to make progress?

As along as there is "something for everyone" I guess it is not that big of a problem. I do like the idea of playing the game any way you like, mixing acids and hitching rides while doing so :) However, I guess it all depends on what kind of game you are making and to what kind of audience. I do however think that as much as possible of the interaction space should be available and not locked away because of cultural background or whatnot. I see it as a sort of goal that anyone (given a few basic requirements like age, being human, etc) should be able to pick up and have access to most of the game. Otherwise it feels like locking away things unless you know the secret password.

I have not given this too much thought though, so I might change my mind if you have arguments for the other side :)

: Michaël Samyn February 16, 2010, 12:42:15 AM

We did get in trouble with this though with Fatale (http://Tale-of-Tales.com/Fatale). We had overestimated people's knowledge of the theme of the femme fatale in general and the legend of Salome in particular, let alone Oscar Wilde's version of it. So much so that several people read the play first before playing Fatale. Which is not altogether a bad thing, but not what we had expected.

Fairy tales are better as a common ground to start off of. People don't know their bible (or historic literature) anymore!

I watched the film version (which featured Oscar Wilde in a play-within-a-film fashion), which was rather excellent. I knew a lot about Wilde but the play was unknown to me, rather a novelty. I think the problem with Salome was I did not know what to expect and it was hard to find out purely from the interaction. The problem for me was more the lack of clear interaction than lack of understanding of the story.

It is a problem I am working on myself, however. I added a section to the start of my game in which you see the character's hand and press a key to "take control" over it. Text will appear that says that in this game you do not play a person, nor yourself, but part of someone's subconscious. I know that in 25 years this message will be laugh-worthy but I think for now allowing people more view on what their actions will be like is a great addition because people will now be able to know what will be their reward and their actions: rather than assuming from previous knowledge (and given that there is no previous version of this, their knowledge would be wrong).

Hooking into something Thomas and I were speaking about in my research thread (which I am still working on ;)), this message is communication between me as a designer and the player... I also adapted my interface to be of a different style to the game content to keep a sort of 'distance' between the player and the character; I made some design errors in making the character capable of 'symbiosis' with the player so I prefer people listening to the character like a story and interacting with him more out of mimicry play than a feeling they are ultimately involved.

Really interesting course of conversation going on here. :)

I think that Thomas is already experimenting with an adaptive game system by making the game adapt to player death.

The basic point of Jenova's thesis was that you could design a dynamic difficulty system through the rules themselves, as opposed to programming AI to try to understand what the player is doing "organically." In this way, the player actually chooses the difficulty through explicit actions. He applied this through eating food. When you eat the "deeper" food item, you go deeper, where the game becomes more difficult.

I think it's a very clever idea, and makes a game very reactive to the player. However, it's very directly reactive. To me, a conversation is more indirect in comparison. At one point, the other party might change the subject or react in a way you don't expect. The not having direct control over the other party in a conversation is what makes conversing so nuanced; it requires you to be sympathetic - to be sensitive to the reaction of the other party.

In contrast, flOw (the game) has you in direct control all of the time. At any moment you can go deeper or shallower; you know exactly what to expect (in general terms). I think this makes perfect sense when you consider that the basis of the concept - the book itself - is about self-service. It teaches you about the concept of flow to maximize your own happiness. This isn't to say that the book is about being selfish in the derogatory sense. In fact, it argues that selfless pursuits are among the best ways to maximize your own happiness. But hopefully you get what I'm saying in that even the selfless acts are ultimately in service to the self. In a game, this would obviously play out in you getting to choose where the flow is for you.

I think it's a very clever idea, and makes a game very reactive to the player. However, it's very directly reactive. To me, a conversation is more indirect in comparison.

Also, it might be a little different experience if the player was not so aware of tuning the the experience and instead unknowingly adjusted the difficulty. This might destroy the whole concept though, so not sure it would work.

I am not sure that "Flow" is a holy grail either and many of my favorite moments in life have been far from flow-like. "Flow" is borderline additive behaviour (and note that many reviews describe the game fl0w as addicting!!) which is far from a design goal for me. One would like to have flow when doing something worthwhile, like building a house or whatnot and not when playing some nibbles-clone :P This means that developers also have a responsibility when creating games, which I think few really care about.

Notgames Forum

Creation => Notgames design => : Michaël Samyn January 14, 2010, 10:07:54 AM