Game Feel - MSE504 Research Paper 1

Here's my first paper written for MSE504 - Critical Game Studies. Part of the assigned reading for the class is the book Game Feel, by Steve Swink. We were asked to write a short paper defending Swink's definition of game feel introduced in Chapter 1, and give some examples of the types of player experiences in great-feeling games we've played recently.

This post was originally published in November 2018 on my old portfolio website.

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Game Feel is a book I find both fascinating and eye-opening in numerous ways despite how early into the read I am, and I think that on the whole it offers an incredible look into a side of video games that is difficult to discuss in concrete form. It's incredible to me that game developers really have never had a larger examination into game feel and what it truly means, despite how often it's used. As is said in the opening of the first chapter, you could talk to ten different game designers and get ten different explanations that are all correct in their own way.

Before I delve into my own explanation of game feel, I want to reference back to Swink’s definition of game feel. Swink defines game feel as “real-time control of virtual objects in a simulated space, with interactions emphasized by polish.

On top of this, Swink posits that good-feeling games convey five different types of experience to the player:

• Aesthetic sensation of control

• The pleasure of learning, practicing, and mastering a skill

• Extension of the sense

• Extension of identity

• Interaction with a unique physical reality within the game

With all of that defined, I want to go ahead and jump into my own thoughts and on this definition of game feel, as well as my personal definitions of the different types of experiences.

Real-Time Control

This first element of game feel is an important aspect to not just making great-feeling games, but also just applies to interactive media as a whole. Real-time control is a wildly important thing to have within games. Real-Time control is the instantaneous feedback loop that should be occurring while the player makes decisions. The player inputs an action, the game instantly performs the equivalent of what the input was intended to mean, and the player then goes and thinks about another action based on what the game does. Making the game respond properly to those inputs is the main element of this part of game feel.

It’s not only about responsiveness, but also about the importance of keeping the player immersed. Defining immersion would be half a chapter’s writing just on its own, but I feel like having controls that respond in real time are absolutely essential to making sure the player not only remains immersed in the game, but also that it feels good to play. For Real-Time Control to be immersive, it must be function well. I’ll use an example to highlight why this is a good definition: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

This game was a game made late in the Wii’s lifespan, and took advantage of the MotionPlus addon for the wiimote. It had a gyroscope built into it to allow it to pick up more detailed motion than just the standard accelerometer built into the remote. Skyward Sword allowed players to really immerse themselves in becoming the hero Link. Their Wii remote controlled the sword, while the Nunchuck controlled the shield and movement. That game’s feel is all over the place, and making the control 1:1 with the remote is a major part of it. When it works, it works well, and the game feels really rewarding and engaging. When the gyroscope is off, it throws off the entire feel- even if the control is real-time, it feels bad.

Simulated Space

The next element of game feel is simulated space. Without simulated space, the prior element means little- a game can’t be just controls. Simulated space can mean a lot of things, and I’d argue that a lot of what we call game design happens in this space. Firstly, it means the world that the player is in- the things it can collide with, see, or otherwise sense in some way. As mentioned in the book, level design is a major aspect of simulated space. The world isn’t just something a player is plopped into that’s a flat plane- every part of it is designed. Unless you’re playing a procedurally generated game, every part of a game’s level is designed. That means it was made with intention, and meant to do something.

Simulated space gives a reason for the controls to be input. If there was no space with a log in the way of a player’s path, or a river to ford, then there’d be no reason to input those sorts of actions in.

I think Unreal Tournament represents simulated space well. It’s a deathmatch shooter at the core, where players run around and shoot each other and try to get kills. However, the act of shooting only provides so much value, even with excellent controls that work in real time. If there’s not designed levels and space for players to interact with, then it hardly can make up a game. However, the presence of a simulated space that’s been designed allows a great-feeling game to come together. It’s especially important because Unreal Tournament is a multiplayer game, and so many players must interact within this simulated space.

Polish

The final building block for game feel is polish. Polish is, to put it simply, extra fluff. A game can exist without polish, but it doesn’t feel half as good. A good example of what games are without polish is whiteboxing. The mechanics that make the game work are all in place- and the player can play the game. Polish encompasses everything that is needed to make the game feel really exist, to be fully brought into being. It’s a bit difficult to define without recycling words, but polish is the satisfying noise that happens when your character punches another, the virtual sensation of weight in a swing, or even simply the presence of art assets and animations and such within the game. It doesn’t alter a game mechanically, but they can’t really exist without polish.

Something to note is that unlike the other two elements, polish is primarily the job of artists and art-oriented designers to create and implement, rather than programmers and designers like the other two.

Something that I think is an important note from the reading, before I jump into the five player experiences, is that when we define game feel, we aren’t applying these things to all games. Games such as Bloons Tower Defense, Civilization, or Starcraft may not have real-time control, but it doesn’t mean they’re bad games in any respect. This book is attempting to capture the game feel for certain types of games, but it doesn’t apply to every game- which is a tad strange when trying to craft a standard definition of game feel. While I don’t feel it detracts from the points Swink makes here, I do feel like it takes away from the gravity of making a standard definition when it’s only applying to some sorts of games.

I want to move on to the five player experiences next.

Aesthetic Sensation of Control

First of all comes the aesthetic sensation of control. This is a bit difficult to define, but you just know when it’s done right. the player experiences this as the sensation given to them when moving through a game with good feel. It’s about the feeling that the avatar’s every action is in your hands, the flow as you shift from one action to the next.

