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.