Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

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.

1Up.com has recently posted an interview with Kenji Eno, a Japanese creator who made extremely creative and bizarre games in the 90′s. I have to be honest – before reading the article I didn’t know much about Mr. Eno. The interview is quite long, clocking in at 10 pages but is worth a read.

When Eno starts talking about his past and the risks that he took to creatively do what he wanted to do it is inspiring. He talks about the realities of the game business and running an independent studio:

KE: Actually, I had first formed an independent game development company called EIM [in 1989,] several years before Warp. Since the beginning of my career, I had wanted to create original games, and so I went independent in order to do that. But after a while, even if I was making original games, I was forced to put licensed characters in the titles. And that was pretty tough on me, and I got mentally unstable at a point.

This was my own thing, and the company had money and all that, but I couldn’t stand creating games that I didn’t want to create. And, also, I had to tell my people that making character games is cool, and that licensed characters are cool, so we should create them, but I myself wasn’t convinced of that — and yet, I had to convince them of that. So I closed EIM. Toward the end, there was a period where I wouldn’t even go to my office because I was so upset.

On constantly moving toward the future:

KE: Not really. I have no interest in my own past — like, what I did in the past, what sold, how much, and so on. And the same goes for other people; I have no interest in what other people did in the past. So, like, instead of working on something I did in the past, I would rather be working on something new. I want to move forward. You have a short life; you’re going to die someday. So I don’t want to waste my time looking back on something I did in the past. But if I get into a really critical situation where I’m forced to do that in order to make a living, I might do that. But until a critical situation comes up, I’m not interested in looking back. Life is short! There’s no time to look back!

This type of uncompromising creative is unusual and the interview is great. It’s clear that Eno understands the business aspect of the game industry and has managed to work within the system to create much of what he and his teams wanted to create. It takes a person who is willing to take a lot of risks, both financially and career wise, is a leader, and has talent to pull off what he has been able to accomplish.

Kudos to Shane Bettenhausen and James Mielke at 1Up who put the interview together.