Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

First, the basic content of the game sense 1, the player's most direct feelings and feedback when we are playing a game (especially some highly operational games), we may use floating, responsive, slow and other words to describe the feelings of the game, which we express is the most intuitive emotional or physical feelings. This inner sense of touch or movement when manipulating virtual objects may be our most basic description of the concept of the sense of play. If we ask a designer what the sense of play is, maybe ten people have ten different answers. For some designers, the sense of play refers to intuitive manipulation. In a game with a good sense of game, players can do what they want to do at any time without thinking too much. There are also some designers will focus on the physical interaction between players and game virtual objects, such as whether the interaction process between units (collision, squeeze) can be really felt by players. Perhaps for some designers, the quality of the game sense comes from whether the visual expression can bring a pleasant aesthetic experience to the players. But these descriptions do not allow us to accurately define the concept of the sense of play.

2. On the definition and concept of the sense of play, it is Steve Swink's book GameFeel that begins to explore and analyze the sense of play as a theme, in which he defines the three basic elements of the sense of play from the point of view of the player's experience and the definition of the game domain: real-time manipulation, simulated space and retouching. The sense of play is defined as the real-time manipulation of virtual objects in the simulation space, and enhances the sense of interaction through retouching, that is, the player controls the character, and the character interacts with the game environment, and the retouching effect strengthens these interactions and increases the attractiveness of the game.

The three basic elements of the sense of play coincide with each other to create a broad range of the sense of game. in the book, the three elements mentioned are grouped into a three-set vn diagram, and some examples are used to roughly illustrate the existence of different types of games: real-time strategy games such as StarCraft, because the player clicks the mouse to give a command to the unit at the end of the operation. The process of the operating unit is not a coherent process, so it does not belong to the category of real-time control. Similarly, Civilization 6 simply uses retouching to show interactive characteristics to give objects weight, volume and so on. These games have only one part of the three basic elements, so they do not belong to the defined sense of play. Although Steve Swink's definition of gameplay covers many video games, it does not cover all types of games. He explicitly excludes specific types of games from the sense of play he defines, so many game developers and scholars think that the concept of sense of play proposed by Steve Swink is a concept of sense of play that only aims at a specific type of narrow point of view, and the real sense of play should exist as a very important attribute of all types of games in the game field.

In addition, there are also developers and scholars who discuss the theme of the sense of play from other perspectives. For example, from the academic point of view of game aesthetics, Malm ö h ö gskola, a scholar at Malmo University, combines some existing theoretical frameworks in the fields of game design, interaction design, industrial design and aesthetics to provide a possible design method for the specific aesthetic experience in the game field; for example, vlambeer, an independent game development studio in the Netherlands, analyzes how to design more interesting games from a more practical point of view. At the same time, it also studies the diversity of game experiences of different players from the perspective of metaphors between game objects and their influence on players. Provide more abundant design tools for game developers. As game designers, we should consider how the skills, abilities and balance of the design make the players feel. From a certain point of view, the sense of play is the upper limit of the player's active challenge system, which is a sense of design habit against the player's strength, specifically a multi-sensory experience. Different from the previous definition of the sense of play in Steve Swink, we pay more attention to the tactile and visual aspects of the sense of play, and the understanding of the sense of play is more inclined to the emotional level of player interaction.

Second, the elements of game sense design roughly analyze some views and understanding of game sense at present, and this part mainly analyzes some necessary elements of game sense design from three aspects: flow, emotional design, feedback and game control.

1. The theory of flow from flow to sensation (Flow) is a psychological term first put forward by Hungarian psychologist Mihari Chickson. It refers to a state of high concentration of attention, which is equivalent to the feeling of concentration on a certain activity, in which people derive pleasure from the experience itself, not the reward they get. Flow theory is the most commonly used psychological theory used by game designers to study the relationship between emotion and games.

Flow theory is the basis of most wonderful game experiences, and it is suitable for all emotional intensity and types of games, such as exciting action games, brain-racking puzzles, interesting social interactive games, etc. all of these can produce flow because they occupy the player's mind all the time. In any case, if the flow disappears, the rest of the experience will become fragmented. Almost all games have to ensure the flow of flow, and the problems of those unfun games are also related to the disappearance of flow. The concept of flow will have a very important impact on our understanding of the game experience. In many designs about flow and games, we have discussed how games can make players feel, and there are also some games designed based on this concept, such as "Flower", "Journey" and so on. When designing games, we will naturally regard flow state as the basis for a more in-depth study of the sense of play.

