No longer are the people in the show merely trainers – but gods and goddesses.  The performance takes a life of its own as the sea god and his cohort would ride the dolphins and flip in the air with them.  The dancing sky goddess and her birds would swoop from the skies touching the ocean surface while birds of paradise were released to fly over and around the dazzled crowd.  To punctuate the performance and bringing the show to its climax where the sea and sky meet in a singular dance would be a pulse-pounding musical number that resonated the entire theatre.  But what brings the whole performance together as a whole is the dreaming girl and her story.

Stories give people purpose and meaning.  It helps people make sense of their lives in an otherwise chaotic and meaningless world.  In a study conducted on children as young as two, it was found that children as young as two formulate and understand their world mostly through narratives and stories.  These studies were condensed into a volume called “Narratives from the Crib” and it shows a surprising amount of comprehension and understanding of the world through the stories a child who would tell herself before falling asleep.

Many of the rides and shows I’ve been seeing have been altered or changed so that they become part of a larger story.  For instance, to revitalize the “Enchanted Tiki Room” in the Magic Kingdom, the animatronic birds were given new life by infusing two characters into the song: Iago (the parrot from Aladdin) and Zazu (the bird from the Lion King.)  By adding these two characters into the performance, the “Enchanted Tiki Room” becomes part of two larger stories rather than an exhibit that doesn’t mean anything by itself.

Even through adulthood, we also are inexplicably drawn to the power of stories.  We spend billions of dollars on watching TV shows and movies.  It is an unquenchable thirst for meaning that fuels this desire for stories.  And, given the opportunity, people want to be part of the story – part of history.  That is part of the reason so many people are drawn to celebrities.

You may agree or disagree with this person.  But you cannot deny the power of his life story.

Miyamoto motioning for "Force Feedback"

Or maybe we just had the same thoughts on Microsoft’s Project Natal:

I don’t think as a creator that I could create an experience that truly feels interactive if you don’t have something to hold in your hand, if you don’t have something like force feedback that you can feel from the controller. That’s why I think the Wii remote, particularly with Wii MotionPlus, makes for such a strong experience.

I think that some of their designers are going to be faced with that question going forward, and they’ll have to find solutions to that, and perhaps that’s why you see for one of the devices that it’s not simply a camera, but that you’re holding some kind of wand with lights that change colors. I think those are interesting ideas, and there are interesting ways that that could be developed, but those are challenges that they’re still facing and trying to learn to overcome.

Humans can go without sight or sound - but not without touch

One of the things that make games fun is feedback.  In my post about gameplay and fun, seeing the feedback from various interactions is fun.  What is underestimated is how much a small interaction makes a difference.

For instance, when you depress the mouse button, you can feel it “click.”  What if you pressed on a mouse and you couldn’t hear or feel it click?  The small “click” makes a difference in feedback.  On a keyboard, I can type up to 110 words per minute.  But if you put me on a touchscreen where I cannot physically feel the keys depress, I will suddenly drop in speed.  Little tangibles make a difference in gameplay experience.

One of my favorite games to play in the arcade was the original Time Crisis.  It had a gun that when it fired, the breach would fire back like a real semi-automatic pistol.  I didn’t notice how much this little feature made a difference in the experience of the game until the home version of Time Crisis came to the Playstation One which came with a light gun.  After feeling the vibration from the arcade version of the game, the boring light gun just didn’t give quite the same experience.

When the PS3 came out and the first generation of Dual Shock 3 controllers came out without a rumble pack, there was a serious uproar.  The vibration features of a game made a serious difference in how people played because you could “feel” the game and removing the rumble feature was like removing one of your senses – specifically touch.  There was a huge relief to gamers that Sony quickly returned to putting rumble back into their controllers.

In fact, one of the major complaints of the iPhone in competing against the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PSPs is that there are no tangible buttons.

