Communication
To bring his organizing powers into fullest play, the painter must haul his perceptions out of their limbo and annex them to his plan.
—LEO STEINBERG1 The definition of a good game is therefore “one that teaches every-thing it has to offer before the player stops playing.”
—RAPH KOSTER2
A
s systems of communication, game levels utilize sensory informa-tion to connect with players. As games are now, this occurs primarily through visual and auditory means and through limited applications of touch.3 In this chapter, we focus on the visual power of gamespaces, how it can be used to teach, and how it can control a player’s understanding of a game.As we discussed in Chapter 2, “Tools and Techniques for Level Design,”
one of the most important goals of game levels is the adjustment of behavior in game players. For first levels especially, teaching how to play a game, what its goals are, and the cause-and-effect procedures that make it run are vital to a good game.
associates them with meaningful information, and how they can be orga-nized to teach players through direct or indirect methods. Lastly, we will explore how to use visual information to turn game levels into spaces of information that create feelings of certainty and uncertainty in players.
What you will learn in this chapter:
Teaching theories for game levels Symbols and visual design in games Architectural forms and types
Teaching gameplay through advertising methods Controlling information in memory palaces TEACHING THEORIES FOR GAME LEVELS
In order to understand the spatial tools we will use to adjust player behav-ior, we must first understand the theories supporting these methodologies.
As we have seen and will continue to see throughout the book, learning from other fields is an important part of the ongoing development of game design. Throughout this chapter, we will reinforce three models of teach-ing commonly considered by game designers—B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning model, the Montessori method, and constructivism—as the framework of our visual communication methodology.
Behavior Theory and Operant Conditioning
Behavior theory, also referred to as behaviorism, is the study of observable behaviors in organisms. John B. Watson established behaviorism as a school of thought in psychology with his 1913 article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.”4 Ivan Pavlov and his famous studies into classical conditioning—
wherein he would ring a bell before feeding his dogs, thereby causing them to salivate every time he rang a bell—were major influences for behaviorists.5
A major evolution of behaviorism came in 1937 when psycholo-gist B.F. Skinner coined the term operant conditioning. Skinner rejected Watson and Pavlov’s earlier emphasis on reflexive or involuntary actions
and “attributed a more active role to the learning subject.”6 Operant conditioning involves changing voluntary actions of subjects via positive and negative reinforcements, as well as punishments.
In Skinner’s experiments with his operant conditioning chamber (widely known as the Skinner box) he had rats pull a lever in response to a specific stimulus, typically an auditory or visual signal (Figure 4.1). In the version of the experiment for studying positive reinforcement, when the rat pulled the lever in response to the signal, it would receive a food pellet as a reward.
However, pulling the lever at the wrong time would elicit a punishment, often in the form of an electric shock to the rat’s feet. The box could also study negative reinforcement, which teaches the subject to perform actions to remove unfavorable conditions. In the Skinner box experiment, a lever could be used to stop negative stimuli such as mild electric shocks or loud noises, thus strengthening the behavior of pulling the lever in the rats.7
Skinner also wrote considerably for the field of education. The current system of grading students—rewarding success with good marks and punishing failure with poor ones—is often seen as an extension of his philosophies. Skinner himself argued for a methodology that avoided emphasis on lectures or tutorials, but rather on breaking large tasks into a series of smaller ones. As each task is performed, correct actions are reinforced so the student learns the proper way of performing his or her tasks.8 This methodology is also commonly applied to many games that seek to do away with extensive explanatory tutorials. When teaching mechanics in the first few levels of a game, such as is done in Super Meat Boy, gameplay mechanics are broken into individual tasks that are rein-forced and repeated. As we saw in Chapter 2, Super Meat Boy9 focuses
FIGURE 4.1 A typical operant conditioning chamber, or Skinner box. The box is outfitted with devices for several types of experiments, including lights and loudspeakers to be used as stimuli, a food dispenser, a lever, and an electric grid to deliver shocks through the floor.
its first few short levels on individual mechanics— jumping, running, wall jumping, introducing obstacles, etc.—that eventually create an extensive knowledge of Meat Boy’s capabilities as a playable character.
Skinner-esque reinforcement and teaching models are commonplace in many game levels and puzzles. For example, solving puzzles or defeat-ing enemies is often met with in-game rewards such as resources or new items. Designers often structure gamespace territories in such a way that players must remove negative conditions—poison gas, constantly spawn-ing enemies, or enemy occupation—to make the territory safe for passage or to continue the narrative (Figure 4.2).
The Skinner box model can be used to describe the repetition of one sin-gular action over and over again. As such, it has been used as a derogatory term for many newer game types, particularly games that force players to wait to perform one or two simple actions repeatedly, such as Farmville.
For our purposes, we will look at operant conditioning as part of a larger palette of communication devices for educating players on how or when to utilize game mechanics.
Montessori Method
The world didn’t want him to fail here. It was pushing him, but gently.
—THOMAS WAS ALONE, MIKE BITHELL10
FIGURE 4.2 An early area in Batman: Arkham Asylum demonstrates how a negative reinforcement puzzle can transform a space. When the player initially enters a room in the Asylum’s Intensive Treatment facility, it is filled with poison gas, requiring Batman to leap on catwalks to progress. When the gas is removed, the room becomes open for regular circulation travel. If viewed in terms of ter-ritories, players encounter this area as one that has been corrupted by an enemy and must reclaim it. As one of the first areas to use batarangs for solving puzzles, it is also an important gameplay tutorial.