In his book, Mikhail Chickson proposes eight sufficient and necessary conditions for an experience to achieve a flow state: ① is challenging and skillful; ② is focused; ③ is targeted; ④ has clear and immediate feedback; ⑤ is deeply involved without being far-fetched; ⑥ 's fun-filled experience makes people feel free to control their actions; ⑦ enters a state of ecstasy; and ⑧ changes the concept of time. In the above conditions, the source of the sense of play mainly depends on dynamic immersion and clear interactive feedback, which are also two goals that can enable players to achieve the flow state.

2. Emotional design if we find a player and ask him what he thinks of a certain game, he may keep telling you the whole set of theories formed in his cognition about whether the game is fun or not. In fact, the emotion hidden behind the game is the basis on which they come to the conclusion, and it is very important how a game brings us various feelings. We all know that the core experience of a game is either on the fun of playing or on the emotions of the player. Emotion is the center of cognition, which in turn motivates people to do something spontaneously. The emotional aspect of design is a very important part in the field of user experience design (UX). There are many studies on the complex relationship between psychological needs, emotion and interaction, and many methods derived from user experience design have been cited in game design, and many studies have successfully bridged the gap between game interaction design and user experience design.

In the field of experiential design, there are three levels of design, namely, design product, design experience and design emotion. Design product is the most basic level, focusing on the functionality and portability of the product or service; the design experience is to consider how to make the use process more smooth and comfortable, and how to convey information more effectively. But for users, an experience no matter how the content is done, if it finally makes the participants have the desired emotion, then it is successful, so they should stand on the emotional level to think about the various designs. Perfect design is close to control, and what it controls is emotion. As a game designer, perceiving and understanding fleeting subtle emotions is a very important design ability, such as anger, joy, or disgust, which is the true meaning of the game. It is also the reason why players are willing to spend time, energy and money in the game.

The emotions of players in the game include a variety of short-term emotions, as well as some longer-lasting and more complex emotions. A variety of short-term emotions, including joy, anger, sadness, joy, fear, call and so on, these are the most common and most easily generated and understood emotional elements, these short-term emotions can be well used to enrich the game experience. After designing a certain game, you can choose an emotional element and add it when deciding what kind of experience you want to give to some players. For example, when designing a large-scale pvp confrontation game, when the overall situation is designed and the value has been balanced, add specific emotions to some of the players on this basis, and adjust the ability of some players on one side at the beginning of the game, supplemented by pressure, different adjustments may bring fear, tension or excitement to the players. This is also a method often used in many asymmetric competitive games. In addition to short-term emotions, there are many psychological effects that can easily affect players. With the development of psychology, many psychological effects have been found. at the same time, people also find it difficult to avoid being affected by their own rationality, such as prejudices, delusions, obstacles and so on. In short, how to design the emotional level of the game experience is an important part of the game sense design.

3. Feedback and game control apart from the design content at the emotional level, the core that we often pay attention to when discussing game design is the design of complex game manipulation and interaction in the game. these are all related to feedback and the relationship between feedback and game control. if we regard a game as a feedback system, then the sense of play can be regarded as the direct performance of the feedback system. The mechanism of the game is actually a rule-based system or simulation, which uses feedback mechanisms to promote and encourage users to actively explore the possibilities that exist in the game. The core of this system is the concept of feedback loop that encourages learning (see figure): the player performs an action-the action will have an effect in the simulated game world-the player receives feedback-with new tools and information. The player performs another action based on the new cognition. To design a sense of play, in a way, is to design enough feedback to stimulate specific feelings or emotional responses.

In his book, feedback Loop Steve Swink analyzes two important elements of the real-time control plane: input and response. From the designer's point of view, which parts of the input device and how to use them will affect the player's sense of control over virtual objects, and all inputs will eventually become signals, mapping the adjustments of some parameters in the game. These adjustments can be thought of as an orderly response to the input, ostensibly just mapping buttons and events, but how to make the player's actions work. Is what designers need to consider. If we want to measure the response of a particular game, we will see how the signal from the input device maps to the changes in the game. The system adjusts those parameters, how to change the parameters over time? For example, in "Thor Hammer", the rotation angle of a character in three-dimensional space closely corresponds to the distance the mouse moves on the desktop, but the proportion in the horizontal and vertical direction is not the same. The rotation of the perspective is not very large when moving the mouse up and down, this is because the game itself determines that the player needs to adjust the horizontal angle of view faster to aim. In other games, such as those operated with a joystick, pushing the joystick a little to the left will cause the star to move to the left at a slower speed, while pushing to the end to the left will move as fast as it can.

