Brendan Rowe
Staff writer
A whole segment of gamers out there believe video games can be art once they step away from the conventions other art forms have set in place.
They speak of removing, for example, video game cinematics and video elements, which basically perform the same way a film does.
The industry needs to back away from emulating film elements and focus on defining video games as their own medium. What do games have that no other artistic medium does? Player interactivity.
‘LittleBigPlanet’ is one series that couldn’t be done in a film; creating levels and manipulating the environment is key to enjoying the game. (SCEA)
Enter Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, York University professor and expert in 3D user interfaces and computer graphics.
“In a certain sense, interactivity in videogames is fairly good, and very disappointing on the other side,” said Stuerzlinger. He says targeting, known as “selection” in the academic community, and navigation are prevalent in video games.
“However, manipulation of objects is fairly rudimentary. It’s rare, for example, that you have a videogame where you can easily stack boxes.”
Many action games and first-person shooters let you break objects, but not modify a box or change something within the world.
“It’s usually a case of, you can go through the walls and you can see most things, and you can maybe break most things, but you can do very little with the world. There are some exceptions.”
Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, for one, allows players to move objects and solve puzzles by manipulating objects. Stuerzlinger used the example of Halo 3’s Forge mode – an in-game editor that allows the player to move objects and create a space to play in. The only problem is that forging is not part of the normal gameplay.
Basically, interactivity comes down to what the game designer has pre-scripted for the player.
“You can only break the box if the game designer allows you to break the box. You can’t move it if the game designer hasn’t allowed you to move it and vice versa. This is actually very important, because you need to limit the player.”
What if the player takes their character and manages to break out of the area intended by the designers? he asks. Those options aren’t there because the designer wants the player to remain on course, driving the plot or action forward.
“Now it might be much more interesting to make it so that once you get outside the map the world gets more boring and will naturally draw people back to the more interesting zone.”
To make a game more interactive, a designer needs to provide more manipulation options. The challenge is making all the different manipulations and options easy to control.
Take design programs, for example.
Sure, a good design program has hundreds of thousands of possible options with thousand-page manuals, but it also has a huge learning curve. So the fundamental problem with interactivity is figuring out how the designer will allow for more options while remaining in control and offering the player ease of use.
Games like LittleBigPlanet and Scribblenauts are games that allow the player to create the world to play in while still being fun.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
