Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games
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- Future Topics
- From Alchemy To Chemistry
- References And Notes
6. ConclusionWe’ve covered a lot of ground in this essay. Hopefully, the diagrams give you a good understanding of how to describe a game using skill chains. Using Skill ChainsAs a tool, I’ve found that skill chain diagrams dramatically improve my understanding of how a game works, where it fails and where there are clear opportunities for improvement. Creating a skill chain provides you with the following information:
Though it takes a little practice, skill atoms aren’t all that complicated to define and are really no more of a burden than writing unit tests for a chunk of code. Future TopicsSkill chains are a deep topic and we’ve described only the most basics aspects of how they function. Further topics of inquire include:
From Alchemy To ChemistryI like to imagine that models like skill chains will help raise the level of intent and predictability in modern game design. With the concepts in this essay, you can start integrating this model into your current games and collecting your own data. We’ve got some immensely bright people in our little market and it is almost certain that they can improve upon this foundational starting point. By sharing what you’ve learned, we can begin to improve our models of design. What happens if game designers embrace the scientific process and start build a science of game design? The alchemists of ages past dreamt of turning lead into gold. They performed mad experiments with imprecise equipment and questionable theories of how the universe worked. Modern game designers are not really so different. Those not simply here for the sake of profit instead rally around equally fantastical dreams such as creating a game that makes the user cry or enlightening the world with games of politics or hunger. We crib cryptic notes from past successes and chortle merrily when our haphazard experiments manage to mildly entertain our audience. We are on the leading cusp of deep human / software interaction and yet we know so little. It is only by gaining a deeper understanding of the fundamental building blocks of design that game designers with gain the power to break free from the accidental successes of the past. With practical techniques gained from controlled experiments, we will create radically effective new applications. When we have our basic chemistry, our basic systems of measurement and our basic atomic theory, perhaps then we can consistently build games that tap into the heart of human psychology. The reproducible application of psychological manipulation of individuals and groups using software is big heady stuff. In the short term, I would hope that a deep understanding of models like skill chains help us crack open the rigid craftsmanship of existing genres so that we can build better, more potent games. Long term, it will be interesting to see what world changing uses we can find for our ever improving psychological technology. References And NotesThe original essay on skill atoms
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Perceptual pleasure and the Brain Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel, American Scientist, May-June 2006 Abstract: “From hand-held DVD players to hundred-inch plasma screens, much of today's technology is driven by the human appetite for pleasure through visual and auditory stimulation. What creates this appetite? Neuropsychologists have found that visual input activates receptors in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward, and that the brain associates new images with old while also responding strongly to new ones. Using functional MRI imaging and other findings, they are exploring how human beings are "infovores" whose brains love to learn. Children may enjoy Sesame Street's fast pace because they get a "click of comprehension" from each brief scene.”
Six sinister things about Super Mario
An example of game chemistry in action Here is a rough draft of a skill chain for Tetris. It is interesting to note that a game that is mechanically quite simple can possess an expansive skill chain. PDF (800k) Description of expert level Tetris skills Relationship of Skill Chains to MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) This is a question that has been posed on occasion. MDA is a game analysis framework put forth by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek. It is one of many descriptive techniques that catalog the elements of a game. The hope is that in the process of defining the pieces of a game, the designer will clarify their thinking about a design. This is certainly an admirable goal. The major differences between the two approaches is that in MDA there is little attempt to model the actual player experience with the game. MDA analysis also fails to provide any objectively testable structure. With skill chains, you can always hook up logging software and observe where atoms light up and where they burn out. You can read more on MDA here. A quick overview of alchemy, from a reliably alchemical web 2.0 source
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It's All in Your Mind: Visual Psychology and Perception in Game Design By Hayden Duvall Gamasutra March 9, 2001 URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/200103009/duvall_01.htm Making a game is sometimes like being in a bad relationship. In the beginning, everything ticks along nicely and your partner seems happy as you try and provide for their needs. You both know what you want, and all seems well with the world. After a while however, your partner begins insisting that you spend more time with them, you never seem to be able to do enough, and they become more demanding. Your life soon becomes dominated by a never-ending list of things they want. Fail to give them the care and attention that they dictate, and they stubbornly refuse to do a single thing that you ask of them. Eventually you give in to their requests, secretly plotting to end the relationship as soon as you can, moving on to something better that will allow you the space and freedom you need to truly express yourself. When the split finally comes, it is a relief, but looking back, seeing all