A Book of Lenses

Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” is the first book I’m going to review. I’ll read chapters that particular interest me or relate in some ways to my work and comment on some of the author’s opinions.

Modelling:

Author describes how people don’t really perceive the reality itself, rather simplified model of it created by our brains. He presents few examples that prove his point.  As he says:

“Our brains do a tremendous amount of work to boil down the complexity of reality into simpler mental models that can be easily stored, considered and manipulated. And this is not just the case of visual objects. It is also the case of human relationships, risk and reward evaluation, and decision making. Our minds look at a complex situation and try to boil it down to a simple set of rules and relationships that we can manipulate internally.”

Then he makes an argument that games are enjoyable because they are simplify models, that are easy to understand and interact with.  The ruleset of game is easier to comprehend than the real world and our brains have less information to process, thus playing games can bring us a pleasure.

This is very analogous to the way I’ve always seen games and I could argue it’s applicable to every form of media.

Focus:

Author talks about humans’ ability to focus on one specific stimulus and ignore others. As an example, he presents the concept known as a “cocktail party effect”. Which is described as a humans’ ability to focus on one type of sound or conversations when there are in an environment where there is a lot of them.

I could easily think about few gameplay scenarios, in which game designers could take advantage of that ability.  For example, you could play an audio cue when a player is on the right way, teaching her or him to associate this sound with progression. And then put a player in the scenario where her or his ears are bombarded with different sounds from different directions and several paths of progression and only way to find the proper way forward is to focus on that one audio cue. Of course, doing something like that would require a lot of playtesting to make sure players can find themselves in a scenario like that and find it enjoyable.

Next the author writes about a concept of flow and describe it as a state of sustained focus, pleasure, and enjoyment. He makes a point that game designers should study it to create a better experience for the players. He listed key components necessary to put players into a state of flow, and these are; clear goals, no distractions, direct feedback, all of them allows players to focus on the game. The last component is continuously challenging, which I find particular interesting since I’m not going to create any challenge in my game project. So I have to find other ways to reward players for their time investment. I was thinking about making visual rewards so to speak. Beautiful or intriguing environments, scenes, events.

Empathy:

Author talks about the concept of empathy and how humans naturally feel empathy towards other humans’ or animals’ (like a dog) facial expression and project their emotions onto them.

Sadly, he didn’t elaborate on this too much. For my MA project I would like to create characters towards whom players would feel empathetic, but I don’t want to emphasise their faces. I won’t be able to animate complex facial expressions so I wanted to focus more on the body language and so on. So I have to conduct more research on that topic from other resources.

The Nature of Game Character:

Author compares video game characters to those from novels and films. Pointing out that the latest are usually more complex and deeper, which is understandable since a lot of narration is built around their nature, inner thoughts and expressions.
Though in my opinion, there always were some exceptions, for every terrible Mario or Link we had plenty of RPG characters or NPC much deeper than that. And it’s only getting better since we reach the technological level that allows for a more complex range of emotion. And more money is put into haring professional writers.

Then the author goes to the topic of the game avatar. He describes it as a tool to which a player can project itself into. He claims that the more relatable the character/avatar is for the player the more powerful the projection will be. Afterwards he presents two character types, in his opinion best suited for players to project themselves into: The Ideal Form and The Blank Slate. They are self-explanatory so I don’t really feel need to describe them. Though they might be the most popular types I would argue they are the best, or the most compelling, furthermore author didn’t present any scientific proof to support that notion. But then again, what is considered “the best”  tends to be very subjective. I don’t feel the appeal in those character types. And if we think about games like D&D there were always a lot character types that people could roleplay. Nevertheless, for my game project I’ll probably go to the blank slate character.

The Purpose of Architecture:

“The primary purpose of architecture is to control a person’s experience.” That quotation alone perfectly describes what the author writes about in this chapter. He presents similarities between architects and game designers. Both professions require creating an indirect experience for people to make them happy.

“Any good gamespace has built-in landmarks, which help the players find where they are going, and also make the space interesting to look at. Landmarks are what players remember and what they talk about, for they are what make a pace memorable.”

Real vs. Virtual Architecture:

Author talks about how often architecture in the game doesn’t make any sense, and would be physically impossible to build in the real world. But he argues that players don’t notice strange layouts and so on because the human mind is very weak in translating 3D spaces into 2D maps. And what really matters is how a player feel in that space not if it make sense.
I feel like even games from soul series, which are well-regarded for their level design are guilty of spaces like that. They’re still very believable. And I guess that’s the key.

Third-Person Distortion:

 The author writes about weird phenomena when playing 3^rd person game players feel that interiors are very crowded and small. I don’t recall ever having felt like that. Nevertheless, since author felt a need to write about it there is possibility that a lot of players have this problem. It’s worth considering, especially since my game will be 3^rd person. As the best solution to this problem he propose to make interiors bigger, scale up props and spread them out.

Aesthetics:

This topic is especially close to my heart since my background is conceptart and character design. And I will put a lot of emphasize on the artistic vision and presentation of my game project.

Author reminds readers that game designers don’t only create gameplay, but more importantly an experience, and good aesthetic can make it more enjoyable. One of the points he makes is very important to me. “Aesthetic pleasure is no small thing. If your game is full of beautiful artwork, then every new thing that the player gets to see is a reward in itself.” This ties with the point I was making before about the way I could reward players.

“you need to be judicious about where to put detail, for a few details in the right places can make your game world seem far larger and richer than it is.”

Author claims that audio is very important part of the aesthetic and can be a very powerful tool. He advises to think about the music and audio from the earliest stage of production because it can greatly improve the feel of the game and channel its design.

The Feeling of Freedom and Indirect Control Methods:

The author writes about the importance of feeling, of freedom in the game and how much it can improve the players’ enjoyment. However, he claims game designers don’t always have to give a player true freedom, only the feeling of freedom. And control a player’s experience in an indirect way.
This topic interests me quite a lot. I planned to have fixed camera for the most part, and that alone can vastly restrain a player’s freedom. So I need to figure out a way to preserve the feeling of freedom.

The author described few methods game designers’ can use to achieve that effect.

First one is the method of constraints. It consists of presenting a player limited number of options, but making clear to them, they have the freedom to make a choice between them. Too much freedom can be overwhelming for players, so it’s good to discreetly guide them towards proper path.

The next method is called goals. Which is simply presenting clear goals players would need to fulfil to progress. As the author claims: “The “players” have not had their freedom diminished in the least, but are indirectly controlled toward the behaviour that the designers find optimal.”

The third method is called interface, but the author doesn’t mean UI (user interface) by it, rather things like controller, setting, the environment, the avatar. Things that in some way determinate what you can do in a game.

The next method visual design is about controlling where players look and where they go, by placing landmarks and visual cues in desirable places. Some players will be unconsciously drawn by them without even knowing why. As a lot of concepts described in this book it is nothing new to me. This way of controlling person’s attention is often present in the paintings.  Good composition in painting can lead a viewers’ eyes without them even realising.

Another method described by the author focus on characters. By making players care about characters in a game, designers can manipulate them into making specific choices based on their relations with these virtual characters.  

Lastly the author writes about using a music to influence a player decision and playstyle. As he writes: “Music is the language of the soul, and as such, it speaks to players on a deep level- a level so deep that It can change their moods, desires, and actions – and they don’t even realize it is happening.” 

Schell, J. (2008) The art of game design: A book of lenses. San Francisco, CA: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.

In-text citations: 

• (Schell, 2008)