Cultural differences and touch

Our family booked a train trip to see my husband's family in Bremen, and he was complaining about how crowded the train will be... this brought back memories for me of riding the trains in Japan. I remember one rush hour trip between Kyoto and Osaka where there really were men with white gloves shoving us all onto the train, similar to what you can see in this photo:



We were so densely packed that there was no way to hold a hand rail. Instead you were held up by other bodies all around you. You had to sort of wriggle your way to the train doors one stop ahead of where you needed to get off the train. The experience was extremely overwhelming to me, as someone used to US notions of how crowded in it's acceptable to be.

Wikipedia actually has an entry describing cultural differences in notions about how close we can get, which is termed 'spatial empathy'. The idea being that in some cultures there's a notion that a person 'owns' a certain amount of space around him/herself, and others should not enter it. It's quite shocking to suddenly be pressed against strangers in a train if one is operating under these notions!

Considering the space between people, and how it influences emotion, is hard enough when designing characters in a game for one cultural market. After all, there is a whole research field (proxemics) devoted to the understanding of interpersonal distance.

There are some games that have explored proxemics in interesting ways (remember Ico's hand-holding game mechanic?), but designers have barely scratched the surface of the possibility space.

When I'm supervising Ph.D. students, I tell them that the moment they realize how little they know and get a bit depressed is the moment when they've just started to become good at what they do. I think this may also be true for game designers hoping to create true empathy in games. There are so many facets to the experience to be mastered. It can feel overwhelming, but it is a worthy goal that is achievable...

Building a canon of empathy examples

This week's entry is really a pointer over to Grand Text Auto, where Noah made a great post on the merits of Indigo Prophecy, a 2005 release for the Play Station 2.

Noah, and some of his respondents, discuss play mechanisms like the timed dialog choices and the forced switching of point of view between the murderer and the investigators, and the impact these design choices had upon their experience.

In my classes on character design, I have students play through games that are known to have really well executed characters. I gather these examples informally by asking developers and players what they've seen and appreciated. But I think it would be great to have a more systematic and broader collection of examples. Something like Indigo Prophecy had some issues, but also had some very interesting innovations. All too often all the pieces don't come together for a game and yet there are some valuable insights for designers.

We got at some of this at my round table at GDC this year, and hopefully Corey's survey (that I blogged about last week) will gather some additional helpful input. But a taxonomy of interesting techniques is yet another needed resource.

Anyone out there know of such a thing? If not, maybe I should create one here...

Answer a few good questions?

Corey (my undergraduate research assistant) and I have finally gotten together the survey that was discussed at GDC this year, about game characters and emotion. If you have a moment, would you answer a few good questions?

We'll share the results on this blog, so you'll be contributing helpful information to larger game development/research community.


And when you're done with that, you might find this recent NY Times article interesting--it's a meditation on how fashion and game avatar customization intersect. They quoted me as saying that competition could enhance men's fashion sense, which I'm not sure I really did say, or if I did, that I really did mean. But it is certainly interesting to consider how a player's identity and habits shift and meld with his or her in-game choices...

Ich bin ein Berliner

This month and next I'm staying in Berlin, which, besides being a bustling, fascinating and very international city, also seems to have a stealthily growing games scene.

Last week I gave two talks here based upon my book--one at the Games Academy for the local chapter of the IGDA, and one at Yager Development, which was hosting the annual meeting of the German Game Developers Guild.

The Games Academy has been in business since 2000, and seems to be thriving. They recently added a new degree focus on Game Producing, something that RPI's panel of experts on our own undergraduate degree development spoke of as an educational gap, now that game projects are so huge and complex.

The IGDA talk was well attended, and the audience had many great questions and thoughts about game characters and emotions.

The next day's talk at the Game Developers Guild meeting was actually part of a 5-hour workshop among experienced designers/developers from all around Germany. After I spoke, the group discussed their own issues and insights around characters and emotion--from designing interesting and non-repetitive interactions with merchants in a big open-ended game world, to strategies for offering character customization in a classic RPG, to how to make a character feel alive and emotionally engaging in a point and click style adventure game while the player is mulling over what to do next. The common theme among all these dilemmas was how to handle limited resources to deliver emotional punch along with great game mechanics and all the other things that players expect. It seemed that everyone there benefited from the shared brainstorming, and I was impressed that the developer community here manages to find the time and to be open enough to share dilemmas and pool their insights.


Several people had traveled quite a distance to be there, and were happy when the meeting adjourned to a local cafe/pub on a floating dock in a canal near the studio. Before we left, Uwe Beneke, one of Yager's founders and my gracious host at both events, brandished a full-size mock-up of a weapon that his art director constructed for their new game. It was huge and heavy, and could even be reloaded, after a fashion. They are using it for mocap for one of their games, to add a level of realism to the movement of the characters. Yet another of all the myriad details that go into making a game feel emotionally real...

