Tension, Pacing and emotion in Games
So I was watching some talks about games design on youtube and stumbled upon this.
I immediately got very inspired and started playing around with the idea of creating heavy tension in a video game and then randomly breaking the tension. I got the idea from typical scream type horror movies where they build tension for ages and then break it with gory fast cuts causing the viewer to usually jump. Partly inspired by Slender man and a little inspired by our typical super hard platforming giants like Super Mario Brothers and others I created a little prototype.
The prototype, currently called LSD (Lucy Sees Demons) follows the player in an explorative platforming environment with occasional puzzles and long expansive areas that the player has to explore and understand in search of key objects (I have a narrative planned for the reasons for the typical "Search and win" cookie cutter objective). The unique kick is that the music that plays is heavily tension building and randomly the tension is broken by a horror mode with appears once every minute to ten minutes and introduces enemies which the player can only run away from and which will kill the player on touch.
In Horror mode enemies fly down, run at you and come from all angles forcing the player to run away, proceed forward far to fast or die. The uneasyness created by not knowing when the horror mode will come (a bit like the curse from Castlevania Simons Quest) builds extreme tension in game and I have found so far, with only two days of playing around, is very effective in getting an emotional reaction from the player.
What do you guys think about using emotion as a driving force behind genres of games (As Blow explains in the video)
I immediately got very inspired and started playing around with the idea of creating heavy tension in a video game and then randomly breaking the tension. I got the idea from typical scream type horror movies where they build tension for ages and then break it with gory fast cuts causing the viewer to usually jump. Partly inspired by Slender man and a little inspired by our typical super hard platforming giants like Super Mario Brothers and others I created a little prototype.
The prototype, currently called LSD (Lucy Sees Demons) follows the player in an explorative platforming environment with occasional puzzles and long expansive areas that the player has to explore and understand in search of key objects (I have a narrative planned for the reasons for the typical "Search and win" cookie cutter objective). The unique kick is that the music that plays is heavily tension building and randomly the tension is broken by a horror mode with appears once every minute to ten minutes and introduces enemies which the player can only run away from and which will kill the player on touch.
In Horror mode enemies fly down, run at you and come from all angles forcing the player to run away, proceed forward far to fast or die. The uneasyness created by not knowing when the horror mode will come (a bit like the curse from Castlevania Simons Quest) builds extreme tension in game and I have found so far, with only two days of playing around, is very effective in getting an emotional reaction from the player.
What do you guys think about using emotion as a driving force behind genres of games (As Blow explains in the video)
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Well, the trouble with games is that they aren't like movies. Blow is right that talking about a platformer and a RTS isn't like talking about a comedy movie and a drama movie. He's right to say the genre's are weird. However I don't think it is because the emotions are more important than the mechanics, but rather because talking about a platformer and a RTS is more like talking about a movie and a book than talking about two genre's of movies.
I mean, I like both books and movies, but I especially like sci-fi/fantasy books and movies with socially aware themes and death... just like I prefer sci-fi/fantasy platformers and RTS's with socially aware themes and death.
So I'd say that a platformer game really isn't a conventional "genre" in the first place, it's possibly closer to a "format" or "form". Just like a movie and a tv series are different formats.
I do think, like Jonathan Blow suggests, that as the medium matures, we will place greater emphasis on the emotional experience and the themes each game explores when distinguishing games.
But we'll still be talking about platformers, just serious sci-fi platformers vs humorous urban platformers or a platformer about magic and govermental conspiracies or a platformer about the rediscovery of love and the loss of identity between estranged lovers. Just like telling someone to read Perdido Street Station because it is a book is pretty dumb, so is telling someone to play Broforce because it is a platformer is also pretty dumb.
Though seriously, read Perdido Street Station.
I guess we've still got a long way to go. For the moment a hell of a lot of games mainly explore shooting baddies in the head.
//
I was looking at the Indiecade E3 showcase the other day: http://www.indiecade.com/2013/E3_Games_2013/
Most of these games defy comfortable fits into genre's or formats (just like an Indiecade selection should). And as one would expect the description for each game avoids useless terms like "platformer" or "RTS". Well... except two of them.
I don't think we can get around mentioning mechanics. In the case of FPS's, some consumers won't play FPS's because the control schemes produces a dexterity barrier, because of the device available to them is suitable, because they enjoy the gameplay mechanics of other sorts of games (even though they might like the theme/setting/presentation/flow etc of the FPS game in question), we can't leave out that information (even if a screenshot is usually suffice). "FPS" is a short hand for a set of mechanics that need to be communicated to consumers.