the things you achieved together, you realize that through pain there is reward. Next time, however, you won't be pushed around quite so easily. You may think that this article will address that most insidious of evils: Feature Creep (which to me always sounds like one of Spiderman's less successful foes). This however, was not the purpose of my "a game is like a relationship" analogy. My intended point was that a game (like a relationship) is a complex, dynamic thing that requires the participants to draw on all areas of understanding to make it successful. Similarly, the more involving and well constructed the game world is, the more a player will be drawn in and rewarded. It is from this point of view that I propose that psychology has a part to play in game development. OK, I can hear you groaning. Psychology: the realm of ink blots and Freudian slips. But stifle that yawn and bear with me. Psychology aims to explain how the mind works, and how this leads you to act, think and experience everything from falling in love to dressing as your mother and attacking women in showers with a carving knife. Whether your game is trying to be a perfect simulation of flying an F-16 or an epic adventure set in a unused carpet factory, understanding psychology can improve your game's design and execution. Psychological techniques have been effectively used by video games for years, simply because we all live in the same world and decode our surroundings using basically the same physical and mental machinery. Our life's experience brings us into contact with a similar range of emotions, and it is this framework that we draw upon when we create something, whether it be a book, a song or a game. What I suggest is that we put names to these psychological aspects. So, where to begin? Let's see how the player interprets what they observe and hear. You Think That's Air You're Breathing? First of all, a brief overview:
Theories of perception generally draw upon the same basic idea. Gregory's definition reads: "Perception is not determined simply by stimulus patterns; rather it is dynamic searching for the best interpretation of the available data ... perception involves going beyond the immediately given evidence of the senses" (Gregory, 1966) or more succinctly put: "Perception creates faces, melodies, works of art, illusions etc. out of the raw material of sensation". (Coon, 1983) The model is perhaps an obvious one, and as far as creating a game goes, we only need to concern ourselves with visual and aural input (with the tiny exception of force-feedback controllers). This restriction puts extra pressure on the visual and audio aspects of our game, and removes the need for us to create a convincing "smellscape". It is worth pointing out that impairments to a player's senses can impact a game. At the most basic level, deafness rules out most dialog-heavy games that don't have subtitles, as well as making games in which audio cues form an important part of the gameplay all but impossible. Colorblindness is also a rarely considered, yet significant condition, which can affect a player's enjoyment. Red and green color blindness is the most common form, and while it only occurs in 0.4 percent of the female population, it is estimated to affect eight percent of males, and as gamers are still overwhelmingly male, this figure is not inconsequential. As this form of color blindness restricts the sufferers' ability to differentiate between red and green (hence the name) any vital information in a game that requires color matching (puzzles) or easy identification of colored objects (the baddies are wearing red, the goodies green, for example) could be enough to render the game unplayable.
Seeing is Believing The first and most obvious area of perception is vision, so this article concentrates on this particular type of sensory input. If I had been writing fifteen years ago, this section would only be about two paragraphs long, as the limitations on game visuals would have left me with little to say. As it is, today's games are so visually complex that what we see on the screen is beginning to rival the intricacies of the real world. Yes, it is true that a game world has significant technical limitations as to the content of a scene, but when we consider that the range of things that a game can present us with visually extends way beyond that which we will ever see in the real world, the balance begins to be redressed slightly. Consider for a moment, the following images:
While these kind of illusions may not in themselves be of any practical use in game design, they illustrate the process by which our brain translates what it sees (stimulation of retinal cells) into what it believes this information represents, and what this means. Clearly as these images show, what we think we see is in fact not necessarily what is actually there. Fortunately for those of us making games, our brain can be tricked into thinking it sees a whole range of things that are, in reality, no more than a collection of glowing dots of color on a flat screen. There is quite a selection of rules that influence how we interpret what we see. Some, like binocular disparity (the fact that our eyes are slightly separated and so receive slightly different images), have no value in the average game world (put those 3D glasses down). But certain others are of more interest. Similarity: objects that appear the same or similar are grouped together in our mind. This can often be reinforced in a game when animation cycles of several similar objects run in synch: trees wave in the wind in unison, torches all burn at precisely the same rate. Sometimes grouping may be what we want, but more often than not, this similarity just serves to highlight the fact that some elements of a game are repeated. Relative brightness: as things get further away from us, they tend to fade and take on a bluish hue. This phenomenon is used as a depth cue, and is of course great news for fans of fogging. The trick though, is in the subtlety and distance of the fade-out. If the fogging distance is too close, and the drop-off too severe, instead of an acceptably natural haze that reinforces the expansiveness of a landscape, the player will begin to feel that they have wandered onto the set of a 1930's Sherlock Holmes movie.
