Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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!
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.