Immersion

One of the issues that has come up recently in conversation with level 5 students has been why and how do game players get hooked into a game. In particular I know some of you are interested in how to design for levels. Issues such as allowing for a player to become familiar with the game world and its mechanisms during low level gameplay have been discussed in seminars and how as levels get harder the player gets sucked in as adrenaline levels rise have been hinted at in my previous post. But there are lots of other issues to consider. One of which is game immersion.
One way of describing immersion in a game or a film or other media environment is when "media contents are perceived as ‘real' in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment." (Wissmath, Weibel, & Groner, 2009).

The immersive experience is a kind of relocated spatial world that the user inhabits and starts to believe in. Once they believe in this world they can start to make decisions within it that make sense as to the ‘rules’ of this world. If the world is undersea, you can swim or dive even though you are of course in reality on dry land. If an audience or player is completely immersed in their experience they have what Coleridge termed, complete ‘suspension of disbelief’. However, if the plot or storyline has inconsistencies people can easily break out of their imagined world and therefore game designers have to be very careful as to how they integrate elements from outside that world. For instance a learning tutorial can be written into a video game as part of the overall plot.
Wirth, Hartmann, et al. (2007) in their article, ‘A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences’ provide a diagram of their unified theory Here it is:


A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences


Those of you that had to sit through my lecture on Communication theory might notice a similarity with some of the communication theory diagrams.
The stages in the process model show how first of all players form a representation in their mind of the world they have encountered within the game, then the next stage is to make the game world their primary point of reference or ego reference frame, which is where they suspend their disbelief.

As Jamie Madigan pointed out (2010) “Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she's in that imagined world or in the real one”.
There are two main factors that encourage total immersion, the first is a detailed and thorough world model (sound, images, spaces, types of movement, characters, strong plot etc) and the other is a consistency of how things operate within that model, (do you have to suddenly use an awkward device such as a button to activate that doesn’t seem consistant, heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing over enemies' heads? )
As Madigan points out (2010) “Cognitively demanding environments where players have to focus on what's going on and getting by in the game will tie up mental resources. This is good for immersion, because if brain power is allocated to understanding or navigating the world, it's not free to notice all its problems or shortcomings that would otherwise remind them that they're playing a game”. Above all though, I would suggest it is the strength of the narrative that will suck a player in, just as in a film or a book.
Therefore when designing stages one of the first issues is how to begin the narrative and then how to get the player to learn the rules. The total immersion point should be not too far into the game or the player will not get sucked in, but not too early or the player will not have time to acclimatise to the rules and nature of the game world.

Madigan, J (2010) Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29910/Analysis_The_Psychology_of_Immersion_in_Video_Games.php Accessed on 14. 12. 11
Wissmath, B, Weibel, D., & Groner, R. (2009). Dubbing or Subtitling? Effects on Spatial Presence, Transportation, Flow, and Enjoyment. Journal of Media Psychology 21 (3), 114-125.

Wirth, W., hartmann, T., Bocking, S., Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., Holger, S., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Ravaja, N., Gouveia, F., Biocca, F., Sacau, A. Jancke, L., Baumgartner, T., & Jancke, P. (2007) A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences. Media Psychology, 9, 493-525
N.B. Jamie Madigan, Ph.D. is a psychologist and gamer who explores why players and developers do what they do by studying the overlap between psychology and video games at The Psychology of Games website. He is an excellent writer to look at for anything to do with video gaming and psychology.

Gaming, realism and hyper-reality

Image from World in Conflict


“I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”
RONALD REAGAN, speech, Aug. 8, 1983

It’s interesting to reflect on Ronald Regan’s musings from the 1980s. As a former actor turned president he was probably more aware than anybody how reality can be a construction. Realistic war simulators are now the norm in combat training and for a while now the divide between realism and simulation has been blurred.
As Galloway (2006) notes, “The conventional wisdom on realism in gaming is that, because life today is so computer mediated, gamers actually benefit from hours of realistic gameplay. The time spent playing games trains the gamer to be close to the machine, to be quick and responsive, to understand interfaces, to be familiar with simulated worlds.”


David Wong (2007) was worrying about war sims when he wrote this, “I'm starting to think that even World in Conflict, a real time strategy game so "realistic" it takes a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.” He went on to describe what he would like to see in ‘reality’ war games, including:
“I want a war sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in games like the Red Alert series. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or levelling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.”