The big news from this year’s E3 is Microsoft’s “Natal” – a sensor that allows you to play a game with no controller – or rather as your whole body as a controller.  What I love about this is that Microsoft and Sony have taken a cue from Nintendo and started focusing less on pushing polygons and more on enhancing the gameplay experience.  Natal is an impressive piece of technology, and I am in awe that we are in an age of science fiction gone reality.

But where I think Natal goes wrong is because there is no controller – there is nothing tangible to hold, manipulate or use.  Imagine a driving game where you have to pretend that you are using a steering wheel.  Wouldn’t your arms tire out without holding onto a real steering wheel?  And even with game systems that have steering wheels to use with their controllers, isn’t the element of feeling the road and feedback missing?  The draw of arcade games is that those bulky machines can give you those sensations.

A Place to Make-Believe

In my rush to recreate one of my favorite arcade games “Afterburner”, I forgot that one of the major elements of fun for that game is the fact that I got to sit in a seat that looked like a fighter plane cockpit with a flight stick.  The cockpit would elevate according to the way I pushed the flight stick and it allowed me to feel like a fighter pilot.  When I tried to translate the same tangibles to keyboard and mouse, I quickly realized that I had made a mistake, but forced myself to finish Strike Eagle.

Where the Wii-mote has advantages is the fact that it is a controller – something you can touch.  You can swing it like a tennis racket.  When you strike the ball, it can vibrate and make a noise.  With Natal, without some sort of prop, you’re just swinging wildly.  Even when my son likes to pretend he is swinging a sword, holding a stick or a spatula makes a big difference thank swinging with nothing but air.

It’s these tangibles that make a big difference.

Passive Fun

WinAmp Visualizer

Watching an infant, you can see how most of what they enjoy is simply passive stimuli.  When they see a friendly face, they react.  When they see colorful lights or a pleasing sound, they react.  A lot of what they derive of fun is merely passive stimuli.

As an adult, the positive feelings of simple sounds and bright colors don’t draw us in nearly as strongly as it would as an infant or young child.  So as we get older, simple sounds are arranged into notes, and chords, and eventually songs.  Bright colors become images, and then motion pictures.  And as we grow in complexity, the complexity of positive stimuli, of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches become more complex, and arranged in a variety of crescendos, climaxes, and plateaus.

Passive stimulus isn’t limited to just shapes and colors (though I do occassionally catch myself staring at the song visualizes when using my computer music player), but a passive stimulus could be a TV show wherein the story itself is something people enjoy.

There is a delicate balance of overstimulating and understimulating.  Too much color, too much sound can actually create a negative reaction much like too little color, sound and sensory information.  A delicate balance must be struck for having too little, too much and just the right kind of stimulus at the right time.  Whole schools are dedicated to discovering and teaching the right amount of stimulus to create visual presentations, movies, songs, and even stories to tell.

But all of this is merely passive fun.

Interactive Fun

A favorite toy

As an infant gets older, he explores the world around him.  The world isn’t just something that stimulates senses, but is something they can interact with.  My one and a half year old loves to see blocks fall down when he swipes at them.  My four year old wants to throw a ball and see how high it goes depending on how hard and what angle he throws things.  All of these are fun in exploring the interactions of a particular world and getting reactions.

Some reactions are negative, such as touching something hot.  But some reactions are positive like throwing a ball and watching it bounce.  And then there is learning how to create sequences of interactions such as crashing toy cars together, or lining up dominos.  Fun is a series of interactions with positive feedback.

Reading books is a kind of interactive stimulus because it engages the imagination to create images out of words.  So it is more than the passive audio/visual stimulus of movies.  Books and words engage on the plane of an interactive medium because it is an interaction on the imaginary plane.

Game Fun

"Crush the Castle" - a Game of Knocking Over Blocks

After a couple years, a child learns how to string along a series of interactions to accomplish certain results.  But once those interactions are placed into a goal-oriented situation and place limitations on how to accomplish those goals, suddenly you have a “game.”  Instead of merely seeing the ball bounce, you try to catch the ball with your hands and then throw it back.  Instead of just throwing blocks around, try to stack as many as you can and as high as you can before your younger brother tears them down.