I don’t think any game manages to capture this sensation as well as Super Mario Odyssey, released for the Nintendo Switch. I sunk a lot of hours into this game earlier this year while I was pushing to complete it, and in a lot of respects, it has fantastic feel. This strong aesthetic sense of control that the player has while playing it is a very powerful part of it, and it’s why a lot of gamers and critics alike gave it high praise. Odyssey does away with a lot of the clunky controls used by Mario games in recent years, such as Wiimote waggle controls, touch screen controls, and even pointing around on the tv screen. It returns to letting every motion be handled by a controller (with a few controls needing the occasional shake of it.) I think what makes this aesthetic sensation so powerful is not only the perfect controls and how they map into making Mario move, but also the fluidity of animation and the high polish given to them. Mario has a lot of moves he can perform, and they’re all doable with combining various button presses. The ability to move so freely, perform a variety of moves, and the animations all lend a joy to playing Odyssey. It’s this joy to simply moving around in the game, watching Mario leap and throw his hat around at your whim, that is that sensation of control.

Skill

There’s something about mastering skills that can be intrinsically rewarding. You get the satisfaction and the pleasure of accomplishing a goal, of hitting your target, of being able to be better than somebody else at something. When relating to game feel, skill can be defined as the learning to perform certain actions or tasks in a game. It’s not just being able to perform something, it’s about improving the action, making it more efficient or effective over time. Skills

There are a lot of examples I could use here- everything from build orders in Starcraft to the individual skills that make up a League of Legends match, but I’ve settled on highlighting World of Warcraft, an MMORPG. WoW has a ton of classes, each have varying roles within the tank/healer/damage dealer trinity. For damage dealers, there’s generally a right and a wrong way to play a class. The idea, of course, is to maximize the amount of time you’re playing the right way while avoiding all the hazards of enemies and bosses. For most classes, there’s something called a rotation- the optimal way to hit your abilities that will produce the most damage. Now, for the example: In WoW, I played a subtlety rogue for my raid team. I was admittedly pretty terrible at first. Compared to other classes, I felt like it was clunky, based on a resource I hated called Energy, and that it didn’t do enough damage. Yet, as I went into the new raid tier with my guild, acquired gear, and learned how to properly perform my rotation, my damage numbers went up. I went in every week to perform the boss fights, and each time was a form of practice. Week by week, I got better, and we downed more bosses and earned more gear. Not only did my ever-increasing skill have a reward, but it increased the effectiveness of my skill. WoW manages to reward player skill in an excellent way, and you can feel yourself gaining more skill the more practice you put into it, and your higher damage numbers are a form of reward.

Extension of the Sense

Games aren’t just things we seem to perceive visually via looking at a screen. As I’ll mention in the next section, we are tied to our avatars. But, in tying ourselves to avatars, we also manage to tie ourselves to things the avatar senses, because that’s what game developers tend to give us to work with. In placing our identities with these avatars, we tie our senses to them as well. We perceive things they hear as things we hear. What we can see and what they see are often the same.

I’ve only played a little bit of it, but I think Slender is a great example of this. The player plays in first person here, and has to collect pages from a dark and terrifying forest. The game presents not only auditory and visual cues for players to work off of, but does a great job at building the sense of being watched, possibly even tracked while the Slenderman follows you around.

Extension of Identity

The avatar is used to represent the player in many games. Avatars are very important- and I do hope the book expands on them later. They’re not only how players interface in the world, but they’re often how we perceive ourselves in them. But yet, as the book notes, we separate ourselves from them enough to not associate entirely with them. Even still, we often seem to feel some of the things that happen to them, despite there being no actual physical sensation beyond the occasional rumble of a controller. Even still- who hasn’t felt something in the pit of their stomach while their avatar falls a great height? Players often flinch while taking incoming fire in a game, and some even perform motions while using the controller despite them having no bearing on the gameplay. Our association with avatars is very strong, and they are our identity in the virtual worlds.

Avatars in many games act as not just an extension of our identities, but also as a form of wish fulfillment or personification of aspects of ourselves. My example for this section comes once again from World of Warcraft. The game has a robust gear customization system known as Transmogification, which allows players to collect and equip various gear appearances onto item slots. Players can create their own unique looks and combinations of this gear, which I find to be a very fun activity. I often will spend vast amounts of in-game currency on gear that has no benefit for me beyond looking cool, or spend months farming a raid for a very specific drop from a boss to complete an outfit. Games allow us to look cool, and it allows for the expression of a player’s identity.

Interaction with a unique physical reality within the game

This last one is an interesting bit- we interact with virtual spaces with physics of their own, and we begin to work out just what the rules for them are, how the physics function, and then we look for ways to apply those. We’re able to understand how our actions will end up functioning in these digital playspaces, even if something differs entirely from how the actual world works.

Super Smash Bros. is a series that I feel makes a good point here. The physics models vary from game to game- with some people referring to physics as floaty, or grounded, or a hybrid between games. It changes a whole bunch, and players have learned how their characters will function in each style of physics. They represent a totally unique physical reality within Super Smash, yet it’s one we’re able to learn to comprehend and even visualize how certain motions will play out.

Conclusion

In conclusion, game feel has thee major parts, and these three parts work together to help create the play experiences discussed above. Swink's definition of game feel may not be all-encompassing (notably skipping over certain things like strategy games), but it is a good start at defining something that before now, had no single definition.

References:

Swink, S. (2009, October 25). Game feel: a game designer's guide to virtual sensation. Brulington, MA, USA: Elsevier.