Be the ball…

BY: JEFF MURRAY  |  General Rambling, Gaming

As I was flying around the Need For Speed:Carbon universe getting shouted at by my ‘wingman’, I started to notice that something very odd was going on in terms of my relationship with the game. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t playing the driver. There is no driver. Who am I? What am I? Am I … the car?

My steering wheel gives more information about the game world than any visual cue could ever do, through its force feedback. With my hands on the wheel I can feel when I’m losing traction, when I hit a jump or nudge against another driver - I can actually feel the car. Note: The car, not the driver.

On launch day, my son and I got up as early as reasonably possible and headed out to the toy store to pick up our reserved copy of MarioKart Wii. Getting back to the house (and hooking everything up) we hit the tracks. Playing the game, it felt like there was something missing. The steering wheel helped, but I wasn’t jumping up and down - I was just turning a small, plastic wheel left or right. In fact, the only ‘physical’ part of the game is the useless but intensely fun tricks you can perform during a jump by shaking the controller at the right time. When you don’t hit it at the right time, it does kind of feel as though you are hitting the top of a ketchup bottle when the lid is still on. From the much-anticipated Wii wheel, I expected more.

I love the game, but I don’t connect physically on the same kind of level that I connect with WiiSports Boxing or Bowling. MarioKart is great as an ‘old school’ arcade kart racer game, but the shift to the physical world isn’t there yet. It makes the steering wheel a gimmick.

I’ve been dealing a lot with different game control methods recently and I’m beginning to notice that mainstream interaction with computer games is changing quite significantly as a result. Since new gyroscopic control systems are in development and other alternative control systems are in design, this is almost certainly going to require further exploration. Designing games to use new control methods effectively means more than finding ‘fun’ ways to wave our arms around. There is an important paradigm shift that needs to be taken into account in that the control method literally sets the whole context for the experience. The control system affects not only how we play the game, it also affects our attachment and social reference to its content. Stick with me on this, ok?

When you’re in your living room swinging your arms like a fool and listening to the giggles coming from your significant other as you sweat it out in WiiPlay Boxing, ask yourself if you are actually engaged with the game itself or with the control system. I’d suggest that your actions become the game and that the tv screen only serves to give you feedback as to whether or not you’re making the right moves. So where is your mind? Are you in the game, or in the real world?

Game developers concentrate a great deal of effort into making you feel like part of the action and drawing you in to the game. Surrounding Dolby sound effects are all around you, bullets whistling past your ears. The vignette closes in your focus to see what is going to happen next .. what is around the next corner? The music is building up as you approach - the lights are out and the volume is set to ‘window shaking’.

Whats interesting to me is that shift in focus and how it could progress from here. I’ve played a first person shooter on the PS3 with the Sixaxis controller and it was a nice gimmick, but without that physical seperation from the console I’m still trying to immerse myself and the controller actually seemed to restrict that. The marriage of physical and game world just isn’t there.

One way to deal with this shift is to consider exactly what type of game we are trying to compose and consider which direction this type of game should go. Can you even bring this into the physical world without a VR headset and a giant hamster-wheel? Are there opportunities to enhance this game by moving the focus away from the game world? 

Through prototyping and focus testing it is certainly possible to design control methods that support the game experience; however to push the boundaries of the technology most homes already have, we need to consider more than just a control system that feels like ‘fun’. It requires a radical re-thinking of the core game design to utilize alternative control methods, one that may even be seen as counter-intuitive to traditional game design theory.

From here, I guess it’s another one for my ‘list of in-depth studies I’d love to write but will probably never get around to’. Google didn’t return anything on this subject, so if you happen to know of any existing studies on this subject either psychological, metaphysical or otherwise, please do let me know.