Embracing player's perception...

I’ve been playing Prototype lately and while I’m not very far, I definitely have some issues with it. It’s weird, I feel like a lot of games out there are sloppy on their low level mechanics and I wonder why? Some could say its gameplay programming while others could say it’s time constraints, but I know Prototype had enough time to deliver the basics properly.

I was expecting the avatar to move smoothly in the environment and I was disappointed. I think the best example is their jump mechanic. It’s a “jump on release” kind of thing, which is totally fine in itself but the timing is all wrong. When standing still and pressing the button, the avatar goes down and when released, there’s a small delay before he actually jump. Even worst, nothing occurs when we run and press the jump button. The avatar doesn’t even go down a bit while running to give some feedback and when you release to jump forward, there’s a delay of almost half a second before the jump occur. This kind of stuff is happening a lot and it broke the fantasy for me.   

Some see those things as details and they enjoy the game anyway, but I see them as the hidden problems most players will still perceive without knowing. Player’s perception is a fascinating thing and it is the source of serious design problems. It’s quite simple, designers are trying to create an experience and to achieve that goal they need a game simulation. A simulation in three axes:

 S = System States

 C = Context

  I  = Inputs

 

Players react to combinations of systems, each at a particular state. They do so through the influence of the game narrative context, their in-game condition as well as their real condition outside of the game: are they tired, unhappy, sad, drunk or anything of this kind… Then they’ll make a decision by providing inputs which will affect the systems states again.

Providing a game simulation is easy and it is only the beginning. We must understand the various moments this simulation offers and how they should be realized. Each game moment is a single point in a simulation that will be perceived differently by all players. This is important because in the end, the desired game experience is the product of each player’s perception towards the various game moments and how they were interconnected.

This means experiences occur at every level which makes it ridiculously hard for designers to control what they deliver.

Every game designer understands this in one form or another but accepting it is the hard part. Deciding your avatar will jump is one thing, but to know which game moments will involve jumping is what the real job is. Understanding that is key to realize and design your jump properly. Most great games deliver each mechanics for a specific type of key moment and focus only on that to make sure they can deliver the experience they want in the end. This is what Prototype fails at doing…

To be honest, I am also a bit tired to see games delivering only one layer through their mechanics. We are always using different objectives and environments to provide variety in our low level experiences, but what about the mechanics? Would it be possible to have organic mechanics that would take into account the context just like the player perceives it while he plays? What if jumping was changing depending on narrative context or other factors, would that provide new rich experiences? Imagine mechanics taking into account what happened before a given moment, how it affected the avatar and the player. Would that provide something new and would it help us reinforce what the player might perceive?

I think it would, but I also see games failing to deliver the very basic low level requirements. Still, that doesn’t prevent anyone from pushing the boundaries a little bit. Hopefully this is making sense to some of you…

Jonathan

Comments

[Matt Enright]

I'm working for a small studio on our first game, and one of the many lessons we've had to learn is how to meet player's expectations. Not the feature set - we were in tune with that from the start as gamers ourselves - but rather the details like keyboard shortcuts and feedback that confirms an action. As developers, we expect the game to behave as we designed it, and we trust it to respond appropriately to our actions. But gamers don't share our set of expectations, and they don't develop a trust of the game if perceived responses don't reinforce the input.

One of the challenges (frustrations) of adventure games is that the player often has to tap the designer's logic to solve the puzzles and advance in the game. In a similar way, an action game that demands a specific mental model of motion - the timing of a jump, walking speed, or falling damage - that the player can't get comfortable with or discover quickly will block immersion.

When these motion mechanics are derived from a simulation, the designer may even find them uncomfortable until the parameters are tuned just right. Varying those parameters as the story progresses, health changes, or other dynamic factors could seriously distort the player's perception of the game in unexpected ways. Of course, that might be the fun of it. Some people enjoy having the rug pulled out from beneath them.

[Nels Anderson]

I think it's definitely the case that we make the player's job of perceiving the game state far more difficult than it ought to be. The lens we give them to look at a game is basically smeared with Vaseline. In Prototype, worse than even the movement mechanics, are how chaotic all the powers are. It's awkward to execute some of them, it's rarely discernible which ones are useful what situation, etc.

Tom Francis had a pretty good reflection on how Prototype's powers could be made more readable (http://www.pentadact.com/index.php/2009-07-10-prototype-revised). If all of a game's mechanics, even the ones we take for granted, had symmetry and clarity of this magnitude, I think we'd definitely be moving in the right direction.

[Jonathan Morin]

Matt: Supporting mechanics that fluctuates base on the situation doesn't have to alienate the player. A very basic example would be the walking in Resident Evil 4. As health goes down, you walk slower because you are hurt. This changes the movement speed of the avatar which is crucial in that game. This supports what I am talking about and I think other systems could be done. I am more suggesting systems that will remain constant throughout the game, but that will simulate more organic stuff where the player will be able to perceive certain things through his avatar reactions...

[Matt Enright]

Thanks for the clarification; a goal of more organic, innate feedback mechanisms would more likely draw a player into a game than create frustration through dissonance. My tangent lost your meaning when it began to address input models instead of the approach of reinforcing that input, flavored by the context in which it is given.

[Jory Griffis]

I'm reminded of the first time I threw a grenade in Half-Life 2. I was used to having to think about the power and trajectory of a throw (usually by holding down the fire key and aiming somewhere above my target, which I always felt was an awkward and inadequate solution in a first-person environment) and dealing with small, pointless delays like the one you've described. HL2 forgoes this, taking the calculations you'd do unconsciously while throwing and essentially making them for you: where you aim is where it goes. After a moment's confusion with the new system it occurred to me just how obvious this solution should have been all along!

Glad to see a post here.