Paper Information
| Title | The Art of Nailing Pudding To The Wall - Strategies on Modeling Abstract Concepts in Games |
| Presenter(s) | Doris Carmen Rusch |
| Session | Optimizing Emotion, Believability, & Choice |
| Time | Friday, October 22, 1:00p-2:00p |
| Location | Green Room |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | Exploring and tapping games' potential as deep and though-provoking conceptual tools requires experimentation. One thing I like to experiment with is basing games on abstract ideas such as responsibility, dignity or optimism. Basing games on such intangible concepts, however, is a lot like nailing pudding to the wall. The idea of "love", for example, is hard to grasp. What are its elements? Its mechanisms? And which concept of love are we talking about anyway?
Through my reflective design practice at MIT and complementary research e.g. on metaphors, system theory and the psychology of play and agency, I managed to devise three strategies that facilitate the process of basing games on abstract concepts. Hoping that these strategies will prove useful to fellow designers and inspire games tackling thought-provoking ideas, I want to share them in my presentation: 1. Tangibility: this strategy addresses the need to lend some substance to ephemeral ideas, to make the abstract concrete. I will discuss the use of metaphors for this purpose and provide examples for how abstract ideas come to live and start to exhibit a behavior when transformed into physical representations in the analog prototyping phase. 2. Procedurality: this strategy deals with exploring the systemic nature of an abstract concept before one worries about turning it into a game. It addresses the problem that if one tries to make a game too soon, before the concept has been sufficiently explored and grasped, there is a danger that one ends up modeling something else entirely from what one set out to model originally. By way of examples I will explain the difference between capturing the systemic nature of the concept that shall be modeled and the process of turning it into a game. 3. Play: this strategy emphasizes the importance of play in the design process. It particularly addresses the step between identifying the systemic nature of an abstract idea and turning it into a playable game. While "procedurality" helps to determine what shall be modeled (the source system), "play" is necessary to figure out "how" it shall be modeled. One and the same source system when interacted with from a different perspective will evoke a very different gameplay experience. The difference between the "what" and the "how" is comparable to the difference between "plot" and "story" in narrative media. "Play" - in the more mechanical sense - is the space available between the two and "play" in the practical sense helps us to figure out what the do with that space. |
| More | View PDF of extended abstract |