Morphogenesis

The “pro­fes­sional defor­mity” of a game devel­oper is to try to read game design prin­ci­ples into every­thing: a few weeks ago at a hockey game I spent more time look­ing at the pre­sen­ta­tion of the game than the play itself (I was try­ing to decide if impact sen­sors in the boards could trig­ger flashes in the arena lights to help “sell” some of the harder hits…).  That same week I was read­ing about some of the sci­en­tific basis for art and aes­thet­ics, both online and in Jonah Lehrer’s “Proust Was a Neu­ro­sci­en­tist”, and try­ing to apply that back to games.

There’s an over­whelm­ing amount of mate­r­ial to try to syn­the­size into any real the­ory, so I’m just going to summarize/link to some of it and spec­u­late wildly away!

Char­ac­ter Design

The most rec­og­niz­able video game char­ac­ters are always styl­ized and exag­ger­ated to some degree.  Lara Croft is often used as an exam­ple for what V.S. Ramachan­dran calls the “peak shift” effect or “ultra-normal stim­uli”.  She’s pro­duced by extrap­o­lat­ing from nor­mal to beau­ti­ful and then even fur­ther into a car­i­ca­tur­iza­tion space.  Mar­cus Fenix and Kratos are sim­i­lar hyper-masculine extrapolations.

Dis­ney has known this all along and cod­i­fied it into their 12 prin­ci­ples of ani­ma­tion.  Their styl­ized char­ac­ters not only stay clear of the uncanny val­ley but they also con­vey emo­tion and life bet­ter than a strictly real­is­tic char­ac­ter can: “L’exactitude, ce n’est pas la vérité”.

Game Con­trols

Watch­ing some­body per­form an action seems to trig­ger the same motor parts of our brain that per­form­ing it our­selves does.  These “Mir­ror neu­rons” seem to be tied to learn­ing, empa­thy and lan­guage.  Are they also related to our abil­ity to feel embod­ied in a 3rd per­son avatar?  These neu­rons are found in the parts of the brain asso­ci­ated with sen­sory guid­ance, nav­i­ga­tion and con­trol, so poten­tially the part of our brain that allows us to enjoy watch­ing dancers also allows us to enjoy watch­ing an avatar on a screen.  Is it a fluke of the brains plas­tic­ity that allows us to trick our brains into think­ing we are embod­ied this way?  If so, what does that tell us about con­trol scheme design?

Con­trol schemes seem to be more sat­is­fy­ing when the player’s con­troller actions reflect the desired char­ac­ter action.  Shoot­ing actions should nor­mally be on the trig­gers to reflect the action of fir­ing a gun, which isn’t a big sur­prise.  It’s the control-stick move­ments in games that are more inter­est­ing: the QTE events in God of War, the moves and com­bos in Devil May Cry and Street Fighter.  Twirling the sticks, shak­ing the sticks or push­ing them direc­tion­ally usu­ally reflects your desired action, and I think that’s part of what makes them mem­o­rable and satisfying.

Aside: I went back to Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop” hop­ing for a ref­er­ence to how these neu­rons might relate to con­scious­ness based on his love for mir­rors and recur­sion, but I couldn’t find any­thing.  I sus­pect that the ques­tion of how we invest a sense of self into an avatar’s body is hugely depen­dent on the mys­tery of how we’re con­scious of our own bodies.

Antic­i­pa­tion

Mir­ror neu­rons also seem to be involved in the antic­i­pa­tion of other people’s actions and under­stand­ing actions.  Leonard Meyer believed that antic­i­pa­tion and expec­ta­tion was key to appre­ci­at­ing music, it’s also another one of the 12 prin­ci­ples of ani­ma­tion.  In par­tic­u­lar, both Meyer and the Nine Old Men at Dis­ney com­ment on the shock that comes if the antic­i­pated result doesn’t happen.

Eric Williams talks about the impor­tance of antic­i­pa­tion in com­bat ani­ma­tion tim­ing: he calls it out as one of the most impor­tant parts of the move and says that it “sticks in your brain”.  Antic­i­pa­tion is also the rea­son that hit pauses work: Slow downs give you more time to see an action in progress and to antic­i­pate the con­se­quences.  I’m won­der­ing though if hit pauses are also so effec­tive in “sell­ing” a hit because of the dis­rup­tion in time and speed– we have nat­ural expec­ta­tions about the flow of time and a sud­den pause is some­what jar­ring.  They’re the equiv­a­lent of a dis­cor­dant note and the anx­i­ety they induce is asso­ci­ated with the on-screen violence.