Within rules and goals, the physical properties of gravity, elasticity, collisions, momentum start to become meaningful.  And another level of fun opens up – that of accomplishing goals.

Here, there is a delicate balance of goals that are not challenging enough or goals that are too challenging.  A right balance of challenge and skill growth are important to keep a game “fun.”  Also a certain amount of positive feedback keeps the game interesting.  If there is little positive stimulus as a result of accomplishing a goal, or during the process of achieving that goal, then accomplishing the goal can be very boring and can quickly lose interest.  One can extrapolate this to apply towards exciting jobs and boring jobs as well.

Beyond Fun

From here, you can extrapolate social aspects of different kinds of fun.  Social passive fun, is like watching the theatre or listening to a live band play.  A social interactive fun can be talking, conversing, or even dancing.  A social game fun can be competitive or cooperative goal-oriented play like cards, or sports.

Explore the Island of "Myst" OR Blow all the baddies away in "FAR CRY"

There is also a certain tension between non-goal-oriented fun (passive or interactive) and goal-oriented fun (games).  The non-goal-oriented fun tends to be more immersive and exploratory.  It involves absorbing the world and living in it.  Goal-oriented fun in games tends to be an abstraction of the world – a goal and a rules set.  Thus, there is a kind of tension between exploration and discovery versus stimulating gameplay.  No one really takes in the beautiful scenery while being shot at.

Prince of Persia - A moment to take a breath and see

Some games do a very good job of balancing the level of immersion into the world and compelling gameplay.  Prince of Persia does a remarkable job of letting you have moments to breathe and see the world and vast expanses, beauty and heights of the world you are traversing – Ancient Persia.

Another dynamic to consider in the spectrum is that a good deal of “art” games focus more on the immersion and exploration, while there are games that are purely about gameplay and goals.  Unlike movies and cinema, “art” games are interactive, and therefore cannot be easily directed and paced because it relies on the user’s interactions rather than the forced momentum of a movie or narrative story.  However, since an “art” game is more focused on exploration and immersion, it can be more impactful and poetic than something that forces a “goal”.

Lastly, to address a question posed by Brian of JoyfulGames on using “art” games as a means for preaching the Gospel, consider the following:

When it comes to a relationship, everyone loves spending time immersed with one another’s presence, even if it means passively sitting down together and watching a movie.  But no one wants to be made into a “game.”  A game trivializes because it abstracts things into goals and rules – when the goal of a meaningful relationship is simply to “just be with one another.”  Who wants to get into a relationship with an agenda?

Admittedly, this is a problem.  Not only am I a jaded gamer, I could also be considered part of the “hardcore gamer” demographic – up to and including playing (and winning) a gaming tournament.  This skews my vision of what is considered “fun.”

My eldest son liked my game, but I could see he didn’t enjoy it.  It was too complicated for him and after a while, he lost interest.  And my wife didn’t like it at all.  She was proud of what I was able to accomplish with so little resources and time, but it wasn’t the kind of game that she looked forward to playing.

The “golden chalice” of game design is finding what this demographic likes to play – especially women who outnumber men on the Internet.  So I realized that I stepped away from making games for my boys and for my wife and made a game that I would play, but not them.  And even then, the graphics of Strike Eagle, though technically savvy, were not enough eye-candy to cover up its design flaws.

Over the last weekend, I was playing with my two boys.  The eldest was trying to stack a bunch of blocks while the youngest was trying to knock it down.  And they were doing it over and over again, laughing at blowing up castles made of blocks.  I was amazed at how something so simple could be so much fun.

So I thought back to the kinds of games I loved to play as a kid and instead of overcomplicating a design, I was thinking of doing something smaller, simpler and much more fun for my wife and kids – to make something that they would want to play over and over again.