But this type of ‘real’ reality isn’t what people want to see. Most gamers want an escape from reality, but paradoxically want more levels of realism when making that escape. So what’s this about? I posted a blog a while ago that included some thoughts on, the Sublime, the Liminal and Moments of Epiphany. (16th Dec 2010). I was reflecting on why certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness. One aspect of the sublime I didn’t really unpick was the sublime as “an idea belonging to self-preservation” (Burke, 2009). In On the Sublime and Beautiful Burke goes through lots of different ways in which the sublime can be approached. At one point particular qualities of sound are picked out by Burke, such as the sound of far off cannon fire or a slow ominous beat, as being sublime in their effect. What runs through all his examples is a sense of thrill or excitement that is created by being able to observe something potentially fatal without having to actually experience death or near death. The rumble of far off cannon fire is very different to the experience of actually being fired upon, but there is still a thrill and adrenaline jump when you hear those cannons in the distance. The sublime could perhaps therefore be used as a concept within which to explain the need for an escape from reality, together with the need for higher levels of realism within the games that we use to affect our escape from reality.

Burke’s observations are similar to some descriptions of adrenaline addiction. As Lisa Fritcher (2009) has observed, “Some adrenaline junkies place themselves into dangerous situations. Others prefer to know that they are physically safe, but pit themselves against obstacles that make them feel unsafe”. What we do know is that a thrilling encounter creates a rush of endorphins that is simultaneously energizing and relaxing. However, this "feel good" hormone that was designed to alleviate stress on a short term basis or for emergency situations is something we can become addicted to, and as Hart (1995) suggests, adrenaline addiction can be the unfortunate outcome.

The physiological make-up of human beings lies at the core of how and why we behave. When an animal is confronted with a perceived threat it reacts. The animal will use as many resources as needed and as much energy as possible to deal with the threat. When faced with danger, the two main options are fighting, or getting away. In the face of danger, the body automatically induces high levels of physiological arousal which prepare the organism for emergency responses. (Hayes, 1994). As Atkinson (1996) explains, when the external balance is disrupted, our body changes its internal balance accordingly. These internal changes include; increased heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, which accompanies the pumping of more blood to the muscles, and the associated supplying of extra oxygen to the muscles and the increased work rate of the whole heart-lung system. This is linked to increased sugar rates in the blood, facilitating rapid energy use, and accelerating metabolism for emergency actions. Thickening of the blood then occurs to increase oxygen supply, enabling better defence from infections and to stop bleeding quickly.
What the individual experiences as these things take place is a sharpening of the senses. Your pupils dilate; hearing is sharper, muscle response faster and you think much more quickly with your body/brain. This is because you have increased blood supply to peripheral muscles and the heart, as well as to motor and basic-function regions in the brain but you also have decreased blood supply to your digestive system and irrelevant brain regions (such as speech areas). At the same time as all these events are occurring, endorphins; natural painkillers are secreted. (Atkinson, 1996; Hart, 1995, Hanson, 1986) This physiological explanation of what happens when we encounter a fight or flight situation mirrors what happens when we play a video game. If we let ourselves think there is danger to ourselves ‘self-preservation’ comes to the fore, and this lies at the core of both Burke’s idea of the sublime and the reason our chemicals kick in. Realism in gaming could therefore be read as the creating of more and more effective triggers for this response.

The recent development of procedural animation technologies, have allowed the development of games that rely heavily on the necessary suspension of disbelief to make your body think there is a real threat. The necessary levels of realism can now be facilitated by realistic whole-body muscle physics combined with ‘ragdoll physics’ as an integral part of the immersive gaming experience. Real-time simulation of biomechanics and a related motor control nervous system is now possible because of the developed link between software applications that simulate both evolutionary biology and robot control theories. As different areas of scientific understanding and technology are integrated and software developed that is compatible to 3D form generation and movement software, we will experience higher and higher levels of simulated realism. The lack of differentiation from the real world might of course become a problem, however ghost stories have always induced fear and excitement and the associated release of adrenaline and endorphins and we have never had any historical difficulty in sorting out the real from the imagined, I suspect therefore that we might still be able to sort out which is which. If we can’t differentiate fantasy from reality we will lose one of our essential survival mechanisms, but if we can fake it, we should also be able to spot the fake, as lying and truth detection have always been essential to the human condition.