The mapping feedback of different games for player control is different for designers, there are many elements that can be designed at the interactive operation and feedback level, which can be roughly divided into three categories: movement and action, event feedback, time manipulation. Some of the common methods used to create a sense of play in these three types of design elements are described in detail later.

Third, the method of shaping the sense of play 1. To create a dynamic sense of immersion aimed at flow, Mikhail Chickson, the proposer of the theory of dynamic immersion, explained the sense of immersion as: when people are fully engaged in the situation when they are engaged in activities, and filter out all irrelevant perceptions and enter a state, at the same time, he also put forward a series of theories to help people enter the state of immersion. These theories are applied to different fields to improve the interactive experience. In order to maintain a person's sense of immersion, the activities he participates in need to strike a balance between "the difficulty of the activity itself" and "the ability of the participants". If the difficulty of the activity exceeds his ability, then the participant will be anxious because of the suppression of the activity; on the contrary, if the difficulty of the activity is lower than his ability, the participant will feel dull again. Fortunately, humans have the ability to endure, which leads to a vague area between "too difficult" and "too boring", an area that does not produce anxiety and boredom. Because of the relationship between "difficulty" and "ability", immersion theory has been applied to teaching and sports and other fields. The famous GRE test is a design based on immersion theory.

In the part of game design, the player's immersion experience refers to the experience when a player is fully involved in a game, and when this experience occurs, the player will no longer pay attention to the time around him and forget all the external pressure. In this part, we can use the dynamic difficulty adjustment method for players, which is based on the immersion theory to enable players to make subconscious choices, so as to help players customize a game experience that is more suitable for themselves. rather than using the method of analyzing game process data to produce a passive experience. As mentioned earlier, there are eight necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving a flow-state experience. From the perspective of game design, the following parts are necessary to create a sense of immersion in the game: ① games are rewarding and players have the ability to play; ② games provide the right challenge difficulty in line with the player's ability; ③ players need to have a sense of control over the characters in the game. ④ games will make players lose their sense of time and self-awareness. In order for a game to be accepted by different types of people, the game itself needs to adjust the challenge (difficulty) of the game based on the player's ability.

The first thing we need to use is the concept of dynamic difficulty adjustment, referred to as DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment), which is a more direct and idealized concept in the field of game design. As the name implies, the difficulty of a game should be dynamically adjusted according to the player's ability and performance. Many game development teams have applied this theory to game design. EA even applied for a patent for the first dynamic difficulty Adjustment (DDA) system six years ago, which uses artificial intelligence in the cloud to adjust the difficulty of the game according to the interaction of players, so as to increase the duration of the game. In this article, our goal is to build a dynamic game immersion with DDA.

(1) expand the immersion area of the game:

The first method is to expand the immersion area of the game, providing a wide range of gameplay, different difficulties and tastes to build players' sense of immersion in the game. If the content of a game is attractive to the player itself, then the game is designed to keep the player in a state of immersion and finally complete the game. in other words, the designed game system needs to keep the experience of different players within the scope of immersion.

The red curve in figure 1 represents a player's actual experience during a period of the game. A particular part of these game experiences may make the player feel more difficult or easier than he expected, but he can still put up with these situations, so his immersion experience can be maintained within the scope of immersion. If the actual experience is far away from the "immersion zone", then the negative mental effects-anxiety, boredom-will interrupt the player's immersion experience, but it is also possible that a well-designed game can keep the average player immersed, but it may not be able to immerse the ashes or rookie players. Therefore, in order to make a game reach a wider audience, the experience of the game to the players should not be linear or even static. Accordingly, we need to provide a wider range of potential experiences to adapt to the immersion areas of different players. In order to expand the immersion area of the game, the design of the game should give the gameplay a wider change. From very simple tasks to very complex problem solving, the game should allow different types of players to constantly get moderate difficulty (quantity) challenges in the process of immersion. These different gameplay options should be perceived by the player, so that the player can identify and invest in the corresponding game experience at the beginning of the game.

