Session 4
Session 4
INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS:_Interactivity & Choice in Games
Understanding Interactivity: Relevance, Surprise, and Initiative, or Are Computer Games More Interactive than Your Grandmother?_— Jay Lemke
The Perils of Choice: The Sometimes Dire Consequences of Freedom in Games_— Nathan McKenzie
Sasha Barab, Respondent_
Understanding Interactivity: Relevance, Surprise and Initiative
Jay Lemke, U of Michigan
Took up the question of interactivity from a game theorest
“the word Interactivity.. pretty much completely definesthe game medium”
Warren Spector [in Salen & Zimmerman]
The word interactive.. connotes various vague ideas… while denoting nothing Epsen Aarseth [Cybertext, 1997]
So how do we say what we mean when we say “interactivity”?
LOTR game video clip
What is interactive by it
What should we mean by “interactivity” in games?
How does it differe from interacting with a book film or hypertest?
How is it like interacting with another person ?
What are the implications for a theory of liearning with games?
Transmedia
- harry potter is a game, book, text, the book has cover art, and film art
- we can interact with it in all these forms
- How does interactivity play out differently in those forms?
Interacting with a book
- turn the lights on, turn the pages
- control page view sequence, not text
- annotate or mutilate pages
- page text invariant, persistent with normal use ( you can’t change the text on the pages)
- Our running dialogue with the text
- Text can surprise us, move us (it answers our questions that we came up with by following the path of the book)
- No response by text to our new thematic or affective expressions
LOTR game trailer, begins as movie, morphs into being the game
- montage effect within the technology of film and media
- move from film to screen capture of the game seamlessly
- This highlights in many ways the similarities between games and film
o Film theory as relevant or not for game theory?
o You can watch gameplay as if it were a film
o Unlike book, you cannot skip around, nor can you control the pacing or timing
ß So a book is less interactive than a game, but more interactive than a film, ostensibly
Films, webs, editors
- Invariant sequence and pacing with film
- Create page trajectories with web, pages invariant
- Editors let us later page content, film sequence, but we must specify new features at the level of form/ default – no surprise
- Interactive editors flag concerns, offer suggestions: beginning of Dialogue (Clippy brings interactivity. He brings information on the screen that is both relevant, and a surprise, we did not solicit it)
How are games interactive?
- Civ 3: you click on icons with an idea of what it’s going to do, but when, how and what the end result may be are not under your control
How are computer games interactive?
- Program code is a text
- Executing code queries user for input and branches on input
- Output depends in input, program code, data
- Output is meaningful, relebant for user
- User or program may initiate exchange
- Program outputs not predicated by user
Warcraft 3
- output is surprising, but not totally radically surprising, it stays within the boundaries of the game, and is dependant on your input
Civ 3
- you can have a dialogue with the advisors within the program,
o they are always their, always have something to say
ß sometimes they just appear and offer you advice, unbidden by you
- Is capable of having dialoge initiated both by you, the player, and it, the program
Interaction in conversaton
Functional linguistics & Semiotics( Halliday: cf. CA, Grice, others)
- Reciprocity in exchange structure (offers & demand, turn-taking, continuability)
o Q&A
o Problem & answer
o A back and forth between two or more, and a reciprocity in the rolls of questioner and answerer
- Thematic cohesion (continuity chains, pivoting Given./ New, relevance)
- Thematic novelty (Extension, elaboration, enhancement of thematic formations)
o Your interactive partner has do be doing something you couldn’t have totally anticipated
o There has to be an emergance where I say things that I didn’t plan on saying given what you say
Bakhtinian Dialogism
- Addressivity – always (as if) addressed
- Answerablity 0- expectes resonse, takes responsibility
- Re-accentuation – appropriation of the Other’s discourse
- Ideological aspect – ideational –thematic point of view
- Axiological aspect – moral –evaluative stance
Dialogic Interactivity
- Role reciprocity – exchanging roles between intitiating and respoinding, between demands and offers, extensible chains
- Relevant responsivelness – of semiotic output to user input and context
Interacting with
- Environments
- Viewpoints, spaces
- Objects
- Actors
- Inside the sims
o Commands are issued, or perhaps a suggestion
ß Sims don’t always follow them
ß Char goes through a sequence of recognizeable sceens
• You know more or less what they are going to do , but how, and when they go about doing it can have an element of surprise
Cdynamic of coherence and surprise, finding balance
- coherence and cohesion
o coherence produced by continuity, or predictability
Action as Dialogue (The Sims)
- sims have their own needs, and they sometimes give those needs precedence to your wants
- kissing in the sims, one person can reject your characters
Dimensions of coherence and surprpise
- Thematic
- Attitudinal
- Organizational
Interactivity and Timescales
- Surprise is only possible against a background of expectations
- Expectations must be set, or can be changed only on longer timescales
Interactivity and Learning
- Heterochrony and cumulation
- Learning is also a case of continuity and novelty across settings and timescales
- Transfer re-conceptualized
- Learning should be defined retrospectively
- Continuity needed between school and life
- Many reasons for education to stop ignoring games and popular culture
The Perils of Choice: The Sometimes Dire Consequences of Freedom in Games_— Nathan McKenzie
A happy tale of Animal Crossing, or, how a non-gamer got hooked on the game
He shows it to his significant other, and she’s enjoying it
He starts thinking that he should play it too…. Enter…
A sad tale of animal crossing… or, Nathan plays the game
You automatically buy a bigger house when you pay off your old one
Fish are worth the most.. he wasn’t to pay it off. Fishing gets you good money, but it’s totally booring. So he tries to go do the other activites, but he couldn’t reconcile doing those super low paying activies when he knew he could fish
It got boring and aggravating, so he quit
What does it mean to give players a choice, and what is the impact?
