Passing Emotion through Art

Hello again.

    This began in my head as a conversation between me and a good friend of mine about a project we are indulging in, but i decided to turn it into a blogpost so that both he and now you, dear viewer, hear what i have to say on the matter. I did promise to post as much as i can and i have kinda been busy with other things, so here we are.

    Games, as an artform, obviously have the capacity to make the player feel things. There are many such examples and i am sure you are currently summoning your favorites as you read this. Conversations around the matter are usually held from an outside perspective: how and why games make people feel things, what kind of things they make them feel, how good of a job games do at making people feel things etc. Today's conversation will be done from an insider's perspective: 

As a game designer and as an artist, how do you imbue your work with the power to move people?

    It's not always that a game designer consciously sets out to produce emotion in the player. At first it wasn't even a thing designers knew they could do, but slowly yet surely the industry has worked its way up to the point where we are today. Can a game make people feel things? Well, if games are an artform, then by extension, yeah! But hold on a second. If a game designer's job is to design game mechanics and rulesets, then how does a game designer imbue their work with feeling? Can a mechanic make a player feel?

    Games are usually what i like to call a compound art pieces. Compound art pieces are pieces of art that mix and match multiple artforms at once. A text is a pure product of the artform of writing. An illustrated book employs both images and text, in which case, some feelings may only be products of an image and not the text itself. Games do that constantly, with visuals, music and writing being the three big ways games inject feeling into them. The question is, is a game whose only contributor to feeling being visuals, music or writing, considered a needed piece in making the player feel? Wouldn't it be better for that experience to be a movie, an album or a book? The answer depends on another question: does that experience employ interactivity?

    Interactivity is the "edge" games have over other artforms. I would go as far as to say that interactivity is the point of a game. A game cannot NOT be interactive; it ceases to be a game. So, experiences that are meant to become games, are meant to be interactive. A game moves the player through its interactivity. So to answer our previous question about turning the experience into a movie, album or book, if the experience is interactive, then no! It is meant to be a game! And that gives us our first clue at how a game designer should approach feeling. A game designer approaches feeling through interaction.

    So does that mean that game mechanics can induce feelings in players? If so, which mechanics are the sad ones? Which are the happy ones? Well, it's more complicated than that.

    Take music for example. Unlike games, certain aspects of music have certain feelings that they convey. A major scale for example is happy and a minor scale is sad. Music producers/writers you can stop screaming at the monitor now because i was playing a little prank on the reader. Actually, major scales sound sad to certain non-western cultures and minor scales sound happy! Any phoneme of an artform has certain feelings attached to it only due to context and circumstance. Does that mean that games do the same? They sure do! My favorite way of inducing anxiety for example is to create a small room filled to the brim with ammo and health pick-ups and then connect it to a giant, empty colosseum. Certain mechanics that put pressure on players can induce anxiety as well. Inventory management in Diablo 2 makes me feel nothing. Inventory management in Resident Evil 2 makes me more nervous than the zombies themselves (but it's okay, they are naturally nervous). 

    This phenomenon can and should be employed by a game designer to elevate their work, even if they aren't setting out to move the player necessarily. How a player feels while playing the game is something which game designers should endeavor to understand and influence, because imagine if you could totally control it. Preying on gaming conceptions to play with the player is a powerful tool, a tool which can be taken even further if we understand that context is created both outside and inside of the game. If i condition the player that the color red means that a reward is nearby, by making red items appear only around lootboxes or red indicators leading to those lootboxes, then i have created an irresistible beacon for players to gather towards. If i have designed a terrifying, unbeatable monster to spill green goop everywhere it goes to, then a player will steer clear of any rooms with green spills or corridors with green smears. In a player's brain, visual, auditory and mechanical concepts get assigned feelings and vibes instantly. It's how humans simplify the process of categorizing the world around them. This is the fabled "gut instinct". Conventions in the general gaming sphere, cultural context that your players have internalized and habits that your design has induced in them can be used to predict how those players will think and respond in a situation, and in Tekken terms, if i know that you are going to throw out up forward four, then i know to sidestep and EWGF DEWGF b+2,1 S! b+3,1 DEWGF.

    All of that however is based on the player actually "getting it". How does a game designer know how a player will respond to a certain stimulus? How can i be sure that a player will feel what i aim for them to feel? That, of course, extends to every artform as well. How do i know my melody will make the listener cry? How do i know my horror novel will terrify them?

    The answer is that there's, obviously, no way to know. People are complex and unique to each other and something that resonates with someone might not resonate with someone else and vice versa. Does that mean that artists simply create with no idea if what they create is as powerful as they think? Not necessarily. Artists actually do a "beta test" of their work and decide by the audience's response if something is worth pursuing or not, with that audience being the artists themselves. I do not know if what i've written will make you cry, but i know that it has the capacity to make people cry if i've cried to it. I judge an idea's potential to move people by its power to move me. I cry while making sad things, i am hype when i am making cool things. This is how artists know that they successfully created something special and hopefully people who are like-minded with the artist will understand and appreciate their work. This is actually how game designers gauge at the #1 feeling they want players to feel: fun. If i have fun play-testing the game, then hopefully you will have fun playing it. A game's first beta test happens in the imagination of the designer.

    This next part is what this entire article has been building up to. The project that i am working on with a friend is a digital art gallery. Instead of paintings or sculptures though, this gallery hosts a selection of levels, each of them housing a mechanic which is meant to explore all the ways in which game mechanics can be art. Just like any art gallery or museum, the point is to create an environment that makes the audience feel something. In this case, my aim is to make the audience think about mechanics as art rather than simple design and to foster a fascination in game design, the very same i have as well. I am insufferable. Game design is all i care about and lately i have also picked up the habit of talking a lot more about design to my friends. This obsession that i have, all those thoughts and ideas, i want to get all of them out there, in the form of a room, containing all of those thoughts. And in that room, the player will spend time experiencing, internalizing and appreciating game design the same way they would appreciate a song or a painting.