Game design, apophenia and emotional triggers

[Sotha]

Here is an article on game design, which is an interesting read:

http://tynansylvester.com/2013/06/the-simulation-dream/

 

FMA's might benefit from the part dealing with apophenia.

 

Also, for improving storytelling, a list of emotional triggers is given here:

https://memetechnology.org/2013/06/13/emotional-triggers/

 

Reading these might give some food for thought.

[demagogue]

These are great.

 

I've thought a lot about these things too and ideas for game design coming out of them.

It offers a whole philosophy for GUI and meta game elements. Once you add any kind if metric of status or progress, people can gamify it to maximize the metric. That's why econ games, Elite et al, and 4X games, are the best simulationist games. But it lets you gamify almost anything you can imagine, not just money or territory, and that potential has hardly been tapped. I love the idea of slowly making sense of initially inscrutable meters as you interact with the world and learn its ways.

 

Royals, the indie game, was really a metagame figuring out how the world works. The actual game itself is easy once cracked.

And a game like LSD has so much potential if this idea were played out.

My 2 concepts explicitly dealing with this are my French Revolution Simulation, and my LSD like concepts about acting in dream or memory worlds where your actions change the world itself.

 

The guy doesn't mention Affordance Theory though, or the cognitive science of mental model building though, which would add a lot to his analysis, but it's ok.

[stumpy]

I've noticed that women get emotionally attached to any animals in games that they can associate as a pet in their real life, and if the option is there to give it a name they will, watching play through of women playing these types of games means they will talk to said animal as though it is real and not polygons or pixels on a screen.

[Anderson]

These are great.

 

I've thought a lot about these things too and ideas for game design coming out of them.

It offers a whole philosophy for GUI and meta game elements. Once you add any kind if metric of status or progress, people can gamify it to maximize the metric. That's why econ games, Elite et al, and 4X games, are the best simulationist games. But it lets you gamify almost anything you can imagine, not just money or territory, and that potential has hardly been tapped. I love the idea of slowly making sense of initially inscrutable meters as you interact with the world and learn its ways.

 

Doesn't the perspective of making everything a Skinner Box gimmick unsettle anybody?

 

I appreciate it when it's appropriate, but I detest it when I know it's used in bad faith to artificially keep people engaged to a game, knowing there is no more value and worth to invest in that product after a reasonable time.

Not implying that game addiction is real. It's more about self-control and et cetera. But a warning would be good. Gamification doesn't really bring anything good in my eyes. Interaction is what makes the media what it is. Not progress bars. It's much deeper than that at it's maximum potential.

 

Best arguments against that other extreme I touched are represented in the video series made again by the Extra Credits team:

[kingsal]

Good find Sotha! I'd heard of apophenia, but I've never really thought of it in the context of level design. It could be a useful tool for finding creative story channels, shifts in tone, puzzles, ect.

[demagogue]

@Anderson, it's good you brought that up since I would want to distinguish my thinking from just that problem.

 

In one of my concepts, the meters were really going to be proxies for the player-character's emotions, making the game about maximizing happiness and minimizing misery in a complex world, only to find out how closely linked they are and it's impossible to win. But it was supposed to make interaction possible, because there was a real impact by world interactions and the player was induced to make a real try at winning, not simply arbitrarily frobbing things.

 

But you point to the threat that any kind of mechanic is vulnerable to stat farming, which feels soulless and kills the meaning. I thought about that too, and my thinking was that really comes down to game design. A AAA game wants to keep a player busy, but an indie game can have the luxary of being able to alienate the player and force them to confront raw humanity in the way it's written and designed. Not being willing to do that is the reason game mechanics get gamified in the soulless, inhuman Skinner box way you're referencing, not the mechanics per se, I think.

 

So I think it's possible to avoid that problem by having those kinds of techniques, but they're things you usually only see in indie games (even then rare), but not commercial games sadly, since few investors want to sign up for alienating their core audience. Their loss, though. I just wish there were more games that took up this way of thinking. It's a common idea in cinema circles, but not among game devs.