Empathy and identity

The June 17 New York Times Magazine has a fascinating set of photos, showing players and their in-game avatars side by side.

In some cases (as with the photos above), the avatar seems to exude a heightened version of the person's own fantasy characteristics. In others, for example this one:



the avatar is quite different from the player at first glance...

What drives people in their choices, when they have a wide range of options in crafting their in-game persona? How do we choose a social 'face' (in the Goffman sense) in-game? These are important questions for game researchers that have increasing implications for game designers as the palette of player choices expands.

Game designers have a chance now to do something that movie directors and novelists cannot--offering players a deeper fusion of the real and the fantasy worlds through the vessel of the player character. I can look different, I can act different, and I can be treated differently, moment-to-moment. As I play this alternate version of myself, I am experiencing my social self and my connections to others in ways I might never have access to in the 'real world'.

A very powerful way to explore empathy.

Empathy and the body

"Two women are walking over a bridge. One is afraid of heights, so her heart pounds and her hands tremble. The other is not afraid at all. On the other side of the bridge, they encounter a man. Which of the two women is more likely to believe that she has just met the man of her dreams?" This is an example from a recent Science magazine article on Embodying Emotion. The author, Paula Niedenthal, explains that our prior physiological state gets intertwined with how we feel about experiences and about other people. She talks about ways that psychologists have demonstrated that changing how a person sits (slumping or sitting straight), or moves her face muscles (as if frowning or smiling), has a definite impact on the way the person feels afterward about whatever she's been doing.

A game designer who wants to create really powerful emotions between a player and a character, then, should aim to get the player's body in the right emotional 'frame of mind' to connect in the right way... and should also think about unintended combinations (e.g. I meet a character I'm supposed to fall in love with after a relatively boring bit of game play). It's something that movie makers do all the time... what I like about this article is that it provides some of the 'why' behind how this works.

With new ways of sensing player emotion (remember the Mindball game from Sweden? It now seems to be a product.), and ways to get player's bodies going (like the Wiimote), the possibility space is growing all the time. We just have to learn to use emotion state as a design constraint in a conscious way.

Philip K Dick and Empathy

Recently got a really wonderful Library of America edition of four Philip K Dick novels which included 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.' In rereading it, I realized that the novel is in some ways a meditation on empathy. For whom one should feel it and why, and how technology plays into human nature in this arena.

In the book, there is a religion called Mercerism. You hold onto handles on a black box and are suddenly climbing a hill as an old man, who is being attacked with rocks as he struggles to make it to the top. You can feel everyone else who is also holding the box at that moment, and thus you share the struggle and feel somehow less alone. It can be dangerous though, as you can actually be wounded by the rocks and step away from the box with cuts and bruises.

There is also an endlessly running TV talk show in the book, hosted by a man(?) named Buster Friendly, who natters along cheerfully with guests who visit over and over again. They make the same old jokes and fulfill the sort of function of late night tv or early morning talk radio. Characters in the novel feel much less lonely with Buster's show running, but also feel annoyed by it.

Finally, there is a machine that allows characters to 'dial up' a mood for themselves. The main character, Deckard the detective, gets into an argument with his wife as to why she has dialed herself a depressed mood, early in the novel.

It struck me that all of these ways that Dick envisioned how machines could intervene in our emotions offer food for thought for game designers. Are we designing ways for people to viscerally share experiences of a shared world through avatars, like Mercerism? Are we providing distracting pseudo-company, like Buster Friendly? Are we giving people a way to modulate their mood for themselves, in both helpful and potentially not so helpful ways?

I'm sure there are other excellent sci fi novels out there that provide inspiration and useful metaphor for thinking about games and empathy... would be great to collect a set of references for the game community.

GDC roundtable summary

As promised, here is a summary of the notes I took at the GDC roundtable on emotion and characters.
Let me know if I missed anything (my laptop battery died toward the very end, and sometimes the conversation was flowing faster than I could type)...

Who was there:
Looked like ~30-40 people, and was a good range of types--writers, developers, artists, creative directors, researchers/academics, students, working on a wide range of game experiences from educational to arcade to AAA titles.

Some general points made about emotion and characters:
- Emotion can't just be a 'bullet point feature', to work well, it needs to be integrated into the core of game play and the overall experience.
- It doesn't necessarily take high realism (most agreed--some lively conversation here).
- It does take consistent and frequent emotional feedback to the player.
- Timing and use of space seem really important to creating emotion--you can see a drama between a circle and a triangle and if they move around in the right ways you'll feel tragedy or love or the like.
- A feeling of responsibilty and consequence seems key, and not often very present in many games.
- It's risky to try to develop new emotional experiences, but risk has benefits (e.g. Miyamoto's keynote). One idea was to design 20-hour games for more casual gamers; another is hoping to infuse arcade games with new emotional dynamics for players.
- Emotions can be very personal to players (e.g. some loved ICO, some found it an annoying and endless escort mission). Is there a way to design multiple experiences and allow players to modulate through play style? to uncover player emotional preferences in some graceful way early on to allow for different experiences?
- Most people's powerful emotional moments with characters revolved around dying. We discussed why that was (tied to consequence and responsibility) and that led to flushing out some examples that didn't fit this mold (see the examples below).
- We talked a bit about what kinds of emotions are in games today. One person said fear, another countered 'fiyero'. Another mentioned the lack of romance in games. Revenge came up, and the feeling of joy at rescuing trapped characters. Seems worth asking further: what sorts of emotions are desirable and possible?

