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...