What we're all here for

So you've met Psyber and his hatred of Dead Space: Extraction. Although honestly from the way he was talking, I thought his post was going to be full of a lot more loathing and spite.

Anyways, I created this blog for the specific discussion of some pretty theoretical things about game design. One of the reasons I invited Psyber to guest speak was to get some people talking about the practical parts of game design, more may follow in his wake.

But really, the theory is why I'm here. Playing great games is good too, but I have a desire to dissect games as much as play them. So I'm going to start off with the first of what I'm probably going to come back to a lot. I think about the interactions between player and game, a lot.

I like to call this, the feedback loop.

When a player sits down with any game they're immediately presented with an array of choices to make. Start game, load game, etc. Obvious menu choices are familiar to us all. The choices however don't stop there.

Every moment a player is playing a game, they're making choices, these choices are based on the stimulus provided by the game. The most obvious of these stimuli is the graphical one. Put a user in front of a screen and put some moving pictures on it and more often then not, they will get whats going on.

The player-to-game part of the loop almost always has to go through something all gamers know: The controller. The controller though, is almost always extraordinarily limited in the scope of information ti carries back to the game, but these are the two main components of the main feed back loop. Video game-to-player and controller player-to-game.

This is just sort the strained cabbage boiled down to nothing explanation to get started. You can carry this almost as far as you want to go.

Now, when the game receives control inputs from the user, the situation portrayed in the game. The player character moves or some other modifier like a moving cursor or a new unit in an RTS is selected. This changes the image, producing a new stimulus for the player to make a decision on.Thus begins the never ending cycle of interactivity. Maybe this is why gamers are always saying 'just one more minute'.

But like I said, you can take this further. There is also an auditory feedback look, with environmental and action game cues related by sounds, voices, and music. Unseen gunfire tells a player he's under attack, voices relate story and provide clues and a change in the tone of music can prepare the player for the right kind of emotional response.

The player responds, and the loop continues.

This feeds me into what I will probably talk about next time, player choices.

For now, I smell heathen northerner turkey day turkey.