This is a repost from my blog, Aliasing
Introduction
I was pondering on Wii Sports and
its relation to reality. I sometimes see people trying to play Wii
Sports (tennis, for the most) like it was real tennis, and they marvel
at the fact that they can't do all the gestures they would do on a real
tennis court. This often happens when the person complaining has a
real-life experience with the sport or activity involved in the
videogame. Of course the number of people who complain about this is
very, very low, as we all know Wii Sport is mainly accepted as capable
of providing the most accurate real-life feel of the sports included in
the package (except for Boxing, due to the Nunchuck's rough control).
This is maybe due to the fact that we humans tend to dissect reality in mental models created
by our own brain. When we see a match of baseball, we strip down the
movements of the players to the essential ones that dictate the game's
outcome. We don't pay too much attention to all the body movements of
the batter, we only need the swing movement.
In a recent book,
game designer Jesse Schell says: "The only way our minds are able to
get by all is by simplifying reality so we can make some sense of it.
[...] Our brain do a tremendous amount of work to boil down the
complexity of reality into simpler mental models that can be easily
stored, considered, and manipulated1."
Very often
games are based only on the mental model of a given activity, this is a
very common approach that generated a lot of milestone titles in the
history of gaming, we can think for example of the Sims or Sim City,
flying simulator, and most sport games. They mirror a real life
activity only in its most important aspects, they are (under the
graphics) the same mental model that our brain creates when dealing
with that activity. Useful data, possible actions, nothing more. This
gives the brain a relief because it doesn't have to draw the model
itself, so it can concentrate on the gaming, on the goals, on the ways
to achieve them.
Actually, some game designers of old performed this simplifying activity only because of technical limitations.
A game like Pac Man permits movement only on two perpendicular axes
because the hardware running it permitted only two-dimensional input
(up, down, left, right).
As hardware and consoles move on, new possibilities open and game designers take advantage of them.
That's
were I trace a big divide. There's two main flow of thinking: one is
the people that use the new possibilities to add complexity to the game
by making it more similar to reality, and those who do so to enhance
gameplay (and sometimes even purposedly waste the expanded capabilities
of technology just because they don't need them!).
Mind me, no-one
is wrong here. Sometimes players actually like to see more complexity
just for the sake of it, just to feel more immersed in the game. This
is the case for shooters, driving games, flying simulations. We see
better lighting, better physics, better textures, and so on. It's ok
and it's a good accomplishment which I honestly like, but it's not the
only way to go, as some products showed us.
A bold move
Speaking
of the other branch of game concept enhancements, I really appreciated
the decisions made by Konami and the designers that worked on the Wii
edition of PES 2008. They made a very bold move by actually moving away from reality
with this new iteration of the series, but the game is an overall
success and, moreover, it provides players with a very new angle on
soccer games.
For those who had not played the game, in short,
it lets the player control all his team at once by moving the players
on the pitch like in an RTS, with a point-and-drag style. The different
players are assigned to tasks, like 'mark this opponent man-to-man',
'guard this area', 'run to that spot' and so on. Actually in the
attacking phase you can also control the bearer of the ball, shoot and
pass, in the typical soccer games fashion. The passing is not handled
by pressing a button and a direction, but by pressing a button and
pointing to the spot where you want the ball to go to.
Where
other games (the very same PES 2008 for the other consoles too) chose
to enhance graphics, give the player more detailed and fluid
animations, better commentary and so on, this Wii edition chose the
unbeaten path by adding arrows on the field, icons on the head of the
players about to shoot, the possibility to control both your player and
the teammates, resulting in a very enjoyable, refreshing and satisfying
experience.
To add all those features they took some mechanics
out of the game to balance the overall complexity. They for example
inhibited the possibility to direct the shoot, handing this task to the
AI. Some players felt betrayed by the impossibility of controlling what
were key aspects of the other editions and this, together with the
apparent deep complexity of the game, cut short the game sales and
success. (by the way Konami made some steps back in the 2009 edition to satisfy everyone, adding shoot directioning and the possibility to play with traditional controls)
Those
willing to embrace the task though, found that the game is not so hard.
Reality is that the designers, headed by Shingo 'Seabass' Takatsuka and
Naoya Hatsumi spent a lot of time in finding the right way to create a
new model of gaming based on mental model of soccer that gamers could
find easy to decode and use. This model resembles more a soccer game as
it is watched in tv than one actually played.
On the Nintendo
Channel on the Wii there's a video showing the producer of the game
doing experiments with eye tracking. The video clearly shows that the
model works: the player doesn't have to keep an eye on the player that
possesses the ball, his eye goes back and forth on the field in an
effort to find an unmarked man, or free space to pass the ball. This
deep testing gave the developers the assurance that the control scheme
they envisioned was, if not easy, at least possible to handle for the
average player.