Ç.
@aksvodic
Just curious.
Müzisyen | Product Specialist
Galatasaray Lisesi | Koç Üniversitesi
İstanbul
380 okur puanıMayıs 2021 tarihinde katıldı
It is not such a simple thing to know your feelings. It is not enough for a designer to simply have a general sense about whether they like something or not. You must be able to clearly state what you like, and what you don't like and why.
Reklam
On one side of the battle were the behaviorists who focused only on measurable behavior, taking a "black box" approach to the study of the mind. Their primary tool was objective, controlled experimentation. On the other side were the phenomenologists who study what game designers care about most-the nature of human experience and "the feeling of what happens." Their primary tool was introspection-the act of
examining your experiences as they happen.
Unfortunately for us, the behaviorists won out, and for very good reasons. The behavioristic focus on objective, repeatable experiments makes for very good science. One behaviorist can do an experiment, publish a paper about it, and other behaviorists can repeat the experiment under the same conditions, almost certainly getting the same results. The phenomenological approach, on the other hand, is necessarily subjective. Experiences themselves cannot be directly measured—only described and described imperfectly. When an experiment takes place in your mind, how can you possibly be sure the experimental conditions are controlled?
As fascinating and useful as it might be to study our own internal thoughts and feelings, it makes for shaky science. As a result, for as much progress that has been made by modern psychology, it generally feels obligated to avoid the thing we care about the most—the nature of human experience.
You might well ask what is so special about games, compared to other types of experiences, that require us to get into all of this touchy-feely experience stuff. And really, on one level, there is nothing special about games in this regard. Designers of all types of entertainment-books, movies, plays, music, rides, everything-have to cope with the same issue: How can you create something that will generate a certain experience when a person interacts with it?
But the split between artifact and experience is much more obvious for game design than it is for other types of entertainment, for a not-so-obvious reason. Game designers have to cope with much more interaction than the designers of more linear experiences. The author of a book or screenplay is designing a linear experi-ence. There is a fairly direct mapping between what they create and what the reader or viewer experiences. Game designers don't have it so easy. We give the player a great deal of control over the pacing and sequence of events in the experience. We even throw in random events! This makes the distinction between artifact and experience much more obvious than it is for linear entertainment. At the same time, though, it makes it much harder to be certain just what experience is really going to arise in the mind of the player.
So, why do we do it? What is so special about game experiences that we would give up the luxuries of control that linear entertainers enjoy? Are we simply masoch-ists? Do we just do it for the challenge? No. As with everything else game designers do, we do it for the experience it creates. There are certain feelings: feelings of choice, feelings of freedom, feelings of responsibility, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of friendship, and many others, which only game-based
The game is not the experience but an enabler
If we could, through some high-tech magic, create experiences for people directly, with no underlying media—no game boards, no computers, no screens— we would do it. In a sense, this is the dream of "artificial reality"-to be able to create experiences that are in no way limited by the constraints of the medium that delivers the experiences. It is a beautiful dream, but only a dream. We cannot create experiences directly.
Reklam