Scale: perhaps the most important aspect of scale is that it is relative. Perceptual consistencies, as psychology calls them, dictate that elephants are large and gerbils are small. No matter what the viewing conditions, our past experience provides us with this sort of information, which is used by our brain to decide that the elephant on a distant hill is smaller than the gerbil in our hand (Helmholtz, 1909). In a video game of course, elephants can be two feet tall and gerbils can weigh four hundred pounds. The rules of consistency are of little consequence. In addition, everything we see is effectively in screen-space, and will actually be observed in a physical sense, as being only inches high. In view of this, context within the game environment, has a large part to play.
In the example above, the central gray squares within each of the four larger squares are exactly the same. The change of brightness across the four surrounding squares however, tricks us into seeing a corresponding (but inverted) shift in brightness across the inner squares. The effect of context dependency is also valid within a game setting, when dealing with scale. Size, relative to the player's character (or vehicle etc.) can be used as a starting point for scale comparisons. What appears to be a human sized character, will be interpreted as such, if the surroundings reinforce this with appropriately sized trees, cars etc. If however, the character has to climb a can of beans 10 times his size, or run across a massive piano keyboard in a Tom and Jerry kind of style, the character may take up an identical amount of screen space, but will be judged to be tiny. In the same way that geometry sizing can convey scale information, textures can also have a part to play, with the scale at which a texture is applied to a surface, having a contributing (if sometimes subconscious) effect on a players sense of scale. Speed: moving things rapidly around the screen may seem like the obvious solution in this case, but speed isn't just about being quick (not when it's on a screen at least). Let's pause for a second, and consider what most of us see as Lee Major's career high: the Bionic Man. Apart from an impressive line in polyester sportswear, one of the bionic man's most important assets was his speed. TV budgets being what they were in the Seventies, as well as the limited range of special effects on offer, the bionic man's production team had to come up with an acceptable way of making him fast. So what did they do? They slowed him down. On the one hand, this perhaps explains how the logic of this decade brought extreme chest hair into fashion and made Elton John famous, but it also makes sense. TV and film had already established the concept of slow motion, and it was of course predominantly used to show something happening too fast to be appreciated. Drawing on this convention, the bionic man gave us something that was visually slow, but translated by our brain into extreme speed. So what does this imply for creating the impression of speed in a game? Essentially, we can use things that we associate with speed (like slow motion) as indicators that something is fast. Motion blur is perhaps the most widely used of these. Once only available as a pre-rendered effect, we now see it executed in real time. Apart from the fact that motion blur actually produces a moving image that the brain accepts as more convincing, we have now become familiar with the convention that blurring equals speed (in this respect I am talking about exaggerated, visible blurring). Roadrunner cartoons are particularly fine examples of this, building on the traditional static cartoon methodology for conveying speed. A more recent example in film would be The Matrix, where extreme, bullet-dodging speed is expressed with an adapted form of motion blur. Other visual cues to speed would include things like clouds of dust and debris in an object's wake, or the intensity of flame from a spaceship's rockets increasing (the afterburner effect). Indicators like these will help steer the player's brain towards association with speed, making the effect both easier to achieve and more convincing.
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