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Picture Imperfect–Camera Insensilis
By Corvus | September 30, 2008
Note: Thanks to the extended move and long blog absence, I feel a bit off my posting stride. I’m going to wander my way back into this topic and hope for the best…
We have five physical senses–sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Language gives us a means to communicate to an audience information about all five when we tell a story. This means that books can fully present a seemingly real storyworld to us, providing the storyteller has sufficient mastery of their craft and the audience has a sufficient understanding of it. At first glance, film is only able to communicate the first two sense–sight and hearing. But by drawing upon associative sensory experiences, movies can use visuals and audio, along with the performances of the actors, to inspire a memory of a particular taste, smell, or physical sensation.
Video games have a long way to go in this regard and sight and hearing are the only two senses regularly engaged, especially during gameplay. In no small degree, this limitation leads to a dissociative experience. To compensate for this limitation developers have traditionally relied on UI elements to communicate the other senses to the audience. Health and/or mana meter, damage indicator, mini-map, compass, equipped item, prepared spell, ammo count, and targeting reticle are commonly displayed prominently on the screen to compensate for the audience’s lack of physical presence and spatial awareness.
There’s a trade off to taking this approach. On the one hand, this is part of the language of game design that the audience has come to recognize. Once you’ve played a game or two, it becomes second nature to check the red bar to see how your health is doing, or to glance at the mini-map to see how far off course you’ve veered from your next objective. If the UI elements are clear and positioned so they do not feel obtrusive, they can actually help draw an experienced player into the game world by subtly compensating for essentially being limited to the senses of sight and hearing within the game world.
On the other hand, our interactions with the world become defined by these elements that are not directly a part of the storyworld we are meant to experience. Additionally, by focusing on the UI elements (combined with this mad rush to achieve photo-realism), developers have accepted the limitations of the video game camera. Barring a few deviations from the norm–none of which were, I believe, commercially successful–the video game camera hasn’t changed much since the days of Quake and Tombraider.
At one point during Max Payne‘s development, we were told that Max’s health would only be evident from his physical stance and that major injuries would last throughout the rest of the game. By the time the game was released, we had UI elements indicating Max’s current health and the number of pain killers he had available. Major injuries were not permanent (thankfully) and if I remember correctly, Max had two or three pain state animations at best.
Call of Cthulhu did away with UI elements and highlighted interactive elements when you pointed the camera at them. This worked relatively well, unless you were in a hurry and multiple interactive areas were in close proximity and you found yourself locking a door instead of throwing it open and getting to safety. More interestingly, the protagonist’s loss of sanity throughout the game was communicated via camera filters and character animations–blurry reality and fidgety hands. I unfortunately didn’t get to experience this latter feature because of my difficulty dealing with the former.
King Kong similarly did away with UI elements. Health was indicated, if I recall correctly, by the volume and speed of the protagonist’s heart rate. I respect the attempt, but the gameplay was so punishing, and still so focused on the verb to shoot, that I found the game impossible to navigate.
Both of these games attempted to do away with one particularly troubling UI element–the targeting reticle. Sadly, neither game overcame the underlying thematic limitations of the reticle and therefore suffered for its lack.
A game that could have better transcended this seemingly innocuous crosshairs is Deus Ex. Playing this recently brought my issues with the crosshairs into stark relief. Every single interaction in Deus Ex becomes defined by this targeting element. It doesn’t matter if you have a range weapon, melee weapon, or no weapon equipped. The crosshairs are there, defining your visual focus. Want to shoot someone in the head? Aim your weapon at them and click. Want to stun a NPC? Aim your riot prod at them and click. Want to talk to a NPC? Aim your mouth at them and click. Want to pick a lock? Aim your lock pick at the door and click. The crosshairs floating in the center of the screen define every action as a potentially violent targeting action. I found this distracting from the supposed strength of Deus Ex–the freedom to take a minimally lethal route through the game.
When your entire game experience is tunneled through a UI element clearly modeled after a gun sight, violence–or at minimum, a strong potential for violence–is implied and likely inevitable.
Okay, I’m getting a bit of steam now but I’m going to break off for today and pick up the topic later this week with Schizophrenic Camera-Eye. Feel free to pick up any of these loose threads and run with them in the comments!
Tagged:camera, ui elements, video games. | 8 Comments »
September 30th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
The original Quake never actually included a crosshair by default (It could be turned on with a console command which wasn’t particularly well documented).
Deus Ex used the crosshair to represent other characters attitude to you, Friend or Foe; which goes some way to explaining why it is always present. Of course that’s basically causing one problem in an attempt to solve another.
You bring up how films have use “associative sensory experiences” to evoke the memories of particularly sensory experiences. Why do you feel games can’t do this? Is there something explicit about games that prohibit their ability to do the same?
