Ma, The Space Between - Uncluttered Game Design - Extra Credits

in Japanese there's a word called ma it is space or rest it can be seen in no dramas Japanese calligraphy or in the long white expanses of a zen garden it's built into Japanese architecture and inherent in Japanese poetry it can even be found in the long slope and shots of anime but it's something that many games are missing and it's something which a great many might benefit from ma is a nearly impossible concept to translate because it's not exactly how we think of a musical rest or a blank space on a painting in the Western tradition it's not just about having the negative space help define the foreground rather it's about the negative space being one continuous piece with the image itself neither the blank space nor the filled space is the point of the piece but rather together they simply form the experience the piece provides so what does this have to do with video games

well MA is about using the rhythm of emptiness or inaction to create uncluttered experiences think of it this way clutter isn't about the amount of things in a space but rather how they're arranged a room can feel cluttered if everything's just littered on the floor but the same room with the exact same things in it can feel wide open and liberating if everything is put away on shelves or nicely arranged and this is important for modern entertainment in the film world you can think of Michael Bay as the ultimate in aunty MA more often than not there's too much stuff happening to continuously in his films and when there are rests they feel awkward like they're all in the wrong places at times they feel almost stiflingly cluttered and that's unfortunately the direction we've gone with Triple A games but instead I would like to see these games Fury roading it up for lack of a better term there's no less action and no less stuff going on

in Mad Max fury road than any transformers film but it is filled with MA with the pervading sense of slowness that makes the action something you can really appreciate and something that's stays with you long after you've got out of your chair that's because all experiences have two components the objective component what is actually happening in the moment and the subjective experience the thing that the experiencer feels take for example a sunset two people can watch the same sunset that is to say have the same objective experience and yet to one it can be a celebration of the wonders of life and to the other it can be a sorrowful reminder of the ebbing away of time but without MA without space that second bit the subjective part of the experience is impossible without MA we don't notice the sunset at all we rush through our busy day and don't give it a second glance much less have the internal space to process and create our own personal

and subjective experience of that sunset and the internal rhythm of arts rests and blank spaces that internal ma can help give us the capacity to have that subjective experience a Michael Bay film or the call of duty infinite warfare campaign throws things at us so fast that we're pushed through the experience we get through it because it doesn't give us time to realize we might want to stop but at the end of it we actually remember very little vividly now compare this with something like The Witcher 3 pray or even the most recent God of War the ability of the designers to trust the player to handle a few moments with nothing where they're simply riding across a beautiful landscape or stalking through haunted halls sets the player up to be able to process what they're experiencing this allows the game even if just on a subconscious level to take on meaning or to create some feeling in them even if that feeling might simply be aw but ma doesn't simply take the form of time without action games are

complex things with many types of rhythms and spaces within them if we think about MA as the transformational power of emptiness rests or blank space then we can see that any aspect of a game that has the possibility to be cluttered can be devoid of the minimalism ma brings Detroit is at its best in the one moment where it doesn't rush all over itself to tell you its narrative and instead just sets you down in a hellish graveyard and in that moment it's also the best at getting its narrative across destiny to is best when it focuses on simple shooting and doesn't whiplash between trying to be a serious space opera and a comedic sci-fi romp when we talk about MA part of what we're talking about is stripping away all that's unnecessary to make room for that blank space that blank space will then transform what's left into something to remember as we craft our games we must continuously ask ourselves why with

every decision we make and unless we can really justify each thing we build there are definitely still pieces to be stripped away and replaced with an absence flower Shadow of the Colossus near automata these are all games about MA they're games about MA for radically different reasons but they're all games where the things left unsaid the mechanics left out the system's never implemented make room for the player to fully experience them but since MA is about space about a rest rather than action it's difficult to completely define the best definition that I've heard was one man who said that extravagance is complete silence not a riot of color not the gaudy Gold's we sometimes associate with extravagance but a moment of simple silence between the noise and that's a lesson that many games and apparently Zoe could benefit from today we'll see you next time [Music]