Expand the immersion field of flow (2) create a dynamic immersion experience

As designers, we often adjust our designs repeatedly through game tests so that players can enter the immersive game state as expected, but the game experience gained by such adjustments only comes from designers and testers. They cannot represent a large number of different groups of players, so this adjustment only creates a passive and static game experience for players. Unable to adapt to different types of players. We will use some data samples, such as the total number of enemies killed, hit rate, head burst rate, to objectively evaluate the performance of players, but there will also be such a situation: a player is very comfortable in "GTA" to try the difficult skill of suicide, while the difficulty adjustment system is set to judge the player's skill is very poor according to the number of deaths. Or the player who jumps around in a level of "dead cell" does not choose customs clearance but enjoys the feeling of the operation, but the system thinks that the player has encountered problems in target selection. This is also the problem faced by many DDA systems, that is, they only focus on balancing difficulty and ability, but neglect to let players feel their sense of control over game activities. So the second method is to create an active DDA system for players, so that different players can play at their own pace, and what they can do at the system level is to give players the right to control the course of the game, such as in some level games, let players make their own choices to decide whether to enter a more difficult level or return to a simpler one, rather than climbing all the way up.

(3) embed DDA selection in gameplay

Finally, a more direct approach is to embed an active mechanism in the game that allows players to control the immersion experience in the game, allowing players to "make choices" as part of the game itself, and eventually let them ignore the existence of these options. the advantage is that the choices players make are closer to intuition and reflect their true wishes. There are many games that can be handled in this way. For example, as early as the arcade era, CAPCOM actually installed this system in works such as "Quick the whirlwind". For example, the dlc of xiao Blade 2 also has many options that allow players to choose on their own. These parameters can be specific to some direct numerical parameters, such as enemy blood volume, frequency, skill duration, and so on. You can also set a more integrated parameter such as "how fast the difficulty increases" as in the "CAPCOM horizontal Game Collection" launched in 2018.

The setting of the difficulty of the game in the whirlwind

To cite a few examples of the difficulty customization of "different Blade", the domestic independent game "floating flow" uses the simplest control to allow both casual gamers and non-players to participate, but it also reserves some space for ashes players to master. The game offers a wide range of gameplay, from "simple swimming around" and "predation" to "selective evolution" and "high-intensity combat". The game is divided into 20 levels, each introducing new creatures and new challenges. In different forms of traditional games, players need to complete the current level before they can move on to the next level, but "flow" gives players the right to control the progress of the game. At the same time, the game also reduces the death penalty very low. if the player dies at a certain level, he is just pushed back to the relatively easy level. In addition, players can also choose to avoid the challenge, skip this level, and return to this level later.

Chen Xinghan's independent game work "FLOW" who understands FIFA should be able to clearly feel the dynamic balance mechanism of FIFA. From the beginning of FIFA17, there has been similar adjustment and treatment of difficulty after a winning streak or losing streak. The DDA code of FIFA has also been circulated on the Internet before, such as scoring a goal in the first 5 minutes, leading 2 goals, holding the ball more than 70% and more than 20 minutes, and shooting more than 5 times in the first 30 minutes. Or the adjustment of the reduced difficulty coefficient, such as trailing by 2 goals and holding the ball less than 30% after 30 minutes.

FIFA15 also has a classic case of the game dynamic difficulty adjustment system is "biochemical Evil 4", which dynamically adjusts the difficulty of the level according to the player's ability. If the player can dodge cleverly and shoot accurately, then the game will become more difficult, and each attack of the enemy will cause more damage. On the contrary, if the player is always dead or injured, the game will become simple. The enemy's health and shaking before the attack will also become lower, and as the player becomes more skilled, the items in the box will fall less. In short, if the player plays smoothly all the way, the difficulty will be revised up. If the player stumbles, the difficulty will be revised down. Even in the subsequent series of biohazard works, these will also affect the enemy's moves.

"biochemical crisis 4" this article comes from the official account of Wechat: GameTube (ID:GameTube), "[Game sense] A brief Analysis of Game sense Design from the Perspective of Interactive experience [Part ①], [Part ②] author: Zoe

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