Also what about the rumble features on gamepads? Don’t these make some headway in simulation, (should that be stimulating?), our sense of touch?
What about something like the Quick-Time Events of a God of War, or Indigo Prophecy, these usually require mimicry of physical actions going some way towards making using of our sense of touch. Or, on that note, what about the Wii?
September 30th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I don’t feel games can’t do it, just that they haven’t to date. Additionally, a huge part of the visual cues in movies is the actor’s themselves and we don’t use (can’t afford to have) a lot of animation in games to change body stance for temperature changes, foul-smelling environments, etc.
Hates QTE. Hates it, my precious. Pulls you right out to the pattern on the screen. Exactly the opposite effect of what we should be trying to achieve.
Rumble and Wii are a whole new layer of “stuff to talk about” that are pretty platform specific (not every PC gamer has a rumble mouse for example) and therefore more of a detraction from camera talk than anything else. These elements often end up as icing on the cake, rather than the cake themselves. But you are, of course, correct. Both rumble and motion control can go a long way to increasing a sense of immediacy in the environment when used well.
September 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I think many of the things you describe are driven by usability concerns (and just inertia at this point). If your character’s health is conveyed imprecisely by animations or stance, it’s very easy to create an inconsistent experience for the player. A single hit may kill their avatar now, but when th avatar looked to be in that state in a previous attempt, it was able to take four more hits. Deux Ex opted for the crosshairs because they’re accurate. It’s able avoid the problems you described about the interface in CoC. That doesn’t mean the metaphor is correct and they couldn’t have done something better, but I think the reasons for doing so were understandable.
This doesn’t mean we can’t have more seamless, integrated interfaces. But those interfaces seem to me to be something that’s easy to get really wrong and hard to get right.
The latest Alone in the Dark’s inventory system is fully integrated in the game world, instead of just disappearing into another screen. This might be a step in the right direction.
September 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Another issue in terms of health is that most games allow for you to ‘increase’ your health in some regards. This would become problematic to convey without any indicator, and would just become trial and error, which I think we’ll agree is not necessarily conducive to making players enjoy the game (which seems to be the point, but that can, of course, be debated).
While we could use the alternate health system prevalent in theories of Dungeons and Dragons (of which, I believe, you aren’t fond, Corvus), this creates a problem as we see from the difference in Morrowind to Oblivion. In one you could be swung at and be missed, whereas the latter you were swung at and hit, though to varying degrees–no matter what.
As to the other problems? The reticle is something that bugs me in most games. Hated it in the Elder Scrolls series, and generally haven’t enjoyed it in any game where I have to use it. While it makes things ‘easier,’ it always draws my eye to where it may lie, which annoys me as someone who, in real life, will often focus my sight on different things in my purview without needing to shift my ‘eye reticle’ in a new direction.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Difficult topic. On the one hand, you’ve got external senses that relate to our perception of others (which construe the player avatar as an “other”); on the other hand, you’ve got types of self-awareness like sense of pain, sense of bodily position, emotions, and intentions (which construe the player avatar as “self”). Too braindead to think about it more at the moment; hope you’ve got more to say on the topic later.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I hope the move went well, and I’m glad you’re posting again.
Visual focus is an interesting topic. The human eye can only focus on a very small area at any particular time. Focus on a particular paragraph, and without moving your eyes, try reading the paragraph directly above or below it. Interesting, isn’t it?
The crosshairs/reticle is used to designate the center of the screen, which is a proxy for the player’s visual focus since that player might actually be looking at an object elsewhere on the screen. Some games only change the field of view when the cursor is moved near the edges of the viewport.
The question is how to represent that area of focus without using a gunsight. Some games have tried highlighting certain objects as they approach the center of the screen. This seems like a resonable alternative to the traditional crosshairs, except that it makes fine-targeting difficult. This becomes an issue when it may mean the difference between trying the door handle, picking the lock, or forcing the door open.
On a different topic, games have started moving away from the health-meter approach, instead opting for a healthy/injured state indicator. Lately, this has been coupled with a regenerating-health game mechanic, as in Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, Halo 3, Portal, etc. That is, the way the player thinks about “damage” is different from the old-school “generic hit points” model.
What’s also interesting is how damage manifests for the player. With the Doom/AD&D model of health, players were able to deal damage just as effectively at 10% health as at 100% health. Some modern games (mostly tactical shooters) have tinkered with this, linking the player’s health state to their mobility and steadiness of aim.
Even the space combat sims represented this to some degree–players with damaged ships would have to contend with flaky computer displays and radar systems.
I could go on at length (and already have), but I’d love to hear what the rest of you have to say about it.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:05 pm
These are all good thoughts, so thanks for sharing them! I expect to post the next segment on Friday.
October 11th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
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