Bibliography
Atkinson R. L. et al. (1999) Hilgard's introduction to psychology London: Wadsworth

Burke, E (2009). On the Sublime and Beautiful London: OUP

Galloway, A. R. (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture London: University of Minnesota Press

Hanson, P. (1986) The Joy of Stress London: Stoddart

Fritscher, L (2009) Adrenaline Junkie http://phobias.about.com/od/glossary/g/adrenalinejunkiedef.htm Accessed on 3. 12. 11

Hart, A. D. (1995) Adrenaline and Stress London: Thomas Nelson

Mirtich, B. V. (1996) Impulse-base Dynamic Simulation of Rigid Body Systems Berkeley: University of California http://www.merl.com/people/mirtich/papers/thesis/thesis.html Accessed on 4. 12. 11

Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas

I went to see the shadow puppet opera ‘Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas’ on Friday night in the Howard Assembly rooms. In this show, musician and shadow puppet artist Matthew Robins tells the heart-rending story of Flyboy, a mutant half-human/half-fly, who is trying to live a normal life in a small town. Animations projected onto the big screen created using on old overhead projector, lie at the centre of a live shadow-puppet opera as Robins and his band sing and perform on stage. It was great and a wonderful example of what you can do with low technology.
Matthew works with the puppeteer Tim Spooner and a band of musicians. The show was wonderfully low-tech: Matthew played piano and sang the story, while Tim worked getting all the cut outs onto the screen for the stories or at times using layers of video projection, paper backgrounds and puppets for pieces using live video and moving superimposed cut-outs.
One story called Nosferatu and Me, where Matthew and Nosteratu mostly ride around on their bicycles and then rent a DVD in the evening, is really so simple it is hard to believe it would work live on stage with a grown up audience, but it works very well and it’s very funny. But it does get all a bit awkward when Nosferatu gets too friendly.
Matthew Robins’ songs are very narrative driven and quite often have lots of complicated scenarios. He was finding it difficult to hold people's concentration in pubs and nightclubs where he was playing his own penned music, so he added live visuals using shadow puppets. As Matthew said, “It worked and suddenly people were really focused and would watch the whole show!”
He now says he is, “writing a rock-opera concept album about mutant spiders that will hopefully be a cross between Tommy-meets-War of the Worlds-meets-Bat out of Hell-meets-The Man from God knows Where”.
Nearly all of these animations are done by cutting out black paper using a sharp scalpel. An old OHP (I bet there are lots of these still hiding in cupboards in educational institutions throughout the country) was used to get the images enlarged and up onto a screen behind the musicians. This is almost the same technology as Indonesian Shadow Puppetry and works really well if you have a simple and clear narrative to tell, with easily identifiable characters. In this case ‘flyboy’ is an easy cutout, or at least Robins makes it look as if it is. If you want to test a character for easily identifiable visual characteristics, try cutting it out of black paper and then check out its silhouette.
I realise I’m working with people who want to use digital technology to carry their ideas. But most transmedia characters have had to stand the test of recognition across several platforms and media types. The narrative strength in this case is all. The short flyboy stories are gripping and easy to follow by children as well as adults. Perhaps ‘Flyboy’ could be a future children’s favorite. He has all the ingredients. Easily identifiable visual characteristics, a storyline that mirrors those of many heroes, including travelling on long voyages and meeting strange creatures, a love story and a Christmas adventure.

Using a case study in an essay

An audience watching Christian Marclay's The Clock

When looking at writing about certain aspects of film or game it is often useful to use case studies. Particular films or games can be examined and you can make your points with precision as well as be able to direct your reader towards the original material. In an essay it can be a way of being able to use your specific interest in a particular film and use it to illustrate a more general concept. In this case the relationship between editing and our experience of ‘time’ in film.


Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino Miramax Films 1994
Watch the clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQ-BpO4Gzo&feature=related

In the drug overdose scene at the movie’s midpoint, Vincent (John Travolta) attempts to revive Mia (Uma Thurman) by stabbing her in the heart with a hypodermic needle filled with adrenaline. The scripted scene fills us with tension. We hold our breath hoping that Mia is going to make it. The reason we hold our breath is because the script is written already “edited” for suspense.

How does Tarantino do this? By writing overlapping action. Tarantino’s script includes cuts to the needle, the red dot and the faces of the characters. These cuts lengthen the time needed for the real-time-event of the stabbing to occur.

