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The Rhetoric Of Games Explored
Thanks to the IGDA for their 'Ivory Tower' academic-related games column discussing how games communicate information to players. The author uses Ico as an example, highlighting the "...gameplay mechanic of enabling players to save their game. Often with consoles, players access this option with the pressing of the Start/Select button... In Ico, you can only save when you find a glowing white couch... clashing with the rest of the design of game world and drawing rhetorical attention to this mechanic that enables you to save your progress." But should developers "work to create gameplay mechanics that are better incorporated within the overall game design, making them less explicitly rhetorical", as The Getaway does by getting rid of HUD information, or does there need to be an explicit and obvious way to save, regain health, check an onscreen map, and so on?
I'd love to see less games have a HUD, it's more emursive (sp?) and it prevents burning images into the tv screen (very important for owners of projection tvs).
I appreciate what the guy is saying, but his feelings here cannot be applied perfectly across the whole. You have to communicate the idea. That's it. If it involves 'rehetoric', well that's fine, but only use that if it's the best way to do it. I mean, imagine playing Quake. You'd have to look down into your bottomless pocket and count all 100 rockets you have left!
I guess what I'm saying is that his idea can be taken to illogical extremes. As such, it should be thought of as a design consideration, not a rule to strictly adhere to . Pacman would be a strange game to play if there was no score, he just got fatter and fatter on ecto-plasm.
"Derp de derp."
I would like to see more customizable interfaces. In many first person shooters the information is at the bottom or top of the screen. I would like to be able to arbitrarily move it to different points on the screen, and remove and add options as desired. I would like to have transparency for options such as maps.
Reserved Word.
The point is not to eliminate the existence of external maps/information/HUD devices from a game to make it more organic or natural.
Black & White attempted to 'do away with' all those complicated trees, menus, progressions, and 'false' structures on a game. The result? A totally unplayable mess where you spend more time trying to get the game to do what you want than you do actually playing it.
Because your sensorum in a gaming environment is extremely limited to controller & video screen, attempting to use 'natural' methods of seamlessly integrating information into the game world guarantees you that players now have to check every last inch of screen real estate to make sure they didn't miss anything. And that they study the game and the language/shorthand used by the developers so that they can interpret things appropriately.
Where, if you have a Simple Menu Button, you get a number of those features right at your fingertips. Sure it breaks the illusion of a world, but it Gets The Job Done(tm) and lets you get on with playing.
I don't want a 'big white couch' to sit down on and save my game. I want to hit start/select, choose 'save game', pick a slot, save the game, and then get back to playing.
while a bad menuing system can make gameplay less fun and immersive, a no-menu system (as games like Black & White demonstrated) makes a game that could be enjoyable an utter waste of time, and a popular item on the $5 'used' shelf.
The ivory tower folks should try looking at games from a more utilitarian, rather than academia based view.
Total immersion into gameplay requires total integration of technical aspects in the game itself. Regain health by eating at a restaurant or staying in a hotel with money you got from doing something in the game. And you would not have to count rockets...you could tell by the weigh how many you had left.
Who carries 100 rockets around in a pouch nowadays, anyway?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Seriously, racing games that offer either an "in cockpit" view, or a bumper view with a HUD, I'll always take the HUD. My monitor is not large enough to give me the full view as it is, and I don't want more space taken up by a dash.
Other games, like Quake, its very nice and convienent to have a HUD with ammo listed for each weapon. Does it detract from the overall experience of the game? Possibly, but for multiplayer, I'll give up the "experience" every time if it helps me play better.
But its not just simple things like the HUD. I played Half Life, the single player campaign, with video settings as close to reality as I could get. Dark places were dark, and difficult to see. It added atmosphere. For counter-strike, graphics completely different. Very bright, and contrast turned way down. Result, its not very dark when its dark, and not very bright when its bright. Easier to see, and kill, other people.
Anything that helps build the experience, ambience, and atmosphere of a game is a good thing, as long as it doesn't interefere with the ability to play the game.
It seems he is advocating more immersive experiences within the game. And surely that is the trend the industry is following.
Silent Hill 2 doesn't use a health meter, the character just looks and acts more hurt. Such a system is ambigious. This is acceptable in games like SH2 and Ico. Player health isn't the primary concern; solving puzzles is.
Action games trade off a certain amount of immersion because it is often too ambigious. In Halo, you need to know how much health and ammo you have.
In futuristic style games you can add the ammo meter to the weapon and take it off the hud. But you can't do that in a WWII game. I supppose a more realistic game would just force you to count bullets.
The things he is talking about works better in adventure games. Though why not limit save games to menus and keep them out of the gameworld. He doesn't seem to distinguis between the game loader and the game world.
And then there are pure games. Tetris etc. where this doesn't even matter.
One unnatural mechanic leads to another. If the computer/console was an appliance that saves progress constantly (or at least, often enough not to matter), then saving the game is as easy as walking away and turning off the machine.
Of course this only works in-game if your game has been designed so that Death isn't used as a "punishment". If your game design allows players to go down unreversible dead-ends, then you have to have save-game functionality to allow them to back up. One hack leads to another.
For example, see The Sims. No save game required.
To summarize:
I will now discuss the idea of rhetoric in games. Here is my definition of rhetoric in games which is similar to rhetoric in fiction. Here's 2 examples of rhetoric in ICO. Thank you for your time.
