Complexity as an attraction and the influence of the experiences of other games

A few weeks ago, I met the artist Micheal Brennand-Wood, who’s artwork is characterised by having lots and lots of detail.

His idea behind the art is that having so much detail will draw people in, as they take their time to discover and appreciate the pieces’ intricacies. His art is designed so that people at first see the image as a whole, but the longer they look, they notice the smaller details.

I thought it would be a good idea to try this out in a game level, becuase if successful, it could be a unique and fresh way of drawing attention.

The level is made of T-junctions, like many of the experiments before it, with some turnings more detailed than others. Will players be drawn to this detail?

As well as talking to Brennand-Wood, I also sat down with Pete Bottomly, technical designer at White Paper Games. I talked to him about the design of their adventure puzzle game Ether, and a point that he brought up concerned the narrative in relation to the puzzles. Because the narrative is mature and serious, dealing with such subjects such as Alzheimers and relationships, the puzzles are naturalistic; they run on real-life logic. Having puzzles that were more abstract or comedic, such as other popular adventure like Monkey Island, wouldn’t fit with the game and do justice to the subjects.

As a bit of a side experiment, I placed this cartoony object near the end of the level. One of the things that I thought about earlier on in the semester was the idea of games being separate world with their own rules, and whether or not having stylistic inconsistencies, such as someone throwing a hand grenade in a sedate adventure game, would confuse players.

I’ve only had a few people play the level, one being Shawn Moony, an artist at Atomhawk Design, and the rest were people who have had very little experience is playing games.

All of the players seemed to react positively to the detailed sections and looked at them for some time. Not everyone saw the cartoony bottle, but when they did they stopped to stare at it for a while and asked me what it was doing there. Since they did that, it looks like it ended up breaking their immersion. It was however probably the most effective stimuli I’ve tested at drawing the player’s attention for a prolonged period of time. It’s something that could be used if there’s a case when a break in immersion is a price worth paying for grabbing someone’s attention.

Something interesting happened when Mooney went down this darkened corridor. He said that he got a little bit scared. I asked him what kinds of games he plays, thinking that his experience of other games might be influencing his emotional state, and he said that he played a lot of horror games, and said that he felt that other players would have a similar reaction to the corridor.

However, when the inexperienced players played that section, they didn’t feel any sort of emotion. I asked them why and they said that ‘it’s just a video game’.

Around this time I sent an email to Alexander Bruce, creator of the puzzle game AntiChamber, a game that has puzzles that go against game design conventions.

I asked him about the development of the game, and he had noticed that different players went into the game with different expectations of how it was going to play, as it used the popular first person perspective (FPS). He noted that people who played a lot of FPS games were worse than those who hadn’t played games before, as the FPS players were too used to the logic behind those games, and they needed more time to adjust to the logic used in Antichamber.

This experiment is a similar situation. Mooney was scared in the corridor because he’s associated darkness in games with things jumping out at him, because that’s the kind of thing that’s happened in the games that he likes playing. The inexperienced players don’t have that that experience (naturally), and so don’t react. This kind of thing has happened in previous experiences, such as the ‘Dark and light’ town, where some people didn’t go down the dark paths out of fear, and one player of the 2nd tunnels level from the previous semester stopped playing half way through because they thought that something was going to jump out at them.

From this, I would like to say that a players experience of games informs their behaviour and emotional reaction moreso then their real world experience. I would like to do more research into this next semester, if I have time.