Celia Wagar's CritPoints

Kinesthetics are the way games feel to us, also called Game Feel (as named by the book Game Feel, and I highly recommend reading it to anyone out there). The way a game feels is heavily tied to how it conveys information to us and the level of control we have over it. The way a game’s interface and the animations ingame are designed determines a lot of how a game feels to play. Humans have a sense of “visual proprioception” for games and even animated cartoons. When there is a character or moving body we become invested in it, and feel its motions in a simulation of the way we feel our own, similar to how we can recall the feelings of motions in our own mind and play them out in our head. We project ourself onto the things we see, the things we touch. It’s why I wince when I get shot in the back, it’s why people tilt their controller in racing games, it’s a big part of why the Wii took off.

Crouch jumping as a mechanic, is kinda arbitrary, but from a kinesthetic point of view, I just don’t want to do without it. When I play Half Life or Team Fortress 2, I have a sense of my characters body as I jump through the air, and crouch jumping is like pulling my feet up so I can go a bit higher, something I do in real life when I hop onto high rises in parks and balance on the edge. It’s a very natural motion to me, and it feels great to pull up my legs in a game to get that extra boost.

Despite how important interesting choices are, not everything necessarily has to be an interesting choice, sometimes you just have to do something, like 360 inputs in fighting games on grapple characters, L Cancels in Smash Bros, slashing an enemy to finish them off in No More Heroes, Snaking in Mario Kart DS or F-Zero GX, or the static bullet spray patterns in Counter Strike. I think that sometimes games are richer for having these things, because no matter how many rules a system has, it’s gotta add up to something coherent.

360 and 720 inputs in fighters are tough and require a lot of setup to perform, because otherwise you end up grabbing nothing, and this helps convey the whole idea of how tricky it is to land such a powerful move in addition to being a natural force that prevents command grabs from being too powerful. It’s a tricky motion that gives a lot of feedback and as a result feels awesome to pull off. To do a standing 720 is considered a sign of mastery over grapple characters in Street Fighter. Ordinarily to perform a 720 in a match, you need to jump in, or dash in to buffer it, and the sheer execution difficulty of doing it in place combined with the even greater feedback from the animation of the 720 than that of the 360. Honestly, every attack I do in fighting games I judge its power based purely on the feedback I get from it than anything like the health bar or actual statistics. Across fighters, more powerful moves have animations that feel more powerful, and responses to them that feel more powerful and this is a huge part of the feeling of fighting games.

In Super Smash Bros 64 and Melee, there is a technique called Z Canceling, or L Canceling (The official Smash Bros 64 website called it Smooth Landing), where if you input L, R, or Z shortly before hitting the ground, you would halve your landing time. A friend of mine always compared it to tucking in your legs before landing, or sticking the landing. It’s always advantageous and there’s no reason not to do it, but if you remove it like the mod Brawl+ did, instead halving everyone’s lag automatically, then the game just doesn’t feel the same. Project M later added in a white flash on doing it which added a positive feedback for confirmation, which is even better for players, especially those still learning the technique.

In No More Heroes, when an enemy is low on health and you hit them, a circle appears on the screen and an arrow spins around in it until it settles on a direction, then you slash in that direction to finish the enemy off. It’s more than a bit indulgent, but it completely works. It helps that they have a fancy canned animation of Travis powering up his beam katana and a huge hitfreeze when the enemy explodes into a cloud of red mist, sliced in half, pieces sliding to the ground.

Snaking in Mario Kart and F-Zero GX are tactics named for the way people who use them wind across the track in a serpentine pattern. In Mario Kart DS’s case snaking involves drifting and mashing left and right to get the drift boost as fast as possible, then drifting the opposite direction and doing it over back and forth across the track. In F-Zero’s case, it involves holding left and L, then smoothly switching to right and R over and over, to carve a wavelike pattern into the track. In both cases, it looks like stylish handling of the vehicle and it makes you reconsider the way you travel across the tracks to accommodate for your snake-like twists.

