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Oct
10
Making Emotions Work for You
Just a couple quick comments on tonight's seminar, which I thought was pretty damn interesting. (by the numbers, clearly other people agree.) There was a lot of stuff said and while I did spend a couple very confused moments wondering why a Powerpoint presentation by Microsoft people looked an awful lot like it was made in Apple's "Keynote" software, mostly I was very attentive to what they were actually talking about. :P
I enjoyed the veritable moment of poetry, where design was described as "negating oblivion" and compared to trimming bonsai trees or creating a sculpture out of a block of marble. You don't create something out of nothing, you merely get rid of what doesn't belong. So very zen.
I also got a huge kick out of the design version of Godwin's law: the longer a design conversation goes, the more likely a comparison to the iPod will be made. But I digress!
I do admit, however, to some small disappointment about the examples that were talked about. In retrospect, I really should have expected it... this is Microsoft, and Halo is their flagship title. I don't personally have anything against it, but considering the fact that their talk was supposed to be about emotion in games, it's mildly frustrating to have the primary example be a game that I believe -- to quote Hermione -- has the emotional range of a teaspoon.
(if I am completely wrong about that assumption, and I could be as I've never actually played Halo, please ... kick me.)
So Jenova (haha, I didn't even know who it was until after Tracy was paraphrasing, and then I had a omg-it's-Jenova almost-fangirl moment :P ) and Tracy's questions at the end were of particular interest to me... and none of the resulting answers were all that satisfying. Oh well.
The only other thought I had was that I didn't think the whole psychology of emotion aspect was nearly as unintuitive as they kept implying it was. Hm.
I agree that the examples didn't match the depth of the theory. The Microsoft guys brought some great insights about the experience of emotions in games or any media, but in practice, the user testing seemed to come down to the same old call-response as always: "where are people dying? make those parts easier." I KNOW, from my little firsthand time in the GIL, that we get can deeper information out of our playtests than that.
Jamie Antonisse | Oct 12, 2007 at 6:24 PM