Different Game-Mechanic, Different Receptivity

[clyde]

I saw this comment on a blog and I think it's a neat idea to consider. Could various game-mechanics evoke different receptions for information? I'm pretty sure that they do, but I'd love to explore the idea in these terms.

John Scott Tynes on January 10, 2014 at 6:09 pm

Great article, and I’m glad to see your comments on interactive fiction not simply being a question of who controls the plot.

We are trying so hard to find ways of making gameplay resonant with the experience of the story. What if it was entirely orthogonal and used as a device to capture and hold attention?

The cartoonist Chris Ware has done a lot of experiments with comic book storytelling. I remember a series of little strips he did that were genuinely little — each panel was maybe a half inch to an inch across, with no word balloons. I literally had to hold the page right up to my face to decipher them. What I found was a small narrative of longing and loneliness that, in just a few pages, brought me to tears. If I hadn’t had to focus so intently on them I doubt I would have been as vulnerable to their content.

I recently played the iOS game Stride & Prejudice, an endless runner where you tap to jump while running across the actual sentences of Pride & Prejudice. Bizarre though it may sound, I read the entire novel this way, a book I’d never read before. Reading a Jane Austen novel while tapping to jump the spaces between sentences required a degree of focus that minimized distractions. Ordinarily my mind is busy and noisy; the minimal gameplay occupied that distractable portion of my mind and left me with just enough attention to purely read and comprehend. I’m not sure I would have been as successful reading the book under normal circumstances.

What I’m saying is that gameplay doesn’t have to be a tight fit to content. Gameplay can simply be a frame, a medium, within which story occurs. If you take that approach — which I’m not saying is the only right approach, of course — then you would consider gameplay from a completely different perspective based on things like managing attention or increasing comprehension rather than trying to use game design to drive narrative.

[Bjorn]

What was the original blog post?

 

It's certainly a fascinating idea.  Though the example of the Pride and Prejudice game is a bit weird to me.  I would have to see it in action to understand what he means. 

[clyde]

The orginal blog post was that Emily Short article we've been discussing in the Gone Home thread.

http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/

I haven't played Stride and Prejudice, but I have an idea of what John Scott Tynes is proposing. When playing an endless runner, the mind focuses in a specific way that may open some doors of perception at the expense of closing others. Every activity requires some level of focus. The suggestion is that different activities evoke different types of focus and those states can make the player more receptive to various types of information. I mean, we know this; Tony Hawk makes me see the landscape in terms of rail-slides while Gears of War encourages me to see it in terms of cover. But John Scott Tynes is giving a more abstract anectdote where getting into the focus of an endless runner had the side-effect of making him receptive to the entirety of Pride and Prejudice. Typically the discussion of how game-mechanics and narrative relate is that the narrative motivates the player to continue to play. This is a case where the game-mechanic happens to make the narrative more digestable. This reminds me of the memory-castle technique in mnemonics. By imagining information as objects placed in a familiar space, people can remember a greater quantity of things. The reason for this is that our the spatial memory portion of our mind typically has more capacity.

I'd love to have a catalog of all the mind-states specific game-mechanics evoke, and then see how various forms of information are recieved when in those mental-states. I think it's an interesting idea. Would I be able to retain the details of my health-insurance policy if I was presented with sentences from the policy every time I made a match-three? Maybe I would have an easier time with understanding the mathematics of game-theory optimization if constants were tied to skill-unlocks in an RPG.

[SecretAsianMan]

I haven't played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but from what I understand the way the game controls is a crucial part of the storytelling.

[Merus]

I've seen research that suggests that making text harder to read forces readers to concentrate to read it, and they recall it better.

 

Orthogonal storytelling is sort of the default; the reason why there's so much effort into resonant gameplay storytelling is chiefly because it's so hard and rare, and therefore more valuable. Stride and Prejudice sounds like a fairly extreme example of the idea that, to a game, things like collision areas are important to gameplay but how they appear is isn't quite so much, so you might as well make it interesting. The recent Ubi Art Rayman games like to theme long levels as a journey from one place to another, but of course if you don't realise that's what they're doing it seems a little arbitrary.

[Reyturner]

Orthogonal gameplay is the bread and butter of board and pen and paper games.

Dread is an RPG with a very simple conflict resolution mechanic: you play Jenga.

Every time you do something beyond your character's ability, you pull a block to succeed. Since knocking over the tower means death, or some other tragic but permanent end to your character, you can refuse to pull a block and fail without tragic permanence (for you anyways). Alternatively you can intentionally smash the tower and sacrifice yourself in exchange for a dramatic success.

