Baring the device - sense making in digital games

So, jetzt will ich auch mal eine inhaltliche Diskussion anstacheln über etwas, worüber ich schon länger nachdenke und wozu ich einen Artikel für den MIT convergence culture consortium newsletter verfasst habe. Den poste ich jetzt hier, damit auch dieser Weblog gefüttert wird ;-)

Baring the device - sense-making processes in digital games

Those who fear the possible dangers of games and those who see games as a way to better society have one thing in common: a severe lack of knowledge about how games convey meaning and express ideas. I have been writing about this before in this newsletter, focusing on what I have called the “reality-clash” between rules and fiction and introducing the concept of dynamic meaning generation as a means to successfully integrate these two game components.
I have not stopped thinking about the problem of meaning generation in games and here are some more thoughts on the matter, dealing more specifically with the medial characteristics of games and how they might influence sense-making. Again, this article is quite explorative, aimed at inspiring discussion rather than providing answers.

One obstacle digital games are facing at the moment on the way to become more meaningful is the trend to camouflage their game-ness. Across many genres (genre-based design as such hindering innovation) physical immersion seems to be key, the feeling of walking in the shoes of the hero, seeing through the eyes of the heroine. But games are media, thus the interaction with the game-world can never be immediate. Also, the development of artificial intelligence still has to go a long way before e.g. talking to a non-player character (NPC) can create the illusion of a talking to another real person. There is and always will be a gap between game and player and trying to deny it is problematic, because it limits the thematic and experiential scope of games. Why?
Because to create the feeling of presence, games focus on the feeling of immediacy rather than their reflective potential. Thinking about the wii, the new trick seems to be not to draw the player into the world but to get the game into the living room. Still the goal is the same: to blur the boundary between real and virtual space. The way to achieve this is a controller that enables a strong and wide variety of physical analogies between real-world input and on-screen action. This sort of interaction category is the most intuitive, but since it is based on physical analogies, it can only refer to physical actions.
If your goal is to produce deeply moving, thought provoking experiences, how far do you get with this interaction category alone? Especially when the enormous immediacy of the game-play tends to shove context-material aside, turning game-play activities into abstract problems. As King and Krzywinska have observed that in heightened states of play “contextual background is likely to be reduced to the more distant background, the gameplay situation taking the shape of an abstract problem to be overcome rather than one that retains much in the way of contextual depth.” (King & Krzywinska 2006, p. 68).
To make more aspects of the game-world tangible to the player, not only its physical qualities, other translation processes have to be explored. Interesting game design is the art of abstraction, of identifying the characteristic elements of an experience or process and translating these elements to the player, so they can be understood and felt.
This translation process has a huge and game-specific potential for generating meaning. Experiencing how a persuasive dialogue can be translated into a strategic card game as done in the diplomacy game in the new MMPORG Vanguard teaches us something about the “metaphors we live by”, to quote Lakoff. There is not a physical analogy between the real-world input and on-screen action, but there is an analogy on a cognitive and emotional level.
The process of crafting items in Everquest 2 is another example of how a game can make us reflect about the nature of things. Since adventurers have to eat to keep up their strength, it is important to always have food in your inventory. Really good food (in the sense of providing faster power regeneration) is player-made, not bought from an NPC provisioner. This rule has a double function: encouraging the player to make use of the crafting possibilities in the game and conveying the moral concept that home-made food is better for you than what you can buy on the street. But cooking is challenging and just as in real life, one has to carefully balance seasoning, heating and stirring in order to produce a high quality meal.
The way the cooking process is translated into metaphors, represented audio-visually to the player via a variety of information modes (visual icons for the buffs, audio feedback when a new buff is activated, two parallel status bars that signify the progress, how much time one has left before the food is cooked to rags and the quality of the food at any given moment etc.) and how meaning is dynamically generated by interpreting the signs on the screen, taking action, reinterpreting the changed state and adapting ones strategy according to the result of this reinterpretation is a terrific example of how complex meaning generation in games can be and what sorts of questions we have to tackle in order to understand it better.
I am just beginning to explore the media specific possibilities of digital games and the way they can be used to produce meaningful and emotionally satisfying experiences. The questions I am most interested in at the moment, as the above examples might have indicated is
• how meaning is dynamically generated across a variety of information and interaction modes,
• how rules and contextual information are integrated in current games and
• how sense-making processes change over a longer period of playing.
To answer these questions I will mainly draw on semantic discourse analysis as well as multimedia semiotic analysis, adapting these methods to the affordances of the interactive subject. My focus will be on comparative analysis of more or less “self-conscious” games as well as an empirical study that investigates the sense-making processes of players.
My goal is to come up with a theoretical model of semiotic game analysis that shall help to identify design strategies to produce more meaningful games. Some of my current hypothesis include that
• games should not be afraid to bare their devices - maximum “realism” might prevent games from becoming truly meaningful at least as long as there is no satisfying AI available;
• interpreting translation processes can provide valuable insights about the nature of things and the human condition, fostering more meaningful games, given that games continue to expand their vocabulary. As Mary Flanagan said at the Nordic Games conference last year, diversity is key to innovation and this is not only true for the designer’s backgrounds but also for the themes games tackle. The art of abstraction has to be exercised!

References:
King, Geoff / Krzywinska, Tanya (2006): Tomb Raiders & Space Invaders. London, UK: IB Tauris.
Vanguard: SOE, 2006
Everquest II: SOE, 2004

Comments

[Kommentiert von: Umair Ali Qureshi]

i want making the game into the 3ds studio max tell me how can i do this?

[Kommentiert von: Game Controllers]

Good article to us ..
it was so possible dangers of games and those who see games as a way to better society have one thing in common, more knowledge about how games convey meaning and express ideas. i have been writing about this before in this newsletter, focusing on what I have called the “reality-clash” between rules and fiction and introducing the concept of dynamic meaning generation as a means to successfully integrate these two game components.

interesting idea!!
thanks:)