Time in film is perhaps one of its most interesting aspects. A film runs for a specific length of time and we watch it in real time. However a film is rarely cut to reflect the actual time an action, narrative or event takes. One of the few that does this is High Noon a 1952 American Western that tells in real time the story of a town marshal forced to face a gang of killers by himself.



Because time is so important to our understanding of the world, a film director can shape our experience of it to heighten tension, confuse or disorientate us or suggest we are ourselves aging as a film develops. Christian Marclay's The Clock is perhaps the best example of a meditation on time in film. This 24 hour long film collects together thousands of clips from films, each clip referring to a specific moment of the day, these being edited together to make one complete day which if you want to experience it means sitting in the cinema for 24 hours and watching it in real time.

In Pulp Fiction, although Vincent counts out three seconds on the dialogue track, it takes three quarters of a page for the moment to take place—or 45 seconds of screen time. That means that we are holding our breath 15 times longer than Vincent’s three-second countdown suggests. Through purposeful use of editing, Tarantino’s script is guiding the reader’s emotional experience, and delivering a scene that itself can be imagined as a mini-movie.


The red spot


About to drive the needle in


Tarantino doesn’t write in descriptive sentences or paragraphs like novelists, but builds his scenes in shots. Each of his sentences implies a specific camera angle. “Implies” being the operative word here, as camera angles and lenses are not called out, but understood from his description.
The script’s pacing mimics what will later be seen on screen. Paragraph and sentence length suggests how long a shot will play on the screen. For example, a single one-sentence paragraph implies one shot. The implication is that it should play out longer on screen than would, say, multiple shots implied in a four-line paragraph. The white space buys the single shot time. Adding an editorial aside like “Mia is fading fast. Nothing can save her now” is like saying “hold on the shot.” It again gains the shot more screen time.
This excerpt (below) from the original script is taken from mid-scene.
The top line is from Tarantino’s script, where no camera information is given. The text below each line written in brackets in capitals relates to the camera shot actually used in the film.

Vincent lifts the needle up above his head in a stabbing motion. He looks down on Mia.
(LOOSE CLOSE-UP VINCENT) (VINCENT POV – MIA)
Mia is fading fast. Soon nothing will help her.
(HOLD ON MIA.)
Vincent’s eyes narrow, ready to do this.
(TIGHT CLOSE-UP – VINCENT)
VINCENT
Count to three.
Lance, on his knees right beside Vincent, does not know what to expect.
(WIDE SHOT – LANCE AND VINCENT)
LANCE
One.
RED DOT on Mia’s body.
(CLOSE ON RED DOT )
Needle poised ready to strike.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
LANCE
Two.
Jody’s face is alive in anticipation.
(CLOSE-UP JODY)
NEEDLE in the air, poised like a rattler ready to strike.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
LANCE (OS)
Three!
The needle leaves the frame, THRUSTING down hard.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
Vincent brings the needle down hard, STABBING Mia in the chest.
(MEDIUM SHOT)
Mia’s head is JOLTED from the impact.
(CLOSE ON MIA’S HEAD)
The syringe plunger is pushed down, PUMPING the adrenaline out through the needle.
(CLOSE ON SYRINGE PUMPER)
Mia’s eyes POP WIDE OPEN and she lets out a HELLISH cry of the banshee.
(CLOSE-UP ON MIA’S EYES)
She BOLTS UP in a sitting position, needle stuck in her chest---SCREAMING
(WIDE SHOT - MIA)

Writing cinematically requires understanding the language of film, knowing how to use it creatively and translating it into script form. Editing is just one of many film techniques. Lighting, sound effects, camera angles, camera positions, transitions, space, framing and so on are other tools available to the essay writer.

Although edited and added to by my own reflections most of this text is taken straight from ‘Cinematic Story Telling’ by Jennifer Van Sijll Published September 3, 2007
Find the original at:
http://www.moviemaker.com/ screenwriting/article/cinematic_storytelling_20080722/

Why do we like animation?

How to draw a rabbit that has swallowed a plate.

So what is it that makes animation so compelling? My own feeling is that it is very close to real life experience and yet at the same time is an abstraction from it. This allows me to get the essence of the communication without having to be confused by the details. As an artist who draws a lot, I try and use that basic link between experience and its abstraction as a way of creating metaphors for life and its meaning. There are of course other ways of doing this, such as writing or creating music and these can be put into animations as well, each element supporting the visuals, so that more and more complex communications can be achieved, but at the core of an animation is simply abstracted movement in time.

