Empathy Games

Sorry it's been a good while since I posted! I'm pretty shocked with myself... two post without any images! Commence the pretty images...

Nah but on a serious note - Empathy Games. What's an empathy game?

"A game which allows the player to understand and share the feelings of another"

Creating empathy games often designed backwards and it makes for inefficient game design but these games are pushing new frontiers with the medium which is exciting. 

Here are some games which I've been looking at!

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - Starbreeze Studios (2013)

Dear Esther - The Chinese Room (2012)

Gone Home - The Fullbright Company (2013)

Journey - thatgamecompany (2012)

Papa & Yo - Minority Media (2012)

That Dragon, Cancer - Ryan & Amy Green (TBA)

Post Project Proposal

So I submitted my project proposal earlier this week. I stuck with what I said I was going to do. Now it's just up to me to get on with it during semester 2. I've got a bunch of research to continue doing if my project is going to work out. It's just a research paper, there's no experiments or evaluations so I'm pretty happy with that. Essentially I didn't want to do another miniature honours project so I've gone with something I'll be happy working on and it will help my own professional development too. It's ambitious but I'm hoping to come out with a game concept which I'll be able to take on and develop with a small team of people. 

Project Proposal

Now that I've been doing a bunch of research on emotion, emotion and video games and online relationships I'm about to dive in and start writing my project proposal. The idea is that I want to create heuristics so that I can help other game designers in coming up with game design which is driven by emotion. I've been checking out Jenova Chen interviews on YouTube to rake in any information I can about his design process.

I probably won't post again till January sometime. Wish me luck!

Cheers, 

Gavin

Emotion through game mechanics?

One of the things I've came across while researching games is conveying emotion through game mechanics. It seems the traditional way of conveying emotion through video games is with the use of cut-scenes which is basically film. For exmaple, I loved Final Fantasy X, I thought it was an amazing game and there's a lot of emotion portrayed through the characters, however it's all done through cut-scenes... now there's nothing wrong with that but conveying emotion through game mechanics is very interesting because the emotion comes from the players themselves, not what they see on screen. The emotion is simulated rather than elicited by the individual. Imagine a video game where you're constantly playing but it's very emotional. It may seem a bit strange I know... but video games are a young medium; they are maturing and expanding away from what we know them as. Films are great at what they achieve but imagine interactive content which delivers the experience but it differs enough to not be classed as a film. I'm looking at Heavy Rain here. It's a great game which does well what it sets out to do but there is next to no gameplay. 

Okay enough rambling. I would like to give an example of emotion through game mechanics and I'm using an old popular game here with a lot of respect to try and reach out to a big audience. 

Shadow of the Colossus - Team Ico (2005)

That's right, Shadow of the Colossus. If you don't know what Shadow of the Colossus is then I'd advise either checking it out or getting a copy for yourself. I'll dive straight into the emotion through mechanics stuff now.

Example

In Shadow of the Colossus you travel across vast landscapes in order to reach the colossal giants with your horse. This is basically your 'move faster' mechanic in order to get around quicker. However, players can't help but feel some form of companionship with the horse... an emotional bond where they actually care for their horse. This is exactly what I mean when talking about emotion through mechanics. It's just a game mechanic but the context in which it has been put in (the horse) has made the player appreciate the creature a heck of a lot. 

There's a bunch of other examples but I'd be here all day. Can you think of any game mechanics from games which elicit emotions from the player or even your own personal experiences? 

Cheers, 

Gavin

Journey

Journey - thatgamecompany(2013)

It's funny... I talk about this game a lot, people must get fed up with me talking about it all the time! The most unfortunate thing is I haven't actually had a chance to play this game because my PS3 broke a few years ago. I've watched enough videos and interviews from Jenova Chen, Robin Hunicke and Kellee Santiago to know enough about the game to understand it and know what it's about... I just haven't yet had the chance to experience it which sucks!

Despite not having played the game it still manages to amaze me. The narrative is told through wonderful artwork and audio with no dialogue whatsoever leaving the story up to interpretation which is a powerful way of telling a story in my opinion. Sometimes having your own idea of what's going on in the story is a lot more enjoyable than finding it out in black and white. 

I love what Journey did with the multiplayer too. They used subtractive game design and ended up with no way too communicate between players, nope, not even players PSN name; they were a complete stranger which draws back to my last post about instantly thinking of Journey when seeing the topic 'Strangers in game'. 

thatgamecompany have inspired me as a game designer to think about games differently. Games which are driven by emotion, grip the player and give me a rememberable experience. This is why I'm loving the experimental games which are coming out just now like Gone Home and The Stanley Parable. 

I'll end it there, cheers!

Gavin 

Strangers in Games

"How do relationships and bonds develop in multiplayer settings between people who have no contact outside of the game environment, and can we develop concepts, prototypes or technologies to capitalise on this phenomena and present players with a meaningful experience?"

Suzy Prior has proposed this interesting topic which I've chosen to partake in. From the title, description and picture the first thing I thought of was Journey and I love Jenova Chen's work. I have a big interest in experimental games which have been coming out over the past year. In particular, Flower by thatgamecompany is one of my most favourite games. I had a wonderful experience with that game where I was completely immersed. The coolest thing about Flower was collecting enough petals to make yourself longer (sort of like a dragon) and then being able to see your tail if you spin around and do some crazy loops like a roller-coaster. It was an awesome feeling able to fly through the air and brush the grass as I flew a few inches from the ground. 

Flower - thatgamecompany

I'm excited to be working on the project and I've already got an idea of what I'm going to do but I'll wait till it's fully fleshed out before posting. 

Cheers, 

Gavin 

Previous Research

During my honours year at Glasgow Caledonian University I chose to research into the 'role and function of music in video games' which was supervised by Dr. Gianna Cassidy. My project was an investigation into the effects of music on player performance and experience of Tetris. I  had seven music conditions: no music, high tempo, original tempo, low tempo, high arousal, low arousal and self-selected. There were 3 hypotheses drawn: 

1. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with the fast tempo version of the original Tetris track (165bpm) than the original (150bpm) and slower version (135bpm).

2. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with low arousal music, as opposed to high arousal music. 

3. It is hypothesised that player performance and experience will be optimal when accompanied with self-selected music compared to experimenter-selected music (high and low arousal).

The experiment consisted of participants sitting down in front of a computer to play Tetris while listening to one of the music conditions for each play-through. 

The results:

1. Low arousal was found to be optimal in player performance over high arousal but not in experience. 

2. Self-selected music was optimal with experience over experimenter-selected music but not in performance. 

3. Lastly, fast tempo was optimal in player performance but not in experience when compared with the original music and slow tempo.

In conclusion, the results did not fully meet the expected hypotheses but the research did help to support that music has an effect on player performance and experience during a concurrent task.