Tangibility of Games

Tangibility of Games


Gothic, is one of my favourite games, in it when you first pick up the sword your character holds it with a general clumsiness, he swings wide, lacking in precision and control. But after a while into the game you can go to a trainer and get trained. After this, his swings change, the strikes have more precision, he holds the sword in the right combat posture. The character's growth is reflected right on the way he holds the weapon. You can see your journey everytime you take the weapon out.


Games have the unique form of conveying emotions, feelings, story and narrative through interaction. You can feel power; weakness; elation; sorrow; frustration, .. so much more & directly. But it can be more, games have the possibility to change the perception of the player character by the player's view of him/her. 


My Geralt never accepts money for killing humans and never stoops to being a mercenary. This is my greatest ideal on how I present my Geralt, his core according to me. Your Geralt most certainly is different.


But these were decisions made mostly through dialogue choices. And supplemented by actions which the game never acknowledges. Actions speak louder than words. I played my Geralt to his(my) ideals even in gameplay. The effect it had on my experience is both drastic and minimal.


My Corvo stays his blade from the innocent, even when they are unjust and rash. He is ruthless to his enemies, killing them and cunning as them having their lives mean giving them fates worse than death. 


This was build by my perception of the character based on the situations he was put in, and my behaviour on these circumstances. If I did not save Emily in Dishonored, I wouldn't see Corvo as loving and kind. Just the fact that he hugs her changed my perception of him. Which is not an action in itself but a choice presented through gameplay. But a choice I was made aware of nevertheless. 


Games are a medium where you area a participant, your actions can influence the story itself or at the very least the way you perceive it. 

The first Portal is the closest thing to a perfect game for me, it is a game where the consistent mechanics and narrative play off each other almost perfectly. When I reached the ending for the first time, I thought "I am supposed to go through the flames, no way GLaDOS is going to kill me right!" Ofc. I was wrong and I got a gameover screen and the ending turned out to be much more underwhelming to me because the game defied my perception of GLaDOS or didn't satisfy my curiosity on how GLaDOS would react to the death of it's best Test Subject. Would it have been sorrow? or satisfaction on the successful completion of the experiment? While the ending itself is really great, I really wished I could've known. To me, if Portal had this narrative tangibility, it would be the perfect game.

When you are an active participant in a game, it's different. In Spec Ops the Line, the game has a lot of choices littered through out that are mechanical, the gameplay choices and actions affect the narrative, the tension & pressure to act along with uncertainty of actions create a truly engaging experience.

Art by syo


Choices, mechanics & narrative can play off each other.
Assume a game protagonist with a definite personality, now based on your actions the character changes, not just in your perception but a gameplay and narrative change. If you play like a psychopath he get's a more aggressive idle animation, depending on the usage of a specific gun he get's a more proficient animation with it, his natural dialogues get slightly more blunt and aggressive because of your playstyle. At the end he is an outright asshole. The story and ending doesn't matter, the idea is to incorporate the players behaviour into the character depending on the gameplay freedom given to the player. Rather than have a character like trevor from GTAV representing the player, the character can change to represent his "own" apparent actions.


The should also add to immersion as now player actions translate to the character.


Failure, procrastination, unsavory actions etc.. must also be acknowledged. Because all these have the possibility to elevate the experience.


A batman game with unlimited time for your actions and accomplishing everything because the game makes it so that you can't fail isn't really a batman game.


Batman is hero who get's beaten up, tortured physically and psychologically but stands up and walks anyways, because he must. You cannot understand the true weight of responsibility till you fail at it. A game where you feel the same tension, the time pressure, the realization of what's on the line and know the consequence, where failure is unacceptable is a much more compelling experience than one where you can pull things out of your ass because you are batman. 


With great power comes great responsibility. A spider-man game where if you take things for granted, be irresponsible you experience the consequences. This puts in so much more weight to the plight of the character, failure isn't an experience we must do over. It can be something that defines and elevates the characters, it gives you renewed appreciation of how much weight the mask holds.


These kind of choices don't have to be expensive rewrites and complete redesign of the game. As an example, in a spiderman game, let's take an event/mission where Rhino is terrorizing the city, now assume the player ignores this and continues doing other things and after a long time get's back to it, show that Rhino caused massive damage, show the amount of people who were harmed and show them without holding back, make the player feel the guilt of abandoning the responsibility, have Peter react, let him feel the pain. This is enough to make the player feel it too.


These failures and successes mold into the character itself, through animations, dialogues etc..


The idea is that you mold the narrative while the narrative molds you. 


The point is neither choices nor story. It is simply the ability of the game to reflect parts of the player into their character. It is to simply create a connection.


Art stays the same while you do not and Art can put it into perspective. In more ways than one.

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