What’s interesting about games to Nathan?
- is that they manufacture consent – people hoose to do the tuff they do in games
- except for when they doing (ala, his experience with animal crossing)
Games allow choice, but what exactlty is meant by that?
- the specific moves on a controller or actions in the world a player gets to do?
- The higher level interactions between player abilities and the world constraints ans players attempt to achieve the goals they have set for themselves?
When good choices go bad…
- Designers don’t make these mistakes intentionally, and their not really mistakes
o Soldier of fortune weapon selection
ß You can choose from any weapons in the game before you go on your mission.
ß In practice, some of the weapons were odd, others were generic. People would always default with the obvious
ß They were making choices about things they don’t know enough to make educated choices about
- It’s all about emergence…
Choices with too far-reaching consequences
- caused by
o non-reversible choices with significant impact
- Can result in
o Dimished play variety
- Examples
o Everquest: character classes
o Deus Ex: Skills (he felt dirty for dissing this, “ like saying mother Theresa smells bad”)
Uninformed Choices
- caused by
o dirth of feedback
o being forced to choose too early
- Can result in
o Feeling of being cheated
o Conservative player behavior
- Examples
o Diablo 2
o Soldier fo Fortune
o College choice
Unballanced Choices
- Caused by
o Some choices being clearlyetter than others
o Lack of feedback or some choices more complicated than others
- Can result in:
o Wasted game assets
o Boring min/ max playing
- Examples
o Double dragon
o Almost all games ever
Exraneous Choices
- caused by
o toomany things for the player to keep track of, like inventories
o Marketing plys: now with 50 new moves (but they are all the same..)
- Can result in
o Player confusinon
o Noise. Distraction from what you really want to be doing in the game
But choices are vital to games!
- The key is modulation the coces given to players and achieven an optimal amount of choices
Magic, The Gathering
- players build decks for varied play
- No ONE CARD is best- it depends on the position of the game
- Randomness demands new strategies
- This means that
o Encourages diviersification
Super Mario brothers (3 and sm world)
- players choose mid-level to be one of several different types of Mario, each with discrete properties
- different marios for different obstackles
- this means the game
o clusters and streamlines choices for players
o like pizza package choices
HALO
- Players carry two weapons, but get frequent chances to change
- This means the game:
o Allows players to easily control weapons during battle, avoiding inventory problems
o Gives players choices, but not with far- reaching consequences
o Makes retrying situations interesting
Frogger
- Game adds time dependant treats randomly to shift different goal incentives
- This means the game:
o Makes optimal play shift with fluctuations of the environment
Tetris
- Game chooses blocks, player place them
o You do NOT choose what block, but you choose where to put them
- This means the game
o Generates new and potentially tricky situations for the player
o Diversity in the playfield no in the controls
Stree fighter 3
- Players who anticipate their foe’s attack can parry, leaving their opponent vulnerable
- This means the gam::
o Penalizes repetitive behavior
Lessions from good game design of choices
- descrete properties help players manage choices and interperet game feedback
o Mario
o Halo
- Time saving resources make choices compelling
o Frogger
o Robotron
- Playfield differences
- Properly used randomness diversifies strategies
- Self balancing systems can be more robust and interesting
Ideally choices should
- be encouraging diversification of actions
- be balanced within the game