The build up and subsequent release of tension is perfect for horror games, which, in my experience, struggle to find resonance with a lot of gaming groups.

[clyde]

Dread sounds awesome.

Before this discussion, I had never considered that orthogonal gameplay might have advantages. I'm still kind of skeptical though. Is orthogonal gameplay just a first draft that can always be trumped by a more resonant mechanic or a narrative that is more suited for the mechanic? I suppose Dread (in comparison to D&D) is a good example of how one mechanic may not necessarily be better than another, it might just evoke an interesting perspective on the narrative which wouldn't have occurred without it.

I've thought about this problem before, but always with the goal of reducing ludo-narrative dissonance rather than considering what it can offer the narrative.

[eot]

I think the reason experiences I have in games like DayZ and EVE resonate with me more than almost all authored narratives in games is precisely because the mechanics are in sync with the "story". A game like GTA has to work so hard to create a situation where you feel like the stakes are high, hours and hours of expository cutscenes, and even then it rarely succeeds. In DayZ the stakes are there mechanically. One time I had foolishly parked a jeep (they were very rare back then) outside of a factory while me and my friends were looking for spare car parts. All of a sudden someone honked the horn, it drove off, we all opened fire on it and gave chase. The jeep ended up crashing into a tree and we had a long chase / firefight through a forest. I struggle to think of how a game with dissonant mechanics could ever come close to replicating that. I think the only time I've felt real tension in a game story was the final mission of Mass Effect 2, which actually had mechanical stakes even if it wasn't handled very elegantly.

 

As for having purposefully dissonant mechanics, I don't see the point other than as a parody. Yeah, it's hard to tell a love story using tennis. That's kind of the problem games have.

[clyde]

As for having purposefully dissonant mechanics, I don't see the point other than as a parody. Yeah, it's hard to tell a love story using tennis. That's kind of the problem games have.

I think the possible point of dissonant mechanics may be that they encourage you to look at the theme in a new way.

[Reyturner]

If an orthogonal mechanic evokes the emotional reaction in tandem with the emotion the story is intended to evoke, I don't think you can call it ludo-narratively dissonant (though you could call it manipulative).

However, we're entering the territory you'll find QTEs residing in, which I would (half seriously) describe as narra-ludicly dissonant; sacrificing the player's gameplay flow to insert a mechanically orthogonal sequence of events intended to invest you in what amounts to a cut-scene.

I think something like Dread works because its effective but strange Jenga mechanic is elegant and quick and isn't bumping up against more verisimilitudinous mechanics so there's no gameplay flow to take the player out of.

[dartmonkey]

Over Christmas I secured Beatles Rock Band with all the gear off ebay (being six years late to the party has its benefits - I've got the entire set-up for a fraction of the original cost). And just yesterday Rock Band 3 arrived with the keyboard. With my girlfriend on drums, we rattled through Los Pollos Bros' very first setlist which included Dire Straits' Walk of Life and Centrefold by J. Geils Band. As I played them, I was struck by how much more I was enjoying them than if I was just hearing them on the radio. I've always found Walk of Life in particular pretty anaemic, but as I was forced to concentrate and play that melody myself, I developed a greater appreciation of the song and its textures.

It reminded me of this thread. Sure, Centrefold is not Pride & Prejudice, but Rock Band is a further example of engaging one portion of the brain, giving another the chance to digest a text differently than I otherwise might have. Just this week Jeff Gerstmann mentioned on the Bombcast how Beatles Rock Band made him appreciate their music for the first time.

[Bjorn]

Rock Band is probably one of the best examples of game play forcing you to focus on the content in a different way.  I think a lot of people discovered some music that they had previously written off thanks to it. 

[dibs]

I got a ZZTop best of because of Guitar Hero!

[miffy495]

I got back into playing guitar because of those games. I had forgotten how much fun making music was, having given it up back when I was in high school so that I would have time to actually get all the things that I needed to done. Rock Band made me start strumming along on my acoustic again, just because it reminded me how much fun it was. Then Rocksmith happened and I started getting into techniques and actually nuance rather than just a few chords and strumming along to songs I like. Two years in to getting back into it now. I'm still not back at the level I was when I was 15 (I played a LOT back then) because of the ten year break, but man. This is so much fun. I'm teaching my girlfriend things on her bass, and just earlier this week was considering a new instrument purchase because I'm actually getting this serious about things again and one I want is on sale.

 

Thanks, rhythm games, for making me back into an (very, very) amateur musician!