Why deeper character interaction will improve the aesthetic qualities of video-games
Emotional Character-Interaction for Practical Games Design
Paper by Marius Holstad
Computer Games Design
School of Computing, Teesside University
Abstract
Video-games that touch the heart in life changing experiences. The promise of creating life inside a video-game. Living characters that can be your friend or foe. These are dreams that may some day become a reality. Achieving this requires some form of character interaction — emotional interaction that can entertain us and stimulate reflection. This paper focuses on the first steps toward making this a reality; namely improving character interaction.
Introduction
The term video-game usually imply an interactive experience with explicit goals and clearly defined winning conditions, but in recent times there have been games that try to challenge this assumption. This is starting to cause a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in assumptions, about what video-games can be.
Character interaction is the process of performing an action, have a character register and think about it and then react to it in some way. It is the way a player and a character communicate. Creating interesting characters that the player can meaningfully interact with can evoke strong emotions, perhaps emotions that games have been unable to express before. This would allow video-games to convey new lessons and experiences.
This paper addresses the reasons why it is important to improve and innovate character interaction in video-games, and explains why it will improve the aesthetic qualities of video-games. It then moves on to discuss specific problems that character interaction creates for human-computer interfaces, and how that problem limits the emotional impact of an interaction. It lastly takes a look at a game design premise that can be used when designing a game that revolves around character interaction.
Why improve character interaction?
To explain the importance of character interaction in video-games, it is important to have an understanding of art in human culture and the aesthetic qualities of video-games.
Art
In the book On the origin of Stories (Boyd, B. 2009), in chapter six; Art as Cognitive Play, art is explained by its evolutionary benefits to the humankind. Boyd view art as a kind of cognitive play. Play, in biological terms, requires a great deal of energy and may cause physical injury. Because of this and the pure enjoyment of play, most researchers agree that play must serve an important evolutionary function. But this is not enough evidence to suggest that it is a product of evolution. It would have to be explained by its direct evolutionary benefits. The reasoning presented by Boyd is; that evolution has given us the ability to fine-tune our behaviour based upon our experiences, and play is an opportunity to gain valuable experiences without potentially fatal risks. The function of play is to hone skills in a safe environment, and thus art hones our cognitive skills — it sharpens our minds (Boyd, B. 2009, p.91–96).
Cognitive skills mostly involve pattern recognition and analysis. We are able to recognise patterns through our senses. Those patterns can range from tangible; like the weight of a rock, to volatile; like human moods and intentions. Humans need to understand complex patterns of information to have realistic predictions about the world we live in. Creating art and appreciating its beauty helps us understand the complexities of society and social interactions. As Boyd describes:
“A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more frequent and intense our response, the more powerful the neural consequences. Art’s appeal to our preferences for pattern ensures that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways.” (Boyd, B. 2009, p.15)
Being able to recognise behaviour and personality is invaluable when living in a society, which is made possible because of our ability to cooperate (Boyd, B. 2009, p.28). From this point of view, art has evolved because of our social behaviour.
Video-games
The value of explicitly defining art by its evolutionary benefits lay not in the process of creating better art, but in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of video-games; where play itself becomes art and beauty is formed by the process of understanding patterned information. When playing or interacting with a video-game, we can become conscious about our own actions and the consequences of our decisions. It becomes an opportunity for us to observe ourself and the way we act and react. Video-games highlight patterns in our behaviour that we initially may have had no awareness of — it teaches us a lesson.
Appreciating video-games for their interactive qualities and what that interactivity feels like is not an unheard of paradigm in the game industry. NYU Game Centre director, Frank Lantz, expressed a similar paradigm when stating in a talk that games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing (instrumental reason) (Lantz, F. 2014). In the talk that was given at the Game Developers Conference, it was suggested that video-games act as an initiator for self-reflection. They make thought visible to itself, and for that reason we are able to appreciate the process of learning and playing with a system of patterns.
