Establishing Forewarning in Games

I recently started reading a book on cinematography in my quest for learning about other creative industries to broaden my experience and understanding of games. The book is titled The Visual Story and it goes over the use of visual elements to affect the audience (or player) that is watching an image on a screen.

One point discussed early in the book is using visual cues to alert your audience to a certain mood or event that is going to occur. I started to think about games that use these cues.

Strangely the first thing that came to mind was using sound for these cues. For example in the film Jaws the "dun dun dun!" music always faded in when Jaws was around. In Resident Evil 4 you can hear the moaning ganados before you see them. The sound is established early on and then can be used to carefully control player tension later in the film/game. This is a very easy to understand cue that nearly every game in existence uses.

What about visual cues? The next game that came to mind was Doom 3. It uses changes in lighting to alert the player to when monsters are near. It is a very dark game overall but when the lights go out completely you know a monster is about to pop out. Even though the player knows it doesn't really take away from the fear.

Films often use specific color palettes to indicate a mood or emotion. A cliche example would be a light blue palette indicating melancholy or mourning. It got me thinking - with gaming technology focusing a lot on the quality of lighting these days what if that kind of dramatic changing light color palette was a forewarning for something occurring in a game?

Please excuse the terrible images that follow. I just got a Wacom tablet and was goofing off drawing some images for this post.

Imagine a third person shooter with an over the shoulder camera that is based in a modern time setting with fantasy elements. Something like Silent Hill in terms of visual mood but with a fat shirtless hero wearing a grass skirt (ahem, like I said, ignore the drawing). The player is exploring the world and everything looks normal as indicated by the blank background.


Oh crap, everything has turned blue. The player is being drawn into another world. Maybe this is the reality the main character sees through special glasses that reveal the truth of their world. It could be tied to the story or it could be tied to nothing and just a visual device for forewarning. The point is that once this blue atmosphere is established and if it only reveals itself periodically then meaning can be taught via the visuals.


As seen above for this example shooting game the meaning of the color was the typical "monsters are near." I really like the idea of using visual forewarning like this with absolutely no explanation as to why. I'd love to research the responses of players to different styles of establishing a connection between a strong periodic visual element and some kind of gameplay meaning. It would be interesting to see which colors, lighting setups, post process effects, etc. most affected a player's emotional state.

My example is fairly lame - there are games using this technique already in a similar way. Just like my example though, most games are using visual forewarning as an indicator that some kind of battle is going to take place. What about games that don't include fighting? I think a visual device like this can be just as strong if not stronger. It even works for games with no story at all.

Really, visual forewarning is used constantly in games. A "tell", or pre-animation before the action part of an animation, is a common forewarning in just about all action games. But I had never thought about its purpose and how it could be manipulated to illicit specific player responses. Taking those "tells" to a higher level where it isn't just a forewarning for a character action but for an entire game state is something I would like to try in the future.