Fixed perspective in games: the enemy of tears?

Games, Interactive Design,
1/16/08

Just before Christmas, Chris Hecker posted a transcription of the 1982 print advertisement that introduced Electronic Arts to the world: “Can a computer make you cry?” This piece has become a touchstone among digital experience creators, crystallizing as it does our aspirations to be considered artists in the hope-when-I’m-old-they-give-me-a-lifetime-acheivement-award sense. Steven Spielberg himself implicitly invoked the ad at the 2004 opening of the EA Game Lab at USC (an event I captured on my cell phone camera, albeit poorly).

Twenty-five years after the publication of the ad, many gamers are able to recollect a small number of interactive experiences that provide ready and affirmative answers to the question posed by the ad. While many of these remembrances forego actual weeping, I think it’s reasonable to adopt Janet Murray’s position that the phrase “‘make us cry’ stands for a set of phenomena that do not have to involve actual tears” but more broadly engender heightened emotional engagement. A 2005 study identifies the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII as one of the most often cited moments. (I’ve never really gotten into the Final Fantasy series; my pick would be the bridge scene in Ico.)

I think there’s a lot of factors that play into whether a particular digital experience will “make us cry.” A lot of it has to do with the propensities of the user in the first place—most of those reporting high emotional engagement with interactive fiction are those who very much desire to experience such engagement, and to demonstrate that their chosen medium is capable of it. That willingness forgives a multitude of sins, which may include poor writing and acting, low resolution, simplistic characterization, and pandering to the wish-fulfillment impulse.

It also frequently forgives the fixed perspective. Cinema is widely understood to have come into its own as a medium once directors began to liberate themselves from proscenium framing (which placed the camera in the position of an audience member for a play) and began to put the camera in artistically optimal positions, using editing to string the various viewpoints together to achieve a particular effect. Games have their own version of the proscenium—a fixed point of view which is adopted throughout the interactive portions of the game. This fixed perspective arose as a matter of necessity: first a technical necessity (it’s much easier to create games in limited computing environments by restricting point of view) and then a design necessity (it’s much easier for people to learn how to interact with a virtual environment when their point of view is fixed).

As computing power has increased, the first necessity has generally fallen away, while the second remains strongly in force. Contemporary games with dynamic or interactive camera systems offer much greater variation in the range of perspectives offered to the user during play (i.e. not during a cut scene), but this variation is motivated almost exclusively by utility, with the goal of providing the optimal viewpoint for the player to carry out their tasks. It’s still rare to find games in which perspective is manipulated with artistic intent during play, mainly because experiences which tie interface strictly to a single avatar enforce restrictions on scale and perspective that are tough to get around. In a Tomb Raider game, if you suddenly cut to an extreme close-up of Lara Croft’s eye for artistic effect, the interface you were using to navigate her through her environment suddenly has no meaning. Either you’ve got to teach the player a new interface right then and there for controlling her eye (which may not even make sense artistically), or you temporarily turn off the interactivity (which leaves you with a cut scene).

The other factor that limits options for perspective in games is the widely-accepted design principle that difficulty must increase over the course of the experience. This is actually quite a curious phenomenon when examined in relation to other media. Does a song become harder to listen to the closer you get to its end? Do books become harder to read? Do movies become harder to watch? This one idea has a profound effect on the artistic potential of the medium, because the assumption that the user must learn a task that becomes progressively harder by default requires that the basic elements used to “stage” that task must remain constant. I can’t get better at controlling Lara Croft if my perspective on her is always radically changing; therefore all the artistic potential bound up in multiple points of view is discarded to satisfy the requirements of the learning curve.

The Nintendo DS and Wii have given us many examples of games which teach interface on the fly (with Wario Ware being the most hyperactive). If handled correctly, users enjoy these shifts; what’s needed is to locate them in interactive environments in which emotion—not difficulty or consistency—is the prime mover of the experience. This might speed the day when when games that “made us cry” (or more precisely, engaged our emotions) can be counted on more than one hand by more than just hardcore gamers.

 

“We get to decide” what is next-gen

Games, Interactive Design, Wii,
8/20/07

This is so right on, I couldn’t pass it up. In a speech at the GCDC in Germany this afternoon (covered in this article at GamesIndustry.biz), Stormfront Sudios President and CEO Don Daglow made some excellent points that deserve to be repeated far and wide.

