Feature: 'Persuasive Games - Gestures As Meaning'

Author: by Staff

The interface has been a central selling point of the video game experience for years now. Such interfaces can be traced back decades: Sony's EyeToy; Bandai's Power Pad; Mattel's Power Glove; Amiga's Joyboard; the rideable cars and motorbikes of '80s - '90s arcades; indeed, even Nintendo's own progenitors of the Wii Remote, like Kirby Tilt 'n Tumble for Game Boy Color. The recent acceleration in motion control schemes and Sony and Microsoft's E3 gesture-based gaming unveils raise interesting questions about the relationship between gesture, action and meaning as it relates to gameplay. Game designer and writer Ian Bogost examines the issue in-depth as part of a new Gamasutra feature, and writes: As much as physical realism might seem like a promising direction for gestural interfaces, it is a value that conceals an important truth: in ordinary experience, gestures not only perform actions, they also convey meaning. Consider body language. According to an oft-summarized but infrequently cited study (psychologist Albert Mehrabian's 1971 book Silent Messages), half of human communication takes place through non-verbal actions. Gestures like crossing one's arms, tilting one's head, and rubbing one's forehead telegraph important attitudes and beliefs. In these cases, gestures are intransitive; they do not perform actions. Instead they signal ideas or sensations: impatience, disbelief, weariness, and so forth. Other gestures take indirect objects. When we wave hello or flip someone the bird, we do not alter the physical environment in the same way a racquet does when striking a ball or a hand does when grazing a pool. We may, however, change the way the recipient of the gesture thinks or feels about us or the world in general. Bogost asserts that the controversial relationship between Manhunt 2's brutal kills and the Wii Remote gestures the player must use to perform them is meant to show players "how thin the line can be between madness and reason by making us perform abuse." But there's still a direct correlation in the game between direct manipulation, the movements of a controller that roughly map to torture. He offers a subtler example: Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a tabletop game, one of six that the veteran designer is pursuing in a series on difficult subjects. Train's game surface is a window, some panes broken, with additional broken glass scattered atop the surface of the play area. Three railway tracks extend at oblique angles across the width of the window. The object of the game is to load yellow people tokens into boxcars and to move them from one end of the track to the other. Players roll dice to add passengers and move trains forward, and they draw cards to execute other actions, such as switching tracks, damaging a train, and derailing. Terminus cards on each track reveal each train's destination at the end of the game: Auschwitz, or another Nazi concentration camp. Brathwaite's game has earned more discussion that play, since it exists in only one edition. And demonstrations of her game have prompted one to wonder at its "shocker ending" value, in the words of industry veteran Ernest Adams. It's true, Bogost says, that the emotions Train inspires seem like a trick of implementation, not an experience delivered through playing the game. Yet, when one actually plays Train or watches others play it, its emotional power shifts from the epiphany of its ending to the individual gestures that construct its play session -- gestures that must necessarily be enacted in order to reach that finale. You can now read the full feature at Gamasutra (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).