About exploration in games
Hey all,
Although I’m going to be less university centric, I couldn’t resist to mention the game that was played at last night’s Game Design lecture. Instead of rambling on about how awesome the experience was, I figured I’d say more about how playing the game was an intuitive way to find out how exploration works.
So, instead of coming in to class and starting up the material for the week, the class found our lecturer’s hat and phone lying around on a desk in the room. Although this was strange, my alarm bells only started ringing about 20 minutes in when he still hadn’t showed up, especially since only 5 minutes before the lecture a few of us saw the lecturer walking towards the classroom. A call comes through the phone and when one of the students decided to answer, instead of hearing the whereabouts of our lecturer, we hear a strange Russian accented man tell us our lecturer has been kidnapped and that we basically have to search for him. What better way to teach students how the mechanics of exploration work than getting them prepared for the lecture topic only to suddenly throw them into a treasure hunt where they end up exploring some of the most obscure locations around the university including the underground pipes.
Anyway, from the moment the game started, there were several things to pick up on. For one, it definitely threw us off, since I for one have never turned up to a lecture only to find that the lecture itself was a massive game. Our expectations were blown away simply by doing something outside of our usual rigid uni environment. And now that I think about it, aren’t all the best games we’ve ever played do something just like this? You don’t have to necessarily have to do something new, but something that will change the way the players think. The most recent example I’m thinking of is say the Nintendo 3DS which really did change expectations. 3D everyone’s heard about and done already, 3D without glasses…getting very skeptical, actually picking up the console and trying it out, my god did it actually impress and get players excited.
So in there I can glean that there is a lot of fun that can be gained from exploring and discovering something different. Playing the game itself is a different story. Once the players actually participated, there were all sorts of experiences that I could observe in the exploration. Firstly, the Russian on the phone sent the students out in groups to look for a seedy Russian somewhere around the block. He would call, hang up, and call a few minutes later to call another group. There was a definite build up of drama as the students waited and listened for the next phone ring. There was also the aesthetic when people would suddenly drop silent and hush each other in between giggles as everyone listened intently at the words of the Russian. And once the players actually got up and went looking for the Russian, there was the fantasy in going with a small band of people on a treasure hunt not much different to things we see in the movies or in games we used to play as kids. People got excited to looking for the Russian and also got exciting from simply being part of the exploration.
Once the group found the seedy Russian, standing around the corner in the rain at night, it started to dawn how well planned the game was and immediately brought up greater expectations with how the game was going to be played out. The Russian man acted similar to a guard who would test the players before they could pass. In this case he gave us a map with directions. So off our band of little happy people went. Despite the miserable weather and the fact that it was getting difficult to see anything, it added a lot to the experience of going out and doing something crazy. The map ended up leading the students to a location they would usually never enter (the music rooms) and they had to look for a specific room number. Eventually, they found it wasn’t a room, but a locker… or rather a door next to the lockers. After knocking 3 times, the door opened and a man inside invited us to follow him one at a time. It turns out that he was actually bringing us into the underground parts of the university. We had to climb down the ladders and ended up in a canal. Again, this is probably where it really hit us with crazy expectations. Who would have thought that this little game would lead us to such a bizarre location? I mean, the underground sewers of the university is somewhere you would generally think is off limits. And how well the experience was received when the students felt rewarded to have found that following the map lead them to an interesting destination, only to throw them into another, even more bizarre place to continue the exploration. I can see there that there is actually an aesthetic in knowing that there is even more to explore. Not just the experience of the exploration, but the time before the exploration, where the players are in eager anticipation to delve into the labrinths of an exotic and new scenary.
From there, we were in a pitch black canal except for a tiny glimpse of light coming from a small door seemingly on the other side of the canal. One thing to note with this canal was how it automatically made for an excellent exploration space. The design of a black room with a small light will generally make the player walk towards the light. The fact that they have no idea where they are, they will generally always go to the point of interest, which in a dark room will always be the light source at the end of the tunnel.
Coming out of the small door, we found ourselves walking into a maze full of corridors and pipes, all underneath the university mind. Along the way we would find hints written on the wall and strange markings to explore. At some points, the path lead two ways and the group would split up. At some places, there would be arrows to tell the players which way to go. There would also be random quotes like go CSE or Mathsewconfused, or the cake is a lie. And with each new thing that the players discovered there was definitely an aesthetic that ran through the students minds. When they saw something written on the wall, they would quickly draw the groups attention and everyone would stop to look and laugh before continuing along the corridors. Essentially they seemed to be small build ups of points to discover which continued all throughout the tunnels. And it wasn’t just a matter of keep following the path and you’ll reach the destination. What with the fake paths, the dead ends, the confusing anagrams and the beware signs. It gave a sense of chasing a goal and catching up to the target. Sometimes groups would pass each other and quickly pass comments or ask what thee other group had found. The fact that the players had been split into small groups meant that there was also a sense of team effort and competition going on behind the scenes.
Eventually there came a point where several groups including my own group got lost and tried to figure out where they’d gone wrong, and sat down to pool the information they’d found. Everyone ended up in one wrong location from misinterpreting clues found along the tunnels. By that time everyone had followed the corridors to a point of exit… which ended up in another part of the university, somewhere other than the music rooms. This itself had some elements of interesting game design since the exploration of the sceneray ended up bring the players to a place that they recognised. It’s like the moment in Planet of the Apes after exploring the planet for a long time trying to find a way off only to find that the planet is actually Earth further into the future. In terms of when the students sat down to actually think, however, there came a sudden delight with when they discovered a single clue which lead to the actual location of our lecturer. It all came through an anagram, which made it all the more sweeter once A the students figured that they needed to unjumble the letters and once B they’d found out that the word directed them to the location of a lecture room. And once the students got to the room, there was still doubt with whether they had actually messed up the clues and got it wrong again, only to granted the moment of relief (Drama) when they found that they had deduced correctly and the room was the correct one.
So when we now sit down to analyse what was fun, jokes aside from figuring out how there was a cool place to explore in the sewers if we put something similar into games *cough*HL-2*cough* we can see how elements of challenge, drama, fantasy, sensory, subversion and surely several others things I haven’t mentioned already can be encapsulated in the one experience of exploration. There were different types of exploration that fed these different kinds of fun, and they all are relatively simple techniques that we overlook when playing games, but remain extremely useful tools when designing games with a senes of exploration and discovery.