“If it changes the player’s view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn’t have before, to me that’s next-gen,” Daglow said in a refutation of conventional wisdom that you can’t create a next-gen experience without dramatic increases in processing power. I couldn’t agree more.

The most significant innovations waiting in the wings for interactive art and entertainment are absolutely not about processing power, better algorithms, or any form of rocket science, though they may be enabled by technological innovation (as with the Wii remote). They are simply smart design, inspired thinking, artistry, and most importantly, perspective—an actual point of view on the world that arises from one’s personal experience.

Another Daglow quote: “We’ve spent a quarter of a century saying ‘the machine is holding me back’... The only problem is that now the machines are so powerful, we’ve lost our excuse.” This became really clear to me in the waning years of the last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), when I started to get bored with gaming in general. Everything was a retread; new versions of old games with upgraded graphics. I was shocked out of my complacency, however, when the Wii controller was first announced (evidenced by the fact that as soon as I heard the announcement I immediately estimated the dimensions of the remote and built a Duplo version the same size to start imagining what was possible…)

Daglow defends the Wii as a next-gen platform from the skeptics who doubt that it’s lesser-powered processor qualifies it as such with a blunt truth that should be remembered and repeated:

“Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves.”

Amen to that.

 

Eloquence, evangelism, and the fourth wall

Games, Interactive Design,
8/15/07

Eloquence is a wonderful paradox—it’s both impossible to attain and impossible to escape.  Professional communicators spend their lives in pursuit of eloquence in specific domains, never feeling they’ve quite “arrived.”  Yet at the same time every event, being the instantaneous product of the current state of reality, can’t help but be eloquent of the moment in which it arises.  Of course, the distinction has to do with context.  Those with a vocation for eloquence often try to reduce the burden of context as much as possible; within their target audience, their aim is to reach as many people as they can (and the way in which they define their target audience—consciously or not—makes all the difference).  “Naive” eloquence has no such aspirations, and as such its recognition depends solely on the eye of the beholder.

There’s things I want to say in this life, and there’s people I want to work for who have their own things to say as well. Since interactive media are my vocation, it’s my goal to become more eloquent in my use of those media, not just for the sake of having marketable skills but because eloquence in the right place at the right time can be transformative.  Equally as important as developing my own eloquence, however, is advancing in my ability to find it in others. Justice is tightly bound to acknowledgments of eloquence from unexpected sources, and since everything is eloquent of something if only you’re prepared to see it, then the act of readying yourself to recognize unfamiliar eloquence is something of an imperative.

There’s no substitute for the uncomfortable process of immersing yourself in something foreign for a long enough period of time that you begin adopt some of its sensibilities—and thus its eloquence—as your own. What interactive media can provide, however, are “bridge experiences” that allow a person to temporarily adopt a shadow of someone else’s eloquence and thereby recognize it as such. Any quality communication can accomplish this, but interactive media does it in a uniquely tactile way in which you can literally feel and play your way through the contours of someone else’s fluency.

It’s easy to forget that this is what it’s all about. As authors of interactive media we can waste a lot of time trying to make sure everybody knows how articulate we are, when in reality the state of our skills can’t help but be revealed in the work, whether we like it or not. On any given project, commercial or otherwise, we’re tasked with representing a particular kind of eloquence; what’s most important is to ask what we’ve done to enable others to make that eloquence their own.

Sometimes, the things we have to do to accomplish that seem antithetical to how we want to feel about our own work; we want to possess the mystique of the artist, we want to keep things hidden, we don’t want to appear too overt or even helpful. All of which would be valid desires if our feelings were important. But in fact, and again paradoxically, the ability of a particular piece to accomplish what it needs to often depends directly upon our own annihilation.

When Shigeru Miyamoto breaks the fourth wall and has a character tell you to “press the A button to jump” it’s like an evangelist asking you if you know Jesus. Our insides twist up: we don’t really have to do it this way, do we? There’s got to be more subtle, more reasoned, more sophisticated ways to discuss these questions, don’t there?

Perhaps. But in the end, that only matters if your feelings matter in comparison to what the work needs to accomplish. And there’s a distinct possibility that they don’t.

 

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