the ball against the table surface. And last, when you slap the back of your teammate, congratulating him on his field goal, you’re participating in the subtle social dance that marks the constant human exercise of social status.
We know this about other media. It matters who sings a song because delivery is important. We treasure nice editions of books, rather than cheap ones, even though the semantic content is identical. Rock climbing a real rock face, versus a fake one attached to a wall, feels different.
In many media, the presentation factors are outside the hands of the initial creator of the content. But in other media, the creator has a say. Often, we have a specific person whose role it is to create the overall experience as opposed to the content itself. And rightfully, this person is given higher authority over the final output than the content creator alone. The director trumps the writer in a movie, and the conductor trumps the composer in a symphony.
There is a difference between designing the content and designing the end-user experience .
In most cases, we haven’t reached this realization in game design. Game design teams are not set up this way. Nonetheless, it’s an inevitable development in the medium. Too many other components have tremendous importance in our overall experience of games for their overall shape to rest in the hands of the designer of formal abstract systems alone.
Players see through the fiction to the underlying mechanics, but that does not mean the fiction is unimportant. Consider films, where the goal is typically for the many conventions, tricks, and mind-shapings that the camera performs to remain invisible and unperceived by the viewer. It’s rare that a film tries to call attention to the gymnastics of the camera, and when it does, it will likely be to make some specific point. There are many techniques used by the director and the cinematographer, such as framing the shot of a conversation from slightly over the shoulder of the interlocutor to create a sense of psychological proximity, that are used transparently, without the viewer noticing, because they are part of the vocabulary of cinema.
For better or worse, visual representation and metaphor are part of the vocabulary of games. When we describe a game, we almost never do so in terms of the formal abstract system alone—we describe it in terms of the overall experience.
The dressing is tremendously important. It’s very likely that chess would not have its long-term appeal if the pieces all represented different kinds of snot.
When we compare games to other art forms that rely on multiple disciplines for effect, we find that there are a lot of similarities. Take dance, for example. The “content creator” in dance is called the choreographer (it used to be called the “dancing master,” but modern dance disliked the old ballet terms and changed it). Choreography is a recognized discipline. For many centuries, it struggled, in fact, because there was no notation system for dance. That meant that much of the history of this art form is lost to us because there was simply no way to replicate a dance save by passing it on from master to student.
And yet, the choreographer is not the ultimate arbiter in a dance. There are far too many other variables. There’s a reason, for example, why the prima ballerina is such an important figure. The dancer makes the dance, just as the actor makes the lines. A poor delivery means that the experience is ruined—in fact, if the delivery is poor enough, the sense may be ruined, just as bad handwriting obscures the meaning of a word.
Swan Lake staged on the shore of a lake is a different experience from Swan Lake on a bare stage. There’s a recognized profession there too—the set designer. And there’s the lighting, the casting, the costuming, the performance of the music…. The choreographer may be the person who creates the dance, but in the end, there’s probably
We know this about other media. It matters who sings a song because delivery is important. We treasure nice editions of books, rather than cheap ones, even though the semantic content is identical. Rock climbing a real rock face, versus a fake one attached to a wall, feels different.
In many media, the presentation factors are outside the hands of the initial creator of the content. But in other media, the creator has a say. Often, we have a specific person whose role it is to create the overall experience as opposed to the content itself. And rightfully, this person is given higher authority over the final output than the content creator alone. The director trumps the writer in a movie, and the conductor trumps the composer in a symphony.
There is a difference between designing the content and designing the end-user experience .
In most cases, we haven’t reached this realization in game design. Game design teams are not set up this way. Nonetheless, it’s an inevitable development in the medium. Too many other components have tremendous importance in our overall experience of games for their overall shape to rest in the hands of the designer of formal abstract systems alone.
Players see through the fiction to the underlying mechanics, but that does not mean the fiction is unimportant. Consider films, where the goal is typically for the many conventions, tricks, and mind-shapings that the camera performs to remain invisible and unperceived by the viewer. It’s rare that a film tries to call attention to the gymnastics of the camera, and when it does, it will likely be to make some specific point. There are many techniques used by the director and the cinematographer, such as framing the shot of a conversation from slightly over the shoulder of the interlocutor to create a sense of psychological proximity, that are used transparently, without the viewer noticing, because they are part of the vocabulary of cinema.
For better or worse, visual representation and metaphor are part of the vocabulary of games. When we describe a game, we almost never do so in terms of the formal abstract system alone—we describe it in terms of the overall experience.
The dressing is tremendously important. It’s very likely that chess would not have its long-term appeal if the pieces all represented different kinds of snot.
When we compare games to other art forms that rely on multiple disciplines for effect, we find that there are a lot of similarities. Take dance, for example. The “content creator” in dance is called the choreographer (it used to be called the “dancing master,” but modern dance disliked the old ballet terms and changed it). Choreography is a recognized discipline. For many centuries, it struggled, in fact, because there was no notation system for dance. That meant that much of the history of this art form is lost to us because there was simply no way to replicate a dance save by passing it on from master to student.
And yet, the choreographer is not the ultimate arbiter in a dance. There are far too many other variables. There’s a reason, for example, why the prima ballerina is such an important figure. The dancer makes the dance, just as the actor makes the lines. A poor delivery means that the experience is ruined—in fact, if the delivery is poor enough, the sense may be ruined, just as bad handwriting obscures the meaning of a word.
Swan Lake staged on the shore of a lake is a different experience from Swan Lake on a bare stage. There’s a recognized profession there too—the set designer. And there’s the lighting, the casting, the costuming, the performance of the music…. The choreographer may be the person who creates the dance, but in the end, there’s probably
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