Sense and Sensibility in the Nintendo Wii

This article is about game feel. It aims to show that gameplay is more than just game mechanics and interaction but the crafting of these as realistic experiences around the limitations and possibilities of the medium being used. The article starts with a brief section on how to render a fictional world into a realistic experience through the use of transliteration of senses. It continues with an analyses of the "opening minutes" of my user experience with the Nintento Wii game console, followed by a very brief conclusion. I'm owing a lot to Michel Chion and Steve Swink. Their works helped me enormously to articulate my thoughts and analyse the experience I had with the Nintendo Wii interface.



The Real and the Rendered

Rendering a fictional world into a realistic experience is a complex process based on the transliteration of senses, that is, the the evoking of senses by means of other senses.

To render something “real” is by no means a new issue:  it lies at the heart of communication and has been examined in other media (and in the arts) for centuries.

What exactly are we talking about when we speak of such rendering? Let’s take an example from silent film, brought to attention by an early pionieer of film theory, Bela Balasz:

 

In Shot 2, although no sound is available, we clearly “see” the gun being  fired; or to put it more precisely, we “hear-see” it.

In this example, the transliteration of one sense into another (sight into sound) is a realistic rendering of how  gunfire “feels”. Yet we must recognize the depth in this rendering: while the sound of gunfire is rendered into the sight  of scared birds, the transliteration doesn’t stop here. By means of association, the “sound” we believe to hear is rendered into yet another category of sense, that of touch: we “feel” both its travelling through the air (implied by the reference to sound alone) and the impact of the bullet; we're blinking with the eyes and lean our heads back as if we were trying to escape a slap into the face.

The  realness we experience here is "rendered" reality, and by this reality we must understand the realness of the fictional world of the film. We clearly see how this plays a role in immersion, our departure from reality, our crossing into the virtual reality of the film.

This kind of rendering by means of transliteration of senses is also at work during the creation of game feel. I will try to explain how it works by having a look at the opening minutes of our experience with the Nintento Wii game console.

The Main Menu Screen of the Nintento Wii

Love at First Sight (and Sound)

The main menu screen of the Nintento Wii console doesn’t lose a second to set-up the conditions of the feel it wants to create. In our first contact with it (before we start using the controller), it utilizes sight and sought to render this feel.

The first step taken is to utilize the visuals in order to set-up the interface as a three-dimensional space with tangible objects. This tangible ludic realm is rendered by the calculated use of the following design elements:

In terms of design, the visuals and music are geared towards creating the illusion of depth and stimulating our senses as a first necessary step to "prepare" the user for the experience of a “realistic” feel of controls.

I believe that the musical theme plays a central, embracing role here. The music fosters a hierarchy of senses in which the sense of touching is raised into the dominating figure  against a background of all other senses. The musical theme, we could say, *is* about sensuality, is about establishing an “inner” connection with the “hard”ware.

Love at First Motion

Once we start to use the Wii controller, it puts into motion the cursor and other animated graphics. The interplay between these elements as we carry out our actions is designed to enhance the game feel that was hinted at through our first contact with the interface.

Let’s have a closer look:

We see that rendering of realistic movement in the Nintento Wii interface is achieved by the agglomeration of various senses through the cooperation of both interface and controls. What fosters the game feel is a synchronization of sight (volumetric indicators & animations), sound effects (attack-decay, timbre), music (tone, pitch, timbre, harmony) and touch (vibration).

In the case of interacting with a button, we see how the synchronization of controller vibration, cursor movement and button animations (or more precisely, the interplay of the transliteration of senses in each one of them) creates the sensation that we “click” something. Clicking a button feels like the slow dissappearing impression of an object that we have touched.

Conclusion

The fun and immersion of gameplay cannot be mere explained by game mechanics or interaction per se. We need to take into account their rendering into a realistic experience.  It is this complex process of transliteration of senses and their interplay, often going unnoticed during play, that gives players the game feel that they describe as a fun and immersive (hence realistic) experience.