Character interaction
Keeping in mind the perspective that video-games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing, and that play can form beautiful patterns — bring us to the possibilities that greater character interactions can add to video-games as an aesthetic form; it presents an opportunity to create social patterns that become apparent during gameplay. Patterned social information is created by the behaviour of characters, which when interacted with provide valuable experiences that can teach us lessons about life. Character interactions that reveal social patterns give an artist the possibility to express feelings about human relations and to present it as a first-hand experience to the player. Social information is very important for humans, and we have developed a way of teaching each other about events with the telling of stories and fiction. The importance of fiction was described by Boyd quite superbly:
“As children and adults we happily succumb to the training in social cognition that pretend play and fiction reliably yield. Children have to hone their capacity to direct and shift attention. The high intensity of pretend play and fiction and their rapid switches of place, time, and perspective must make social cognition, like any other well-learned and much-practiced skill, faster, more efficient, and more accurate, and speed up the capacity to guide and redirect social attention.” (Boyd, B. 2009, p.191)
While the function of stories is to inform about events, challenges, opportunities and old solutions so that other’s don’t have to make the same mistakes, fiction developed as training for understanding social information. Because of our social nature, informing about the behaviour of other people became very important to successfully work as a group (Boyd, B. 2009, p.129). Video-games can expand upon our traditional way of telling stories and let social patterns reveal themselves with interaction. Creating characters to interact with becomes a way of immortalising social information and lessons.
How to improve character interaction
Interfaces
It has become undeniable that adding deeper and improved character interaction to video-games can benefit its aesthetic qualities. However, a major problem exists with how the player usually interfaces with the game-world, often limiting the player’s expressive power. The problems of designing appropriate interfaces have been recognised and discussed by Nicolas Szilas in his paper Stepping into the Interactive Drama (2004). The paper examines a difficulty in interface design called “the choice problem”. In essence, this problem consists of balancing the number of actions the player is able to undertake and the act of choosing among a large number of actions. If the player is presented with too many actions to perform, the problem becomes how the actions are going to be mapped to an input device. If the player has too few actions to perform, it may limit the player’s ability to take meaningful actions.
The choice problem is especially evident when designing character interactions. That is because it also presents another problem: how to represent real-life actions with a human-computer interface. The main difficulty with this problem is that when translating an action into a representation the computer can understand, it often looses its real-world feeling.
In an interview with a game designer named Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro; SWERY talked about the speech he gave at the Game Developers Conference in 2014 and how he has been trying to solve “the translation problem” with his latest project (Wawro, A. 2014). His game D4 (Access Games. 2014) uses the Kinect motion controller (Microsoft. 2010) and the psychological concept of mirroring to create empathy among players. Empathy, the sensing of another’s emotions, requires some degree of mental synchronisation and seems to be just as physiological as it is mental (Goleman, D. 2006). The idea of mirroring is that by imitating what the character on screen is doing, mirror neurones would be activated and make the player feel the emotions the character is feeling. To get the most emotional impact, SWERY discovered that a more symbolic representation of actions would yield the best results. If the motions were too realistic, players would end up frustrated when the motion sensor did not recognise their gestures.
How to perform an action becomes essential when creating emotional character interaction, but perhaps even more important is what the player is allowed to perform.
Game design
The theoretical concept of “mental modules” presented by Chris Crawford on his blog, provides an interesting perspective on video-games according to what problems the human brain is trying to solve. (Crawford, C. 2013) In essence, problem solving can be viewed as the brain trying to understand patterns. Therefore, different patterned information challenges the brain to use different mental modules, or ways of reasoning, to get an understanding of the pattern. I would suggest that a weak link may exist between Crawford’s theoretical concept and the categories of intelligence that was created by Karl Albrecht based on the work of Professor Gardner (Albrecht, K. 2006). The categories (A.S.P.E.A.K.) consists of: abstract intelligence, social intelligence, practical intelligence, emotional intelligence, aesthetic intelligence and kinetic intelligence. Solving a problem, and getting an understanding of the pattern, may require more than one of these categories of intelligence.