Even though many games have a lot of culturally significant content that is even more important for many consumers than their set of mechanics.
And anyway, no-one calls Portal or Dear Esther an "FPS". We're already well past that (although most stores don't have particularly articulate genre/categories for them).
http://store.steampowered.com/app/203810/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/
What might suit Jonathan Blow, or be seen by him at least as a naive move in the right direction, is if Steam were to have categories like "Comedy" or "Drama" or "Cathartic/Ambient" or "Ultraviolent" and users could search for games in those genre's irrespective of their mechanics.
Steam's current list of categories (with "Action" and "Casual") is pretty awful to use (I've found). And most other stores don't do much better.
LastFM sees who listens to what music, and then groups bands together algorithmically. I think there's a name for this, it's some kind of automatic-user-created-taste-network. This is a little bit like the Appstore's Users-who-bought-this-also-bought feature (and Steam has the same thing). But it is much much deeper in LastFM.
So if I look at "Mono" on LastFM I get to see a bunch of bands that share similar listeners, most of which I'll already know, but there'll be bands there that I don't know. I'd much rather find bands that I will like based on bands I've already enjoyed, than trying to find a band I like based on the type of instruments they use or the type of songs they write.
Though it doesn't solve the problem of talking about game "genres". Games will still need to be described in a short hand way by people. But it would make it less important to try fit a game into an existing category when describing it on online stores.
Though it's not fair to say that books and movies don't suffer from the same fracture in-genre - one person's favourite comedy is not another person's favourite comedy.
Grouping by mechanics work for those who enjoy a certain mechanic - fighting games, racing games, etc. That's pretty solid - fighting game enthusiasts will enjoy more fighting games, or at least those fighting games with similar rewards to what they enjoy from other fighting games they enjoy.
Which raises an interesting question: For example, I like Tekken but I don't like Street Fighter. There are fighting game enthusiasts that enjoy all fighting games, then there are people like me. Should there be a subcategorisation for such fighting games that I like? Or is it far to complex to divide like that? I can probably describe why I like Tekken, is that then enough to describe a set of games that cater to me?
Or should it be rather a more behaviourist approach where, like @BlackShipsFilltheSky says, you take the outcome and categorise by observation? As in - these people like this. Nevermind what genre it's supposed to be - just lump them together and run some complex behavioural equations then determine a "classification" by that?
Then... What do we call that? Who defines it? Amazon? XD Steam? XD
Tension, pacing and emotion are elements of dramatic narrative structure that have been addressed in various linear media formats. Their application to games offer many challenges (in the best, exciting use of the word). At issue is the seemingly fraught relationship between interactivity and narrative structure. Below are some readings on this that you may find interesting:
http://www.few.vu.nl/~eliens/create/local/story/sagasnetLindleyReprint.pdf
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11590361_14
http://inderscience.metapress.com/content/p7xk840k50211487/
I think because games are interactive it's a natural thing to talk about games in terms of their mechanics. It describes what you actually do while playing this game. That being said, I would love if we could expand the genres to include the emotional response you get while playing games instead of just using the mechanics.
@Tim_Harbour I'm glad the video is useful :) you can Youtube some of Blow's lectures, they are extremely interesting :)
@Hanli Thanks for the readings!! :) I will give them a good look, am really enjoying playing around with various different control structures and elements of how one can drive different emotions out of people.
@Rigormortis, This is so true, it would actually be amazing to get games categorised like "Thinking FPS" or "Action Thriller FPS" or "Competitive RTS" or "Dramatic RPG" or "Hilarious RPG"
THanks for everyones insightful responses :D
Wait... is that a problem? It is not like reviewers and friends are going to go away. And it would mean that niche games could better feed off each other's audiences... And that there wouldn't be quite as high drop off in profits between the 1st best selling game and the 11th best selling games (because most stores at the moment curate their lists via category (action, casual etc) and popularity (which I think is a worse alternative).
Apparently GamerDNA has a discovery engine based on tastes: http://www.gamerdna.com/ [Edit, Although after trying it the implementation turns out to be kind of shit]
But it isn't really an answer to your initial question. Just something that might help *some* niche games, and niche gamers.
Though what I'm discussing really isn't the most important part of the Jonathan Blow talk. I like what @Tim_Harbour and @Hanli had to say about it.
Here's some more about User-Curated Stores: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187374/Lets_talk_about_Steam_opening_up.php