MILAS NORMAN

Here I had a moment characterized by an intense feeling of having many possibilities open to me, which was not directly clear in front of me. As a game designer, I of course imagined what a game would look like where you could interact with the world as you expect, and thus set your own rules and goals (or at least feel like you do).

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Autonomy

This feeling of having opportunities that fit into your own personal values, is called Autonomy.

 

According to the book Glued to Games, by Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan, autonomous experiences in games have two criteria's:

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Meaningful choices. Having opportunities that are meaningful to the player.

Volitional engagement. The opportunities are some the player actually wants to act out. 

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The last one is really important, and is the cornerstone of the project.

This is here simulation comes in, as I argue it facilitates volitional engagement.

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Simulation

In games the player needs motivation, and one way is to reward them and support their thought process.

 

One part is that the interactables should react the way the player expect them to, and thus their use can be identified without the game explicitly telling them. This is where simulation is important. 

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Hand-holding

In the context of this project, I defined the term hand-holding as:

 

the games explicitly telling the player what to do, how to do it and overly communicating things the player could figure out themselves.

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One big tool of communicating information, that I wanted to avoid, was the UI. In many games currently there are quest-logs and markers that removes the need for players to figure stuff out for themselves. In real life, there are no quest markers, yet we effectively navigate it anyway.

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Simulation negates hand-holding

Simulation is a way to avoid hand-holding, as there are many realistic tools to implicitly communicate both navigational cues and how the players direct interactions affect the world around them. This is based on the notion that the player already has relevant knowledge from the real world. 

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Let me give some examples:

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We know if we throw a rock, that it will fall down. We also know it can destroy a window. The game only needs to support this expectation. This is simulating logic in interactions.

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Likewise we know that we can navigate by looking for streetnames, numbers or even just natural things like the placement of the sun or that sand are usually found near water. All this is simulating navigational logic.

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Affordance

One realistic tool from the real world I used a lot to implicitly direct the player and communicate goals was affordances. Affordance is the opportunity an observer can understand by just looking at an object. For example, the chair "asks" the observer to sit on it.

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Negative support

If the player expects something to react a certain way and it doesn't their illusion of it reflecting their intuition is broken. This important illusion is called suspension-of-disbelief and the players experience of this was going to be an indicator of whether the game was successful at facilitating an autonomous experience...