About player characters/avatars:
- creating resonance between the player and this character seems to be a powerful guiding principle here--from moment-to-moment to a high level feeling of moral responsibility... that I end up twitching the controller when something scary or surprising happens to my character; that when my character makes an evil choice (e.g. KoTOR assigning a character to kill another in cold blood) I feel responsible, and like I 'turned to the dark side'. Rather than relying on the backstory and cut scenes to carry the emotional weight.
- helpful to create traces of the player's movement through the game space that help to reveal his/her emotions to others playing (e.g. WoW, one can see a player's hesitation at entering a chaotic situation through the fits and starts of the player character's movements on-screen).
- creating a feeling of consequence and responsibility (as mentioned above) through possible actions for the player is a path to emotion.
- the debate between relatively blank and deep back-story player characters was discussed a bit, without a clear preference in terms of creating emotion. some suggested offering multiple paths (e.g. the KoTOR good/evil split) that were more nuanced and involved, and linked to different modes of play with different emotional tonality.

About NPCS:
- as with player character, the most powerful feelings are evoked through using game play to generate emotion. relying on a character, being thwarted by a character...
- NPCs are much less like 'pez dispensers' or 'mister men' (mister happy, mister grumpy, etc) if they have overlapping motivations and actions rather than just one per NPC. this adds emotional complexity and power to player interactions with them.
- controlling the space was mentioned as a way for NPCs to create emotional reactions in players (like being really in your face, or not)
- there was discussion about how much backstory to build in for players--some thought it added depth and emotional potential, others were cautious about overloading with story.
- procedural animation was seen as a tool to create more real feeling and reactive NPCS
- adding 'dirty organic noise' to AI tactics for NPCs was also seen as a powerful way to add emotional richness (randomness can be good sometimes because we interpret it in unexpected and rich ways)

Examples of powerful emotional experiences with game characters:
- Aeris in FF VII and Floyd from Planetfall (mentioned in the lecture). One participant noted though that the Aeris example was frustrating as a player because in game play he could have easily brought her back to life, so it didn't really ring true. This was part of the theme among the group about the importance of melding game play and story well for players.
- Hotel Dusk was mentioned as an example of a game in which you can see your character reacting to others on screen in a way that helps build emotion.
- Sly Cooper: Thievious Raccoonus were mentioned as examples of a game that creates a powerful moment-to-moment experience of connection and consequence between the player and his/her avatar, because of the ways that Sly reacts to noises and elements in the environment.
- Salvatore in GTA 3 was mentioned as an example of a powerful feeling of betrayal on the part of the player, and a nice combination of game play and story to create an emotional impact.
- Gears of War's reload feature--where if you don't press the button right you load slower and the character gets frustrated just like you are, creates a feeling of synergy for the player with the player character.
- Army of Two's AI that travels with you does more than cycle through idle animations, but reacts to what's happening in game play.
- In Beyond Good and Evil, one player mentioned how he felt Jade's loss of will much more powerfully after he 'betrayed' the lighthouse and orphans by not going there through about 6 hours of real game play time. He felt guilty for not having been back there--for getting immersed in the conspiracy.
- KoTOR--several people mentioned how they tried to play through evil and couldn't do it; especially the part where you cold-bloodedly assign a character to kill another. One person said it was the best game play translation of 'turning to the dark side'
- A player mentioned how fun it was to steal other people's stuff in Ultima Online
- Ron Humboldt's experimental game (from EGW at GDC) "the marriage" was mentioned as an interesting attempt to create a very different emotional play experience.

Examples of not so powerful emotional experiences with game characters:
- Silent Hill--how it totally broke your feeling of involvement when the characters didn't respond to scary things.


Next steps as a result of the roundtable:
I plan to...
- Set up a place to post about helpful tools and resources for creating emotional characters
- Set up a place to contribute stories about people's most powerful emotional experience with a character in a game.
- Use the latter to do some follow-up analysis of what's going on 'under the hood' from a psychological point of view based upon the stories people share.
- Will probably do a follow up post on what kinds of emotions people think games should aim for, and why, and ask for feedback about this...

Thanks to everyone who made it and contributed to a great discussion!

Katherine

Welcome

Thanks for stopping by--this blog is meant to serve the game developer and research community as a forum for discussing how to bring stronger emotions and empathy into game design and into the player experience.

I'll be posting regularly about empathy in games and related issues, and am seeking other interested contributors.