Static Bullet Spray patterns in games like Counter Strike enable players to learn which way the bullets go and adjust their aim accordingly to fire more accurately. What this does is, it allows the game to have guns that spray fire everywhere like actual guns do, but players can learn how to control the recoil of the gun with practice and aim more accurately, similar to learning how to deal with recoil in real life, giving a sort of relatable context to the action.

This may sound a bit odd, but to some degree I think this sense of momentum exists in board games or card games as well. Yomi and Puzzle Strike, games by David Sirlin that I can’t stop mentioning, have mechanics in them that to me feel like they have a certain weight or momentum to them. In Yomi, when I play a thunderclap with Rook, then chain it into more thunderclaps, it’s a strategy almost like Hugo’s linked claps in Third Strike. Or when I use a throw on someone with rook and do big damage but can’t follow it up, the way its designed suggests slamming something on the ground in the way none of the other characters seem to with their throws. Sirlin has gone to a great deal of effort to give all of his characters a sort of personality that is represented in the way they play that I personally relate back to fighting games. A lot of traditional gaming fans will say, the crunch has to match the fluff.

In a big way, kinesthetics represent the most fundamental conceptual part of how players interact with a game. All the details on interesting choices, framedata, physics, and so on, all add into how a game can feel to someone playing it. This is reflected in the level design, in the way the characters are animated, in the weapon choice, in the amount of damage different attacks do, in the overall lethality of the game, in the speed of the characters, in the way some moves connect and others don’t. There’s not any ostensibly or universally right or wrong way to do kinesthetics, unlike something like balance or depth of strategy which will or will not produce results, however there are certainly guidelines and kinesthetics can themselves help inform the way the system is designed.

In a big way, the right way to do video game design is to come up with these kinesthetic feelings and figuring out how to work rules and goals into that. Like the feeling of skydiving, extreme speed, straining to lift something and crashing it down onto something else, hopping across high places. Video games are simulations of space. Space, time, and other analog pieces of information are things that humans are naturally adept in dealing with and respond well to interacting with. Many of our most powerful games are things that have a strong kinesthetic sense and identity, such as Tetris, Mario, Sonic, Quake, Doom, Dark Souls, Castlevania, Megaman, Katamari, Megaman Zero, Shadow of the Colossus, God Hand, Devil May Cry, Pac Man, Street Fighter, Need for Speed Shift, F-Zero, Mario Kart, The Receiver, Okami, Kirby, Prototype, Infamous, Prince of Persia, Tribes, Jak and Daxter, Space Marine, Metroid Prime, Section 8, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Trauma Center Wii, and No More Heroes. Each of these has a unique and distinct feeling to the players that helps differentiate them and create an identity for them. Good Kinesthetics is as much about establishing a connection with the player as it is creating a unique identity for the game, which is part of why there aren’t any real rules on the right and wrong ways to do kinesthetics. However you can’t build a game on pure kinesthetics alone and No More Heroes is a great example of that. No More Heroes had spectacularly expressive animations and tons of segments and features that played with the player’s feelings of kinesethesia, but it fell flat in a lot of other ways. Without a solid system of interesting choices and other systems to create depth, a game has very little left.

I’d argue that beyond this, Quick Time events are a cheap way of trying to cash in on kinesthetic sensation. They have next to no gameplay elements, but are an barely interactive reaction to a kinesthetic experience. However the trouble with them is that all the inputs in these sequences tend to lack context. Actions done in standard gameplay have an established precedent and predictable context where quick time event cutscenes are segregated from normal play and consist of inputs that have no connection to anything. Quicktime events can be done better having them smoothly cut into normal play like in No More Heroes’ or God Hand’s case and by having an established context for the action you’re performing versus its outcome. In God Hand, there are quick time events that involve either escaping an opponent by rapidly pressing left and right, and ones where you mash the buttons to stack on damage or beat out an opponent’s attack. What’s great about these is that they have anticipation, the player is given warnings of it on screen before it happens in the form of the enemy approaching the character, and it cuts into the quicktime event, and during the quicktime event itself, it displays how well you’re doing. In the case of the mashing QTEs, as you mash faster, so does Gene on the screen. Best of all, all the QTEs are generally optional. The escape ones are like a last ditch attempt to escape the enemy if you mess up and get grappled, and the mash ones are a bonus if you can manage to dizzy an enemy.

