Games precede culture. That is to say, even animals play games.
All day, every day, games are played. Though most start and finish without ever being fully acknowledged by their participants, when we actively or unconsciously participate, there is normally some form of interface. This can be something tangible, and/or perhaps a set of rules, known to all trusted game players.
Focusing down a bit more on the physically-interactive side, conventionally, when we think of games being played in a modern setting, we may think of some kind of external peripheral, such as a baseball bat, or a pressable button, that is used to interact with a central device, such as being swung to hit a ball, or being pressed to trigger an event on a machine display.
I’ve just finished watching a vodcast that focused upon addressing cognitive dissonances through play; basically, using innovative User Interface (UI) systems to ‘improve’ human beings.
As part of the Stanford University lectures on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Berkeley-based Joe Mackaay and Greg Niemeyer were shown demonstrating a number of interfaces developed to better understand human behaviour through both gameplay and art. In particular, I’ll be focusing on three of them here, with one you’ll see released by a major entertainment manufacturer and publisher later in 2008.
Watching users discover, and thus engage in new behavior through these systems, at first, tends to envoke an unfamiliar feeling; something difficult to master or perhaps feels ‘wrong’ in some way. However, over a short period of playing time, intuition quickly pulls through, trust from the user is gained and this negative feeling subsides – the user is able to enjoy and benefit from this new and enriching experience.
The first game revolves around the idea of colour as an interface.
The game involves two players in a room, standing next to each other behind a pulpit-like control area, containing a set of simple levers (like a mixing desk) for each player.
In front of them is a large screen, split up into horizontal thirds, defined by a particular colour. The player on the left has control of the left block of colour (vice versa with the right player), with the block in the centre of the screen being the target colour.
As mentioned before, each player has three levers, each controlling either red, green or blue – the resultant colour-mix combination chosen by the players’ movement of the levers being displayed on the screen.
The aim is to match the target colour quicker than the other player.
All simple so far, but with each progressive round, the levels become more optically-challenging, with angled and animating elements, resulting in a very difficult task for the player.
Mackaay tells of how addictive users found the experience, much to his amazement – ‘they would stay and play in the lab for between one and two hours, go for a night out out, get drunk etc, and come back to the lab to play the game some more’.
Fundamentally, the game provides a zone of decision-making relating to its tasks, but when you get to the further levels, it takes you to an area outside your zone of perception; a challenging area, where you know you’re in control, but where you no longer get sensory feedback for the decisions you make. This a very important mental condition in which we still persevere, but tend to, in the process, hit the target almost randomly…
Games such as this allow us to move outside our sensory zone of comfort, without the risks normally associated with doing so.
The second game, Organum, focussed on proposing alternative ways of being and interacting in the world, using sound as a platform for these new behavioral possibilities;
Here, using their voices, musicians / players were asked to navigate through a system of tunnel-like organs of a human body, shown on the screen in front of them.
Each player would navigate by singing, speaking or generally making experimental noises into one of three microphones, which control either the x, y or z element of movement. Organum would respond to changes in both tone and volume, allowing the player to become confortable producing a series of personal sounds, allowing them to navigate through the tunnel systems in their own way.
The most interesting element of this game was in the bringing-together of multiple people to play as the different axes of direction; a beatbox mc, a classically-trained singer with an incredibly wide vocal range, and a Tuvan throat singer. The game worked on a number of different levels: game, team and audience. Game: a series of tasks had to be completed (players had to work together to successfully control the thing and navigate through pathogens / hoops using movement). Team: a social performance between three players, developing their own unique dialogues and systems of communication. Performance: a live musical composition to an audience.
Niemeyer stated the importance that the game had self-extracting rules that people get engaged in and would gradually discover over time, thus slowly unearthing the meaning of the game. In the end, there were no instructions to this game; just 5 microphones in a room with a screen. So, as well as this, people would also develop their own set of rules on the fly, implied through the type of sounds they and their fellow players would make, naturally cohabiting the soundspace and finding a way to progress.
To conclude this game, Niemeyer gives a great story of how three young sisters come and play with Organum one day, having a great time, though later returning home. The next day, the parents of the children call up saying how upset their daughters are; they’d been singing to their television set all morning but were extremely disappointed with the lack of sensory feedback they were receiving! A great showcase of how important it is to children for the media to acknowledge your presence and respond to your wishes.