The scientific validity of the concept in question is not as essential as what it reveals about contemporary video-games. If the reason for games and play is to hone our skills in a safe environment, it is worth taking a look at what categories of intelligence are predominantly in use during gameplay. The following is a description of the theoretical relation between challenges in video-games and the categories of intelligence: Abstract intelligence mainly consists of understanding abstract concepts and mathematical operations and is for example represented by role-playing games where player-stats and hit points calculations are involved. Practical intelligence can be used when finding the right combination to solve a puzzle game. In the game of poker, emotional intelligence is used to manage reactions and consciously reveal false information with the poker face. Aesthetic intelligence relates to visual and spatial relationships, and may be used during navigation through an environment. When it comes to kinetic intelligence, it is best utilised in tasks that involve body movement or precision aiming.
Social intelligence, the ability to interact successfully with others in various contexts, is a category of intelligence that very few games challenge the player in, especially in video-games. There has been attempts by Crawford at creating games that test the player’s social intelligence with Gossip (Atari, 1983) and Trust & Betrayal (Crawford, C. 1987), but there are also recent efforts in the mainstream games market with Doki-Doki Universe (HumaNature Studios. 2013) and Journey (Thatgamecompany. 2012) as notable examples.
Doki-Doki Universe is a game about a robot that has to learn how to be human, so he is brought to different planets and has to solve different relationship problems that the inhabitants have. However, a major problem with this game is that the solution to relationship problems are often found using practical intelligence by combining the right item with the right character, meaning the player rarely truly consider the feelings of the characters in the game. There is very little, perhaps no real social intelligence required by the player to know how to solve these relationship problems. In this context, character interactions are not given any true meaning, and because of that there is no social pattern or lesson to be learned through the interaction.
Deciding what actions the player should be able to perform in relation to the story, the patterned social information being told, is no trivial task. Journey is perhaps one of the most successful examples where the actions the player perform matches the actions in the story. In this game the player journeys, but the twist is that the player may meet upon a stranger controlled by another player. The limited palette of actions the player can perform (walk, jump, sing), forces players to remain strangers while on the journey. Because of the limited action palette, the player has to use social intelligence to try to understand the intentions and meaning of the other player’s sounds and movements.
Conclusion
As described in this paper; creating emotional character interaction depends largely on the presentation of patterned social information in game-systems and how an action is performed by the player.
There exists an opportunity to create games that revolve around recognising moods, intentions and behaviour. Players will hone their cognitive skills by using our social intelligence to understand social situations and solve relationship problems. Basing a game-system upon social challenges may make players consciously think about the actions that is performed, which will increase its emotional impact. The more synchronised the player is with what is happening in the game, the more emotional the experience will be.
Emotional interaction is dependent on and limited to the palette of actions available to the player. An interaction in itself can evoke emotions if performed in the right context. Deciding what actions that will be available to the player is, in the end, an artistic choice and depends on each individual project. But that is not to say that there is no room for generalisations, because there might be general actions related to character interaction that could be devised to serve as a starting point for creating games based on social reasoning. This is an area worth of further study.
The presentation of actions and patterned information has been shown to be significant when loading interaction with emotion. Two problems with human-computer interfaces has been highlighted:
Firstly, the choice problem, which is about balancing the number of actions with the ability to intuitively link them to the given input device. This also raises a question about what actions are really necessary to be represented for revealing the patterned social information in stories.
Secondly, the translation problem, which relates to representing an action in an interface while still keeping its real-world emotional impact. Some actions are easier to translate than others. For instance, detailed actions like shy body-language gestures are hard to translate properly.
New input devices can create new opportunities for intuitive interfaces, but new techniques could also provide a solution to these problems. Both problems would benefit further investigation.
When designing a game based upon social intelligence; it becomes possible to tie interactions to story and character development and with meaningful character interactions; characters can change over time, revealing beautiful patterns in social behaviour and evoking strong emotions.
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