In a big way, game design is about capturing interactive experiences we have, quantifying them, and enabling other people to experience and create new experiences with them. As I say, Art is the conveyance of nonliteral information. Despite being nonliteral and abstract, information is very quantifiable and this can be reflected in the design of a game.

Kinesthetics is also partially a matter of using metaphors in the form of input methods to represent actions appropriately relative to how users trigger them, such as how countless console first person shooters use triggers to shoot, Shadow of the Colossus had you grip with a shoulder button, fighting games have you go down, downforward, forward, punch to throw a fireball or otherwise use a move that moves forward, Smash Bros has directional inputs plus buttons to trigger attacks that go in specific directions, Skating games have you balance by trying to keep an icon from sliding off a bar,

This essay is meant to address the game design equivalent of pacing in films. In films there is establishment, development, twists, and conclusions. The 3 act structure. In games there is a progression between the point where you don’t understand anything of a concept, where you know a bit of the concept, and where you are so familiar with a concept that you can have your predictions fooled or distorted about a new situation.

Phase 1: Teach
Phase 2: Challenge
Phase 3: Subvert

Level design is the essential process of progression through a game. Its intent is to lay bear how the game works, test the player’s mastery of it, then try to destroy the player by all means possible once the player understands how to combat it. Good level design can be judged by the phase of the game, and by how well it constrains the player while also letting the player play off it. Phase 3 is the type of level design that we want to aspire to, but the other stages must exist because a player must learn. They can’t play at the top level immediately. This is why difficulty curves exist, to bring the player up to the top. From this point of view, level design is a process of crushing the player via any means possible, and making them accept their defeat. It’s an iterative process of building the player up so you can fairly send them to fall. To use the classic metaphor, give them enough rope to hang themselves with.

Portal and especially portal 2 is a game that never moved past phase 1, and their dev commentary expresses this. Portal 1 later on got into phase 2, and the challenge chambers satisfied phase 3. Portal 2 lacked at anything past phase 1

To a smaller extent, every area and new mechanic has to go through these phases, where first the player is taught about the new thing, the lay of the land, the new enemies, the new tools, and how they’re used or work, then they go through challenging the player, and

Beyond that, level design, and game design in general is a process of both giving the player things to work with, and making it hard on him. In general, the thought goes, how can you make this harder on the player in an intellectual way? The easiest way to make something hard is just to give the player almost no ammo and tons of enemies in tiny space without options for escape, but this isn’t interesting, it isn’t smart for the player or developer, and it’s not good level design.

A better thought process is to think about giving the player options, and the enemies means of countering these options. The difficulty comes from using the environment to the advantage of the player, from making the correct choices given the tools offered. To both succeed in terms of manual dexterity, and in terms of intellectual problem solving. Games that aim for one or the other often get neither. Beyond this, a good way to think about level design is as a process of giving the player things to do, ways to succeed, and then thwarting them, so that the player must dig deeper to try to find viable strategies. If there is a common way to exploit enemies, instead of just removing it, leave it in but give enemies a way to fight back. If there is a spot on the map where the player can stand and never get hit, then either trim it out, or put a firepit there, or make it so the player can’t hit anything while there either. If the players can easily avoid enemies by just ignoring them and running past them, then make the enemies chase them or block off exits. If you give the player the option to heal then have enemies try to close in if the player tries to get in a safe spot to heal.