Moving back to the colour game, creator Joe Mackaay, through having played the game intensely, became really rather good at it, touring round the country and offering to set it up for free if only to give himself the opportunity to play it again.
However, he gave the analogy of completing a video game – upon its completion, he always came away with the sense that he should have spent his time more effectively; spending the equivalent amount of time playing the piano would’ve resulted in his being able to better play the piano, instead of forking out another £35 to learn and perfect a totally new system of control.
Therefore, he came to the conclusion that this game, as good as it was, and as good as he had become in mastering it, had given him a very specific new skill, and he thought it unfair that it might only ever be utilised within the confines of this particular iteration of the game system. Hence, he set out to create a new, more advanced game, based on the existing base UI, that sought to utilise the skills he had already mastered previously.
While out biking in the foothills of Berkeley, Mackaay became astounded with the colour and variability of the sunset. This seemed to him the perfect basis for leveraging his existing ability and, in a way, set the basis for creating the ‘final level’ of the game, if you will.
Using the same hardware, he took it out of the room and projected it onto the side of a white barn in the hills. Now, instead of solid block colours, he had three colour gradient fields, which he would mix live with the ever-changing sunset backdrop. He could not only set the colours of the fields, but also the y positions of where they met, allowing for much greater control. However, the background wasn’t just a simple sunset. It also featured simple manmade features, such as a telephone line, and a silhouette hillscape, so sprites were added to the projection for added authenticity – stars were also added slowly as night fell.
The recorded 35 minute performance starts with a little too much ambient light, but as darkness sets in, the illusion begins to take place, and it really feels like the projection is part of the actual sunset backdrop.
He ‘intervened’ (he calls this game an intervention, not a performance, as it wasn’t advertised – he could just ’show up’) on five occasions, becoming better at the game with each iteration, going back to the studio to rewrite the code so he could do more interesting things, such as adding particular effects and functionality.
The third and final user interface system that I’ll have a look at here physically connects the body with the central device. The sense in question regards that of balance – when people get older, they tend not to exercise their sense of balance too much, leaving them at greater risk of falling over, and thus increased risk of injury. The game was thus developed to help improve and perfect peoples’ sense of balance.
Interestingly, the idea, though soon to see the light of day in the commercial world as a manufactured product of Nintendo, was originally targeted by Sony, but something must’ve happened for them not to take the idea further.
Regardless, the game is set up so: player stands on square brown board about half a metre wide, in front of a large screen. The screen shows a top-down view of the same brown board (3D board) in the centre of a simple 3D space, surrounded by four differently-coloured rings, one at each of N, S, W and E. As soon as the player stands on the board, the board on the screen instantly reacts according to the weight distribution placed across the player’s board, angling itself in an analogue direction relating to the player’s current weight distribution. Seconds later, a ball drops from above the board, down onto it. The colour of the ball determines which of the four hoops the player should aim to bounce the ball into, hence in what direction he/she should target the ball and therefore where on the board the player should place greatest weight.
Though very intuitive, each player shown took their time to get used to this new user interface – some got frustrated, while others took their shoes and socks off, and persevered quietly in front of the audience. As the player got used to the system and completed the ’simple’ first round, the tasks became increasingly more challenging, with the hoops beginning to rotate around the board, and moving closer to and further away from the centre.
This was a fun, challenging and innovative use of a natural unconscious body process, that, if used regularly, would surely help the balancing ability of people of all ages. Nintendo certainly seem to think this way…
Here we’ve seen a number of games with innovative user interface systems that give people an environment in which they’re able to explore outside of their normal sensory boundaries. Whether all these games will explicitly ‘improve’ those who use them is perhaps a difficult question to answer. But regardless, for each new player, a new environment was experienced, in which trust was given, and a new game-specific skill would thus develop – whether or not it should be the primary aim to leverage this skill for more practical use is worth questioning, but the fact remains that for each new experiential environment created, an innovative source of fun and enjoyment is also made. If nothing else, such experiences can only help to highlight and give focus to the natural game-playing nature of human beings and animals alike.
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