illustrative nonetheless. The result is that the cars in Project Gotham 3 simply do not meet expectations for how they should interact, creating significant dis-sonance in the photorealistic metaphor of the game. Mario Kart Wii does a much better job of harmonizing with its metaphor.
And this is what we are interested in measuring: the overall effect that met-aphor has on the feel of an object with respect to the way it sets up expecta-tions in the player about how objects should sound, how they should look, how they should behave, and how they should interact with one another. In this way, all pieces of a game’s feel are affected by the metaphor that you choose and apply.
Real, Iconic and Abstract
Up to this point, we’ve made oblique references to the term realism. Let’s nail that sucker down so we can get a better grip on how treatment modifies game feel. The way we’ve used realism thus far is as a measure of how similar something looks to a photograph or film. On the other end of that spectrum is cartoony. This is, I think, how most people apply the term realism, especially to graphics in games.
A slightly different approach is that used by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics. He adds a third axis and changes “cartoony ” to the much more descriptive
“ iconic ” (see Figure 10.1 ). Although Scott’s concept is summarized below, please consider reading his original explanation in “Understanding Comics, ” which is very well done.
On Scott’s diagram, all visual representation exists somewhere in a triangle. At the far left point of the triangle is reality. At the far right is iconic. He defines the
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written word as the ultimate abstraction, the point of visual representation that is furthest from reality while still effectively conveying meaning. Between reality and pure meaning, there are various shades of iconic. That is, visuals which are abstracted from reality, but which still convey meaning. With the third axis, he separates iconic abstraction from what he calls “ non-iconic ” abstraction, which is probably what most of us think of as abstraction. Shapes, colors and lines; things which exist for their own sake and have no inherent meaning, which don’t repre-sent anything. This scale, while originally designed to apply to comics and other visual art can, with a little fudging, be applied to the representation of objects in a video game ( Figure 10.2 ).
Gears of War fits somewhere between Project Gotham and Mario Kart Wii. There are some iconic elements, in the sense that the characters are large and bulky (not something you’d see in the real world of everyday experience), but the texture and lighting attempts to be hyper-realistic, in the way that the movie Alien attempts to visualize a world in which things are more sticky, more wet and more rim lit.
Call of Duty IV is even more realistic, trying to emulate photo-like visuals in a more staid way than Gears of War. There’s not much stylization in the proportion of the characters, though there is a grainy, filmed look to the game that could be considered stylization. On the iconic side, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is highly iconic but represents a complete game experience in a world with its own self-referent, entirely consistent rules. If we move to the top of the triangle, toward the purely visually abstract, we have games like Everyday Shooter, in which the objects are geometric and musical abstractions with no apparent metaphor.
From a metrics point of view, what we’re interested in are the implications for how elements of game should behave if the game is more or less realistic, iconic or
F I G U R E10.2 Some well-known games placed on the triangular diagram.
abstract, with respect to game’s overarching metaphor. For example, returning to Project Gotham 3, we located that game far over to the left of the diagram toward realism, and we can infer that everything in the game should behave as closely as possible to how things behave in the physical world as we perceive it. Everyday Shooter is very abstract, presenting us with a bizarre world where we’re not really sure how things are going to react, which has the effect of setting expectations wide open. It would be hard to make objects in Everyday Shooter behave in a way that seemed wrong, but it leverages no expectations either. In an iconic game like Sly Cooper, which is far over to the right, we expect cartoon physics and are not dis-turbed if two things jiggle like Jello-o when they collide, as long as volume is main-tained per the principles of animation.
Metaphor sets up expectations about the way things should look, move, sound, behave and interact. This is how metaphor affects game feel. When everything is in harmony, and all the player’s expectations are met, it’s a win for the designer and the player. When things aren’t in harmony, it causes dissonance and frustra-tion, and the player disengages from the game. If the visuals write a check that the game’s physics can’t cash, the player loses his or her belief in the self-consistent fidelity of the world.
Summary
We can measure the impact of metaphor on game feel by looking at response, con-text and polish, and by comparing them to the expectations set up by the metaphor applied to all the objects. This is a soft metric. Players will perceive things as they expect to perceive them, not necessarily as they really are. We want to know what perceptual expectations are being set up by metaphor and treatment.
If you’ve ever been to a wine tasting, it’s easy to experience this phenomena in real life. If you put out eight bottles of wine and hide the labels, you’ll get a very different result than if the tasters can see the labels. People expect famous, pricey wines to taste better—and results of a tasting will reveal that they do! The Chateau Mouton Rothschild will always rank higher than the Stags Leap Cabernet. But taste the wines blind, and you can get some very different results, as in the famous 1976 wine tasting in Paris, where California wines soundly whupped some of the top French chateaux in a blind tasting by famous French judges.
So be careful what expectations you set up and how. Ask the following questions:
● What do the objects in the game represent?
● Where does the treatment rest on the triangle diagram? How realistic, iconic or purely abstract is it?
SUMMARY
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● How well does the representation and treatment of objects in a game coincide with the way those objects behave? Based on the metaphorical representation, what are the expected behaviors, effects, animations, motions, interactions and sounds of the game?
● Does the metaphor set expectations that are in line with game feel for each ele-ment of the game? If not, either the metaphor or the game eleele-ments probably need to be adjusted.