A great recent example of this sort of thinking would be hotline miami which is heavily based on taking out enemies and provoking them. Enemies carry guns and melee weapons. You start out each level with just your fists. Your fists are silent, and you provoke enemies by being seen. Your fists however are inefficient, and you must pummel the enemy on the ground to guarantee they will not attack you again. Melee weapons generally have a better range than fists and kill instantly, and can be thrown to stun enemies. They are also generally silent. Guns have limited ammo, and are generally trickier to aim than melee weapons, but they kill and can do so at a distance, but the cost is that they make a loud sound which can provoke enemies that cannot see you.

Notes for expansion:
twists early on disrupt learning and consistency in the learning environment
owata style games are universally simple, so that they can throw tons of twists

Alternate proposal for phases:
1. teach
2. test
3. challenge

In games there have seemed to me to be a division between the immediate and pressing ways a player plays the game, the “primary” play mechanics, and the more far off managerial systems that seem to guide the primary play. To help elucidate the differences between these I coined the term low level and high level mechanics, such as to play on the similar seeming distinction between low level and high level programming languages. At the time I was not totally certain of the difference between the two, merely that it seemed evident to me that there was a distinction.

This concept came to me after my lamentations with new MMOs, that all of them seem to pursue new and interesting managerial mechanics, like owning land, player government, construction of player buildings and so on, but none of them have the combat to back up such systems, and the other activities they sport, such as crafting, harvesting, and trade are even less robust than their shallow combat systems. I wanted to have all these clever ideas MMOs kept coming up with, however I knew that each of these MMOs still had the same boring gameplay up front, so I was perturbed.

The other source of this line of inquiry was the game mass effect, which had lackluster cover based shooting, its real focus seeming to be the system of choices made by the players over the course of the three games, some of which had long term consequences, such as whether characters in the player’s party lived or died, were more loyal to them and thereby got stat buffs and which missions the player got to play out. It seemed to me that the primary system was the combat, it was the direct series of interactions that determined success or failure, and yet the focus of the work overall was on the conversations, which had all the same impact as a mere level select screen. The dialogue almost never determined success or failure, and the consequences were more long term, making the game harder or easier, or simply playing in a different style.

As of recent conversations, my conclusion is that the difference I was after was one of short term versus long term consequences. Combat is something very direct, and failure in it was rather immediate, all the interactions and consequences of combat being very short term, with few states persisting longer than a second. Things like leveling up, different builds, resources, character selection, level selection, and type effectiveness are all more long term, being less consequential in an immediate sense on whether the game is won or lost. In RTS games a similar concept exists of micro versus macro play, with micro being how individual battles are won, and macro being the efficiency of resource gathering and allotment for an RTS player.

Between these are things like super bars, health meters , and stamina gauges that tie more directly into the outcome of a fight, but still bridge context for a gameplay encounter and may even be critical in the short term, such as deliberately kicking a player many times in dark souls to erode their stamina and break their guard, where things such as the soul system and level ups and weapon upgrades are far less influential on a player’s success in any direct terms. In a fighting game, this is like deliberately whiffing attacks to build up meter versus the more high level action of selecting a character and fighting style on the character select screen.

Beyond this high level systems play into low level systems and can frequently drive specific types of low level play. The most obvious example being experience points earned from defeating enemies motivate players to fight instead of run away, thereby making the game more deep and difficult by demanding players figure out when they should risk fighting or simply avoid combat.

However there are a few things that can only really be accomplished with low level systems and things that high level systems are necessary to mediate at the low level. A common trend is that with high level systems, at best they can only determine the style or difficulty of play, not be directly responsible for whether the player wins or loses. If a game encourages playing it in a multitude of styles, then it cannot make progression impossible for a player’s decisions there, such as only one style obtaining the master key item and having the way forward only open with the master key. In mass effect, as far as I know, there is only one dialogue option that will instantly kill you if you choose wrong. The reason for this is that dialogue has no mediating system that determines the outcome of interactions, it is purely the fiat of the author, so dialogue in games can only fairly control things like level select, which are not instrumental to beating the game.

