Nuances of Design: An Experiment in Visceral Communication

Speakers: Chaim Gingold, Jonathan Blow, Raph Koster, Rod Humble

Track: Game Design

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: Advanced

Description: This session consists of a few short presentations; during each presentation, the audience actually plays game snippets that illustrate the speaker's point, rather than just watching.

To participate fully, please bring a laptop running Windows XP with a reasonable graphics chipset (Radeon 7500/GeForce 4Go level or higher), and a pair of in-ear headphones.

Most modern games are conduits for a large amount of visceral communication: the colors and sounds that the player sees, along with the way his actions feel, convey most of the game's information and constitute most of the experience. However, when talking about games at a conference like this one, we tend to use a classical lecture format: a presenter divides the time between talking about a game and showing demos of it. The talking is good for presenting intellectual ideas, but it's not effective for communicating the visceral properties of a game. The demo handles part of this, showing colors and sounds. But a demo doesn't let us experience gameplay directly; we must infer what the gameplay feels like based on what we see, and this can make it very difficult for the presenter to communicate certain kinds of subtlety and nuance.

This section attempts a different approach; by augmenting a classical presentation with play sessions, we hope to facilitate understanding that is instinctual rather than intellectual.

Idea Takeaway: Experience the presenters' design concerns at a more instinctual level.

Intended Audience: Game designers of all levels.