This passes for academia?!?
Save games and information presentation for the sake of interacting with an environment is not rhetoric but, I would propose, an extension of the fictional characteristic called "breaking the 4th wall". The 4th wall being the "wall" between the reader/viewer/player and the media being read/watched/played. You see examples of this in Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Ferris talks to the camera and explains his inner thoughts. Also check out the Sesame Street children's book "The Monster at the End of this Book", and Isaac Asimov's "Murder at the ABA" (where Asimov has an ongoing argument with the main character about what "really happened" in the footnotes).
"Saving" on the couch is a nice touch that keeps you within the fiction of the game. It is *not* intuitive. (Try it, drag anybody over who's never seen the game and let them go at it. It's incredibly easy to fly past the couches without ever sitting on them and then ask "Say...how do I save" in the middle of a dangerous situation with no couch anywhere to be seen). But the mere fact that you have to *think* about saving the game will destroy any established rhetoric, because you're not thinking about the story at that point. You're thinking... I have to pee or I better save before the big monster kills me or the power goes out. No matter how much you candy coat it, you're still pulling yourself out of the immersion of fiction to think of real world events.
Contrast this with Myst which saves with every transition from room to room and doesn't penalize you for health or time when you don't interact with it. (THAT'S intuitive, but then that's a PC/MAC game too where you've got a hard drive and not slow memory cards to write to.)
And note that this only applies to story based games. In mulitplayer Quake, this sort of thing is silly (as has been pointed out here already). I need critical information about health and ammo YESTERDAY! That means some sort of HUD or static information gauges. You don't care if the health pack is a realistically rendered metal container with a satin emroidered red cross on it. You care if you can see it from two rooms away!
It's an interesting discussion, but in the end a game is a game. If I wanted ultra realism, I would just play "real life."
Other popular forms of entertainment, like movies, have similar devices. If a movie has background music, does that diminish its ability to tell a realistic story because where the hell is the music coming from? Or for that matter, does it make the movie less enjoyable when it's less realistic?
Direct from the Alanis Morissette school of Irony, now comes a word that we've all been waiting for
I mean, whatever happened to the usual meaning of rhetoric as "the art of oratory"!? (Yes, Virginia, that was a rhetorical question.) How the hell can rhetoric be extended to using objects to communicate? Rhetoric has always been associated with _verbal_ communication.
Mr. Davidson tries to "loosely" define rhetoric at the beginning of his article, and in general, he failed. It almost seems like "rhetoric" is starting to become the trendy word of the month. And I despise people who try to be trendy.
Please call it what it actually is; a metaphor or a symbol. For my sanity. For everyones sanity. For the children
Wow, I can't believe how annoyed I am with this.
hindering total emersion. I would be as happy as Mario in a Coin Room, if I only felt the illusion fade when I had to save.
How about tackling a real problem, like, when faced with some game problem I have to stop and think "Ok, what physical properties of which objects did the game designers choose to model?" Or something like "how did the game designers intend for me to solve this problem?"
The good games of today attempt to overcome these problems by being consistent; but we are always stuck with a weak metaphor of reality.
I realize its the Holy Grail, but I want to hear no more whining about the rhetoric of game saving until some serious headway is made in hard physics.
Since The Getaway sucked bigtime, and Ico was really rather good, they seem to be picking on the wrong guys.
The Getaway was an ample demonstration of how to do it wrongly. No explicit display of health, using the battered state of the character instead, was an interesting idea to immerse you in the game's reality. One then broken by watching the blood disappear from the guy's jacket when you lean against a wall (because, catching your breath is enough to not only recover from gunshot wounds but clean your jacket, obviously). Similiarly, the fact that your only clue as to where to drive is by watching your signals on the car meant that you spend have your time lost. Something made far worse by the fact that they did only a reasonable job at modelling London. "A-ha!" you say. He's going to the Tate! I'll cut the corner and dive down the side road." Which doesn't exist in Getaway London, only on the real one. Locals get lost because roads are missing, the rest of the world gets lost because they don't know the place at all.
Meanwhile, sitting on a glowing sofa seems hardly the worst thing you could do.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The glowing sofa just seems like another take on the standard checkpoint...and I have to admit that after MDK2 I'm really gunshy of checkpoints. Here's the MDK2 view of checkpoints:
Get to point A. Die.
(repeat 10 times)
Get past point A.
No checkpoint yet. Get to point B. Die.
Get past point A again. Get to point B. Die.
(repeat 10 times)
Get past point B. No checkpoint yet.
Get past A and B to C. Die.
Repeat 10 times.
Get past point C. Find a checkpoint.
Repeat the entire process.
Meanwhile A and B aren't fast to get past, and after you figure it out they are very tedious...but you have to do them over and over and over because there are no checkpoints.
Give me a game save that I can get to by the start button and I'm happy...after that any game with checkpoints leaves me VERY leery.
Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com
Two peanuts crossed the street. One was assaulted.
I assume that you're playing the PS2 port of MDK2? The PC version, after all, allows you to save anywhere. On the other hand, this leads to save abuse... /really/ needs to save.
One thing that I'm still waiting to see implemented is automatic exit-on-save. If a player needs to call up a menu and quit in order to save rather than just tapping F6, it helps ensure that saves will only be used when the player is ceasing play for a time or