Back on the low level, many low level systems, such as different moves with unique tradeoffs as in a fighting game, can only work if there is a mid level system, such as a health bar, governing them, so that attacks can have larger payoffs relative to the situation, and express a broader depth of interactions. Otherwise a number of attacks based on being lower priority but paying off better simply cannot work.

Furthermore, hard counters can only exist on the low level, where at the high level there can only be soft counters or no counter. If hard counters existed at the high level, such as in a fighting game, then what is a complex game with a wide series of interactions all across, may be reduced to a simpler game of just picking the character that automatically wins against your opponent, producing an overall simpler game resembling rock paper scissors. Counters that do exist at the high level must be soft, because they have the longest term effects relative to the length of the game, and if their effect is absolute, then it invalidates many of the game’s other systems, producing a more shallow game overall.

The issue that I see with many games, such as deus ex, mass effect, skyrim, and others, especially rpgs, is that such a focus goes into their high level systems, that the low level is shallow and uninteresting, producing a game that is less about the direct process of winning or losing and more about allocating stats correctly or grinding enough to win, which is less interesting because the consequences are less direct and more long term, and it is less based on interplay and more on efficiency. More interesting examples in the RPG genre would include examples like the Penny Arcade RPG, Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne, The World Ends With You, Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World, and the Mario rpgs, because they attempted to make the player evaluate choices within the course of each battle across changing circumstances instead of restricting their complexity to purely their statistical systems.

Related to this is how many stealth games have complicated systems regarding the states of enemies and their process of detecting you, these comprise the more low level systems with more immediate consequences. However another facet of these games have extremely lethal combat, to the player character, with rather simplistic, and frequently clunky, actual fighting. The reason for this is because if these games had more drawn out and more complex combat, then it would undermine the importance of the stealth system, relegating its consequences to being more long term and less short term, as it less directly affects whether the player can or cannot progress. Despite this, I still find the combat systems of many stealth games to be unsatisfying, and I think a good cue to take might be from another game that lacks in high and mid level systems, divekick. Not by literally copying divekick’s mechanics of course, but by establishing a simple spacial means of confrontation with enemies. To create an encounter that is over with very quickly and if failed, means instant death, yet provides a bit more depth to the actual fighting than what metal gear solid 1 or thief provide. A good point of comparison for Thief might be to a more fast and lethal version of chivalry. This hypothetical model for systems would allow players to express more skill in overcoming guards once discovered instead of the more simple systems currently employed that converge on the player just running away usually or overwhelming rather stupid guards in a simple way, while also maintaining that the stealth systems themselves are what decide the outcome most, maintaining the game’s focus. Some games, such as Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, even elected to include a difficulty, called European Extreme, which makes it so the game is instantly over if the player is clearly spotted by a guard. In the case of Metal Gear Solid 3 in particular, this allows the game to focus very clearly on the stealth elements of the game.

Footnote: It was suggested to me that Micro and Macro might be better terms than low versus high level mechanics, as this is essentially intended to describe the difference between tactics and strategy, and the high versus low dichotomy might be confused with assigning a value to either one, with high level being associated with things like “high level play” and gaining a positive association when no such association should exist for correct use of the term. Another good term may be local versus global.

Additionally it may be useful to provide more examples of how higher level systems are necessary to bind some low level systems together. Obvious example being poker or other betting games, which don’t work without something to bet.

Civ was also presented as a counterexample, being a completely managerial game, and I respect civ on principle due to the words of others, though I have not personally played it. So I think there may be something that civ does right that either disproves or validates my theory.

These are some thoughts on commitment, making a move feel like there’s some weight or momentum behind it, and how cancels change how we think about a move and how it feels to us. It’s unfinished, but it can be an interesting insight.

Some games have a really soft feeling of commitment to actions and others have a really hard feeling of commitment to actions. Lets have a look at how games with low commitment can feel a bit too mushy and how ones with high commitment can feel a bit too rigid.

