Editor's Note: Imagine "the sound of a can of Coke being opened... The hue of light in late summer afternoons..." Visual and audible cues can set the mood of the scene, and small cues can evoke powerful emotions, especially in the game!" In this article, let's see how the author leads players to the deep-rooted world of games! It is recommended for users who are interested in the game.
First, the prologue
Imagine a scene where golden sunlight shines through the window and refracts on the body.
Tiny dust particles float slowly in the air, shining brightly. Outside, somewhere in the distance, there was a faint sound of children giggling.
The air was warm and so was the soft quilt on the bed. A faint smell of old paper and printing ink fills your nostrils.
When you hold this soft drink in your hand, it's instantly cold. Ice cubes clang softly. Soda bubbles burst and hiss...
Imagine another scenario: the neon lights flicker incessantly, and its light is so faint that it can't fully illuminate the room you're in, but it's strong enough to hurt your eyes.
You can see a wall, which is made of cold, hard, not bendable concrete, painted in a grayish white with a sick green hue. And the floor is covered with white tiles.
The brown dry stains splashed out and led down the sewer, and there was a black circular crack in the ground covered with a metal fence...
Small cues can evoke powerful emotions.
The sound of a can of Coke being opened... The hue of light in late summer afternoons... Visual and audible cues set the atmosphere of the scene.
Words themselves can create a sense of immersion. It's a mediocre trick, but it's very effective!
These small elements are an important part of the narrative and help to build emotional bonds with readers, bystanders, and real players.
As game designers, you should strive to create this emotional connection.
People play games for fun, and it allows us to feel fun on a deep emotional level.
Emotions are a way for our subconscious mind to mark experiences, marking them as important or satisfying, i.e. something worth remembering.
Connections made on an emotional level are stronger and more enduring than the memory of any particular detail.
You may have forgotten the details of the Nintendo game you loved so much as a kid, but when you think about it, you still get that warm and fuzzy feeling.
However, many game designers, especially when it comes to free mobile games, seem to have forgotten this simple thing.
If your strength is game system design and you focus on player retention, it's easy to get bogged down in mechanized design, a set of rules that might work well on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet, but with no soul at all.
I admit that this trap, I myself fell into too many times.
Second, a better way
Recently, I came across a 2017 white paper on so-called comfort game design, which was an eye-opener!
While I was fascinated by the concept of the comfort game itself, what really caught my attention was the systematic approach the authors took to define the concept.
The authors first define a feeling that they want to focus on.
They define a specific emotional state in the hope that their game will capture the player's attention.
In their case, it was a sense of comfort that could be described by a range of adjectives such as safety, softness, and abundance.
After that, they listed a range of emotions that partially overlapped with the concept of comfort, such as cuteness, childhood memories, romance, and more.
In the next steps, they will continue to list a series of concepts that are opposite to the feelings they want to evoke, such as feelings of fear, danger, or threat.
Finally, they went on to discuss how to evoke player comfort in the game. They listed related entries:
The general aesthetic mode of comfort
Game mode and mechanics design for enhanced comfort
Comfortable visual and audio elements
Comfortable narrative mode
They successively listed items, places, and character archetypes that could be described as comfortable.
In this way, they are actually creating a kind of game design mood board. By doing so, they put the desired emotion at the center of the design process!
This mood board can be used as a reference for them to evaluate their game design philosophy.
In addition, they defined a set of tools and a set of game design elements, both to reinforce the sense that the game should be centered on it. These all help reinforce the specific sense that the game should revolve around.
In this particular white paper, the authors focus only on comfort, however, the same approach can be applied to any type of emotion or complex feeling.
People play games for fun, but there are many ways to get it. Like a book or a movie, a well-crafted game can trigger multiple emotions in the player.
Third, build your own emotional board
You can try replicating a similar process and applying it to your own game design needs.
First, you can choose the specific emotions or feelings that you focus on in the game.
For example: creepy
Try to describe this feeling in words:
For example, creepiness is a strange feeling, invisible sense of danger, fear, uneasiness, and so on.
Then discuss with as many people as possible, dig up ideas, and reach a consensus on the emotions you want to trigger.
Different people will find different creepy things, but there will certainly be a lot of these things that are repetitive, such as clowns, right?
Define contrasting feelings:
The creepy opposite can be a sense of security, pleasure, comfort, etc.
Define overlapping and adjacent concepts that have some of the same characteristics as your goal, but are significantly different.
In creepy situations, these may include: blood, horror, existential horror, nausea, helplessness, feelings of loss, etc.
Photo taken by Yener Ozturk
Continue to define the aesthetic elements:
Creepy visuals: dark, dim shimmer, cool tones, etc.
Creepy materials: stone, metal, tiles, rust, damp surfaces, cold surfaces, reptile skin, offal, etc.
Creepy sounds: the creak of the floor, the sound of footsteps in the distance, the sound of heavy breathing, the sound of your own heartbeat, the sound of insects, the hissing, the rumble of machines, etc.
Eerie locations: abandoned buildings, empty streets, crypts and cemeteries, abandoned amusement parks, old hospitals, abandoned bathrooms, narrow corridors, confined spaces, old castles, dilapidated churches, dark forests, etc.
Creepy items: broken toys, broken strollers, old photos, chains, medical devices, hospital beds, etc.
Whenever you add a new design element, you can use this list of elements as a reference to evaluate your design or use it as a source of inspiration.
Have artists on your team use it to create an emotional board that really points out aesthetic directions to define visual effects.
Refine and reinforce your overall direction of progress by adding elements, iterating over and over again, and improving this list.
This approach is clearly designed for the whole, and every aspect of the game is designed to enhance the overall experience. In this way, you can avoid the common problem that games have no soul.
Also, because the aesthetics of all aspects of the game are consistent, you don't need to rely on the storyline and dialogue to convey the game's narrative.
The narrative will naturally appear in the background of the game and will only require very few pieces of dialogue or text to be reinforced.
Ideally, taking this approach would make the game more emotionally coherent, and emotion would allow the player to have a deeper connection with the game.
Of course, this is not the ultimate design approach.
It's just a tool that you can use with all the other tools in the Game Designer toolbox.
Combine this with some solid game system design and you'll be the winner.
Original: https://uxdesign.cc/building-blocks-of-fun-emotions-89040b236fb3
By Stanislav Stankovic
Translators: Guan Rumo; Reviewer: Cai Linyan, Li Zehui, Zhang Yutong; Editor: Sun Shuya
This article was translated and published by the @TCC Translation Intelligence Bureau and published by everyone is a product manager, and reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol