Tapping Empathy in Video Game Design

This is a collection of notes/thoughts on Reality Check: Game Design and Empathy by Mark Venturelli, a writer and game designer on Gamasutra. Feel free to study alongside me as I try to figure out game design one article at a time.

Notes/Quotes

If you don’t know how people work, you can’t make stuff for people to interact with.
The most talented and technical designer that lacks empathy will make something that only he/she can enjoy
Satisfaction is fulfillment of expectation; following through on promises
Everything we do in our game can be viewed as either expectation-setting or expectation-fulfillment.
I don’t think we’re in the business of giving people what they want. We’re f***ing artists. What we really want is to cross that chasm. To build something truly awe-inspiring. We must take our understanding of what people want, and then surprise them.
Entertainment is satisfaction and surprise
Real greatness comes from understanding people better than they do themselves.

This concept of empathy (and psychology, for that matter), is one that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I think too often in video games we work to create cool stories but not timeless ones. We seek to create interesting characters but not ones that have real life to them: none to whom people can really relate. We create grand narratives without thinking about the player's narrative--where he/she has been and what things he/she has encountered--and so we miss out on some of the greatest opportunities to access the minds and hearts of our players. I think any artist has to come to understand humanity (and for that matter, joy and sorrow) in some small but significant way before he can really make anything that will resound with people on a deep level, and until we approach that level of understanding and empathy, we are just churning out simulations. We've gone around understanding human psychology and instead relied on intense music or stunning graphics to invite serenity or terror or awe. We've neglected to study character and instead have created simulacra--emulations of a breed of mankind that never existed in the first place. I think if we are to ever get into the hearts of our players, we have to first show them that we've already been there, in thought, in comparison, in memory. We have to let them know, through the game, that we're human, too, that we've suffered the same doubts and discouragement, felt the same joys, as they have. We have to learn to truly each other--game designer and player--despite the processors, monitors, and controls that stand between our interaction. I see game design as as much an art form as writing or painting, and we have to get the medium out of the way before we'll really be able to talk to players in a meaningful way.

Pulp Free: "Juicy" Video Game Design

James Paul Gee has some interesting things
to say about identity, empathy, and character
design in Ch. 3 of What Video Games Have
to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
I will probably do a post on it this week.

Three FAQ’s for Juicy Game Design

Josh Whitkin, Murdoch University

- Juicy design is about released energy from a design in a way that creates surprise, delight
- Juiciness is not logical but emotional.
- Appeals to subconscious feelings of fairness and reward/punishment. It encourages certain behavior endogenously.
- Creates an expectation from tiny player actions. You know, for example, that collecting a coin is a positive action because it rewards you with sound, an animation, or a score of some sort.
- Characters can serve in mirroring players’ internal, emotional states as a way to amplify that emotion.
- Minimal character emotion is, in a way, an intentional means of focusing the player specifically on gameplay. “[M]aking … character[s] more “juicy” could easily hurt the player’s overall satisfaction,” especially where the mirrored emotions (fiero at a headshot, for example) might be incongruous with the setting, theme, or psychological setting of the game.


This last point is one with which I take contest. While there is a certain value in focusing the player’s attention, and while excessive emotional response from characters who are largely non-empathetic would certainly be jarring, to suggest that our effort to humanize video game characters is somehow harmful is indeed folly. The fact that video game designers have not yet found a way of making empathetic or emotional characters does not in any way suggest that it cannot be done, and in fact, creating realistic characters will only help to immerse players more fully within compelling stories, settings, and emotional climates. Our aspirations, however, shouldn't be centered on creating “juicy” characters but rather on bringing to life living characters—ones possessed of the same fears, doubts, and aspirations as we have—or even better, ones who drive us to seek after higher ideals and more meaningful modes of connection with others. Video games are a powerful medium, but until we allow them to aspire to greater heights of emotional expression, they will be unable to reach their full potential as creative tools. See Jenova Chen's comments here or the video link here for further thoughts on limited emotional ranges within video games.

Building the Wonder, One Interaction at a Time

"Theories Behind Journey" - Jenova Chen, creator of Journey

- Build games around desired emotional experience and allow game play to arise from that.
- Visceral/social feedback as an incentive for action within a game. Tailor game play to deincentivize anything that will detract from the emotional experience that your are seeking to recreate.
- Three act system: build up, backward turn/twist, huge rise in emotional intensity
- Hero's journey is about transformation (stories are about combinations of small transformations, both for the characters and the reader)
- Emotional arc - craft setting based on experience that you want to create.
- "People hated the game" - huge iterations based on playtesting
- "By the end, when we shipped Journey, we actually went bankrupt." - Be ready to sacrifice.

Chen and his colleagues used an emotional arc to conceptualize and plot out
 Journey on both a metaphorical and a physical sense. The story, aesthetic, and
landscape were all crafted to convey specific emotional interactions and states.

I think the most interesting notion Chen put forward was that game mechanics don't necessarily have to take precedence over theme or story. So often, we look at games from a single perspective, insisting that core mechanics must come first and theme should arise from game play. Chen, in contrast, suggests that game play ought to arise from the core emotional experience and should be tailored specifically to reinforce that idea or feeling. It was neat to see that even in terms of physical landscape, Chen had used the emotional arc as the foundation for the entire game. This notion is, I think, going to be very important for me, especially in light of my current aspirations with regard to narrative. In any case, this will be really helpful in terms of my writing and game design.