Obvious contrast is between bayonetta and DMC, DMC has much higher commitment, because fewer readily available actions can cancel commit actions. You can’t cancel attacks with dodges, you can’t cancel attacks with movement options. Instead in DMC3 and 4 to cancel options, you need to use royal guard, which functions as a universal cancel, to transition into a neutral state, and then use the move you want to cancel into. This retains a big feeling of commitment while giving a means of getting around it. By contrast, the original DMC only offers roll dodges as a means of evading attacks (and the invincibility frames on jumps). These roll dodges can only be initiated while not attacking, so attack or defending must be considered more carefully as there is a greater commitment to attacks overall.

Being able to cancel into movement options in general reduces the feeling of commitment to an action, obvious example being cancels into dodges that move you. The more flexible the dodge, the further the feeling of commitment is reduced. God Hand has dodge cancels, but you can only do them forward (practically royal guard), to the sides, and back. The back dodge itself has a long usage time, and cannot be canceled into anything else. Between that and the side dodges, in god hand you still have a strong feeling of commitment to actions. By comparison, in Bayonetta you are allowed to cancel any attack into a dodge at any time. Dodges in Bayonetta can go in any direction. This gives a much lower feeling of commitment, because combos fluidly flow into dodges in any direction at any time without restrictions.

Being able to move as an action is performed, like a jumping attack, reduces the feeling of commitment. Attacks like Stinger however still have a strong feeling of commitment.

IASA frames are a term from Smash Bros for frames in an animation at which point the animation allows itself to be canceled into any other. The acronym stands for “Interruptable As Soon As”. Many games feature these at the tail end of attack animations and it helps the transition out of the animation feel smoother by reducing commitment at the very end and giving the sense that the action flows into the next. Examples of games that do this are obviously smash bros, DMC, Bayonetta, God of War, and Dark Souls. An exception to this would be Kingdoms of Amaleur, and Psychonauts (just the examples that come most readily to mind).

In general, cancels from one animation to another give a sense that the two states are connected and flow into each other. This should give a bit of context for the differences in cancels illustrated above. Cancels like the royal guard cancel or god hand’s weave dodge cancel feel like one is making an effort to halt the prior action, where cancels like bayonetta’s dodge out of any action make it feel like at any time, one can just do anything.

On a further level, the inaccessibility of the royal guard action in DMC4 and the weave dodge in god hand further contribute to that feeling. Most DMC4 players probably do not play in royal guard mode all the time, so in order to royal guard, they have to first style switch, which involves removing your thumb from the control stick to actually reach up and press on the Dpad. In God Hand, the right stick, used for dodges, is removed from the face buttons and has to be reached for to dodge. There is more effort in the physical motion, so it feels like more of an effort to halt the action. By comparison, God of War has the block button readily accessible at any time, so its block cancels have less impact.

Combo chains give the sense that each move flows into each move as a sequence, where links feel more like each move is its own move and they are performed one after the other.

As players play, they build up a model in their head, a simulation of how the whole system works, on the basis of the many repeated times they use actions and the slight differences in outcome each time they use it. Players start games by essentially guessing at the function of things based on the visual symbols they are given, and over the course of play and exploration of “corner cases” (rare circumstances that demonstrate more fully the )

IASA frames are a great example of this type of model building. People rarely if ever see the full followthrough of animations in games, because they get so frequently interrupted once the IASA frames start. However players still get this smoother sense from their presence, because at one time or another they saw the full followthrough animation, or they can subtly perceive where it’s supposed to be and know it’s getting interrupted. In the Animator’s Survival kit and other animation guides, animators frequently mention how there are frames drawn in that convey motions that pass by far too quickly for the audience to really see and realize they saw, but which they will feel and give a greater impact to their perception of the motion. A classic example being squash and stretch used in inbetween frames. Games are filled with these types of things and the most obvious example is cancels themselves.