All of us have an innate understanding of life and the physical laws that underpin it, for instance when you bounce a ball you can catch it and throw it each time instinctively. But when it comes to making an animation, you have to interpret the ball's motion and re-create it frame-by-frame. Basically designing motion is translating daily experiences into a time-based, 2D platform. This ability to abstract and analyze perceptions that we normally take for granted is the real skill behind animation.

The first thing that therefore captivates me when viewing an animation is an experience parallel to my bodily experience of moving through the world and responding to the things that I experience in it. I can get involved in it because it’s like life and the difference between what is inanimate and what is animate is movement and movement means life is there.

The second thing I experience in an animation is that there is a degree of abstraction. All the superfluous stuff is eliminated and I’m allowed to concentrate on what the animator is asking me to concentrate on. In comparison a film has everything in it that is recorded through the lens and I have to select out what I think is the most important, just like I have to do in life. It’s therefore easier to understand what the animator is presenting and also a bit of a relief for my overloaded perceptual mechanisms.

In order to be a good animator I would therefore suggest you need to grasp some of the fundamental concepts and laws that govern the behaviour of objects within the real world. These objects will either be moving or moving in relation to something else. How the landscape changes as we walk through it is as important to our understanding as the quality of our movement through it. The way a pair of legs is animated changes as the character starts running, or begins hopping. This will of course change the way the landscape moves in the background. Figure and ground are vital relationships and ones that have been essential to all Western European Art since the Renaissance.

However this is not all about sight, it’s as much about touch and feel. We understand weight in a particular way and expect its consequences to be understood and visualised in a good animation. If this is working well our body starts to feel in tune with the animation. You could argue that a full phenomenological grasp of animation is essential to its understanding and that of all the arts except for dance of course, animation requires high levels of embodied reading.

An animation’s capacity to carry visual invention is enormous and I’m always impressed with a good animator’s grasp of visual possibility. In 1964’s "The Pink Phink" (DePatie-Freleng) the possibilities of painting on a flat surface and all the illusionistic tricks you can play with these are just there to be enjoyed.


"The Pink Phink"

However it’s Chuck Jones’s playing with the possibilities of impossibility that first of all drew me to animation. Just think about the implications of these images in the ‘real’ world. Impossible distortions, fragmentations and splits that go far beyond anything Cubism offered and visual paradoxes to fox even the most aware visual psychologist.









For a mouth to stretch this far what would the underlying bone structure be like? There is a visual logic here not far away from D'Arcy Thompson's theories of transformations in nature that can be found in his book ‘On Growth and Form’.


From 'On Growth and Form'


So in some extent we get back to where we started, an awareness of physics was I felt at the core of our understanding of good animations and in Chuck Jones’s case I’m looking at an awareness of biological evolution. Perhaps it’s an art-form that is forced to grasp the real world’s underlying scientific principles. Is it something to do with the suspension of disbelief I have when I rely on the fact that my eyes appear to operate using persistence of vision? Is it just that I’m a sucker for anything that stimulates my fight or flight mechanisms, my body's primitive, automatic, inborn response that prepares it to "fight" or "flee" from perceived attack, harm or threat to my survival?


A few favourite animators
The woman Czech animator Michaela Pavlatova’s short animations, in particular Laila, are a great exercise in what you can do with few resources. She uses simple Flash animations, to great effect.

See: http://www.michaelapavlatova.com/laila/

For me another classic is Don Hertzfeldt. His animated stick figures are very simple but his timing and characterisation are brilliant. See the stuff rejected from The Family Learning Channel or ‘I Am So Proud of You’. He still uses a 35mm rostrum camera to do all his animations.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgQqSVrkkag

Adrien Merigeau uses the computer to enhance rather than support his work. He has done music videos, such as the Villager’s 'Cecelia' but ‘Old Fangs’ and ‘Le Carnet de Chloe’ are really great mixes of technique and approach. However above all his films suggest a background in looking at comics.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR-Kox34wgk

Chuck Jones is of course just fantastic and I have used several images from his cartoons above to illustrate my ideas of visual invention. His ‘The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics’ is a brilliant exercise in how narrative can support formalism in animation.


Chuck Jones: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics’
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSbdvzbOzY