The Play of Stillness: Designing Experiential Play Spaces

[Music] So, they've closed the door, so I think I'm going to get started. Uh, first, thanks to everybody for coming. Uh, when I'm, even though this is scheduled opposite the number one reason to be panel, uh, I've seen from Twitter that the line there is out the door. So, um, thanks very much for, uh, coming to hear a talk just about design. Um, a little background about myself. Uh, my name is Brian Upton. I'm a senior game designer with Sony Santa Monica. Um, my biggest came to claim to fame is that I designed the original Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon. But, uh, thank you. But, uh, for the last 12 years, I've been, uh, at Sony Santa Monica where I describe my role as like being a script doctor for games. I work with a handful of little indie games that are, um, in development, and I provide design, support, and critique while they're being developed. Um, and I'm currently in the process of working with several different experiential games. uh one of which is the uh the next game being done by the Chinese room uh the original makers of Dear Esther. So what I'm going to do is talk a little

bit about the design of experiential prey spaces and some design principles I think that that sort of tie into that. The first thing I'm going to mention is the problem of what I call the problem with interactivity. Um we define ourselves as an industry as being interactive. I mean we have the academy of interactive arts and sciences. It's sort of baked into the genetics of what we consider games to be. There's a problem with this, however, because it biases how we think about making these sorts of experiences. Interact interactivity is a thing that games can do, but it's not what games fundamentally are. And this is a really crucial distinction. I'm going to borrow something from another form of from another medium to sort of illustrate what I'm talking about. So this is probably the most famous example of um another thing that another medium can do really well. This is the most famous match cut in all of cinema

from 2001. The cut from the femurbone to the nuclear missile platform. This is very a very very meaningful moment in 2001 and it's something that film is really really good at. But nobody thinks that film is all about cuts. Cuts are a thing that you can do within cinema, but it's not what films are in their entirety. It's not sort of it's not the essence of film. You don't make films better by putting more and more cuts in. You don't um put cuts in at arbitrary times just because more cuts are always better. Cuts are a tool that can be used in order to tell stories with film, but they are not something that has to happen for a film to function as a film. So within games, interactivity has a similar sort of role. We've seen it as something that has to happen that has to happen for a game to occur. And uh that has a particular effect on how we design

play spaces. So for example, this is a common way to think of this illustration here I have here is a common way to think about the relationship between a player and a game. A game is something separate from a player that stands apart and there are sets a set of mediated interactions between the player and the game and that is what produces the play experience. But there's another way that we can define the relationship between player and game. We can draw the line in a different place. And in my design work, I prefer to draw the line like this. The reason why is that um we all know that different people play different games in different ways. We don't all play the same way. There's an element that each of us as players brings to the play experience. And if we only think of the game as existing in is something apart from the player, we're losing a key element of what it takes to design a good game. So I prefer to to think of the game as being as something that occurs both with whatever is happening

in the computer or the console, whatever is providing it, and within the player himself. and that that the the element that's being contributed by the player is actually crucial to understanding what the what's going on with play. So the question is what's going on here? We don't currently have particularly good tools for talking about this part of the play experience because we've been so biased towards thinking about interaction is being at the heart of where play lies. And so what I'm going to do um over the next hour or so is talk about a new design methodology. This is a methodology for talking about what happens in non-interactive play spaces. It's what's happening in those little loops that are happening in the player's mind in between beats where they're actually interacting with the game. And as part of this, I'll be giving you a set of design heruristics that I've developed for designing these sorts of spaces and go through some case studies, some games that do this sort of thing particularly well, uh, sometimes in very surprising situations.

So, the first thing I'd like to ask is given that we're so focused on interactivity, why should turn-based games be fun? It's like if you look at people playing chess, sometimes they'll just sit there. They'll sit there and they'll stare at the board. They're not interacting at all. There's most of the play of a game like chess involves um sitting there and thinking about what's going to happen in very particular ways. And then when a move does get made, when you do interact with the other player, it's almost like you're confirming the play experience you had before. The the fun that you have when you're playing chess is in this moment where you're considering, not when you are actually moving the piece. That's just a bit of bookkeeping. And in fact, if you're really good at chess, you can just do it entirely in your head. You don't even have to move the piece. So, I have an answer for why um I I believe that turn-based games are fun, and that is anticipation.

There's something that goes on that I call anticipatory play. And anticipatory play is something that happens in the gap between moments of interaction. and understanding how this works can be a really valuable tool. So you see it in turn-based games. You see what's going on when you're waiting in it for a turn of chess. You also see it in puzzles. Um if you're working um on pseudico for example, you may stare at a page for 10 minutes before you make a mark. Something's going on there. But it also happens what seems to be more actionorientated games. It happens in strategic beats and action games where there's a pause in the ongoing flow of give and take with the game where you stop to consider what you're doing. And it also is going to happen in something that I call interpretive play. And this is in games like Dear Esther um or Gone Home where most of what's happening, most of the meaningful play that's happening is happening inside the player's head, not in their direct interaction with the system. So what we could talk about is with

games like this, these little cycles that are happening in the players in the player's head, we can talk them as interpretive moves. interpretive moves are a shift in your understanding of the play space. So, it is it is a state change that's happening. It's something that's happening that um produces a play-like effect, but it's not a state change that's happening out in the console that you're playing with or it's not happening on the game board. It's a state change that you're that's happening in your head. And understanding how these state changes happens is the essence of anticipatory play. So, here's a really obvious example of of anticipatory play in action. A a puzzle game like Portal. When you move it, when you enter a new a new test chamber in Portal, you don't immediately start firing your gun and your portal gun and creating portals and jumping through them. You stop and consider. You stop to think about the situation. And you're not just thinking what can you do. You're trying to think about how does this work? this un this working

through the understanding of how the space is organized is an important part of of interpretive play. So that you're identifying different features within the environment and you're considering how that defines a space that you can operate within. This is there's a you can see this also in Metal Gear Solid. Metal Gear Solid has lots of anticipatory u play moments. Uh, and what's important to note is that if you're if you're studying the the guards in Metal Gear Solid, again, you're not necessarily thinking about, oh, what am I going to do next? You're trying to understand the situation around you. And that that that cycle of understanding is a key for understanding why Metal Gear Solid is fun to play. Now, personally, I just first stumbled across this when I was designing the original Rainbow 6. And for the I mean, this was I apologize for the very primitive graphics. This was back in 1997. And uh this is the first mission from the original Rainbow 6. It was a hostage rescue in a Belgian embassy. And um one of the things that's interesting about Rangers Fix when you see people play it

is that a lot of the most interesting gameplay happens in spaces where nothing whatsoever seems to be happening. So you enter the embassy and you have a hallway and the original Rainbow 6 was had a very very severe one-shot one kill um rule rules of engagement. so that um any misstep would get you killed. It could potentially lose the mission for you. And people who play uh who would play this game would stop and would stand in the hallway. And the gameplay that emerged from standing in the hallway turned out to be a crucial part of what made Rainbow Six a fun game to play. And then they would creep slowly forward and kind of get a sense of what they're doing. And eventually they might see somebody. But the moment that they saw somebody and and and took a shot, that was actually a confirmation. And that was actually like the reward for the actual game that had been played. So when these shots happened, because the firefights would be over like that, there'd be these almost instantaneous um results, the the gameplay that was happening was happening in people's minds as they considered the situation

they were in, not when they actually fired the killing shot. And so we actually um took the information we got from this and it it factored into the design of the sequel to Rainbow 6 Rogue Spear and then later on Ghost Recon. We realized that the best levels were one that had nothing that happened in the first half of the level. You would actually we would actually design the level so you'd have half the level that was just an approach and you get little glimpses of maybe what was going on and you could stop and hide in the bushes and think about what was happening. But there were no firefights for the first half of the game because um a lot of the most interesting things that happened were in people's minds as as they considered their options as they were moving forward um within um within the approach to the play space. So how do we go about designing spaces like this? I mean, we can't just say, "Okay, well, we we'll make a space that's interesting to play through." Because lots of spaces that are interesting to play through are not necessarily interesting to think about playing through. Um, if you're if you're if

you're doing a very very fast action game, you may discover that um there's not a whole lot of planning that happens at all. And sometimes um with um with one some of these shooters, you have situations where you don't want anything to happen. You want people to, you know, purposefully be still and and not doing anything. So this is a set of heruristics that you can use to think about how situations can be structured in order to deliver these sorts of anticipatory play. So the first one is choice. Are there multiple possible ways for the situation to unfold? What can I do? What's going to happen? If you have an immediate threat that's coming to you in a game, you know what you need to do. You need to deal with that immediate threat. But choice involves putting the player in situations that are inherently ambiguous, where you're not sure what's going on. You're not sure what you um what you're supposed to do. And those are cases where players will stop and consider and if you design it right, have an good time considering what

they're thinking uh what they're going to do next. But you also have to include variety. Have you encountered previous situations before? Because when we play this sort of anticipatory play, we remember what we did. And if we if we encounter a similar room, a similar set of monsters, a similar setup, we remember what our anticipation was. We know how it's going to go. And once we know how it's going to go, then the situation is played out. So that means it's not only the case that you have to um continually give the player choices, but these choices have to be different than the choices they've seen previously. This is why it's so hard to design puzzle games because once you've solved a puzzle, you know what it is. You know what the answer is, and there's no more anticipatory play in working your way through it. Um, if you have the same levels repeated over and over again, things quickly get played out. You also have to have consequence. Does any choice that I make in my anticipatory exploration affect my my

future opportunities? So, it can't just be idle speculation. Um, to go back to the Rainbow Six example, it's really important whether or not a guard sees you. So wondering about what the guards can see is a fun form of anticipatory play. Can an innocent bystander see me? That doesn't really matter. That doesn't affect the way the game's going to unfold. So it's not just a case of that you have something that you're going to work through and try to understand, but also have a sense of um how does that play into future anticipatory um play as I move forward through the game? predictability. Are we able to correctly anticipate? Has my model of the system that I that that I understand my understanding of how the game is playing. Can we observe patterns to guess what is likely to come next? We have a system that's predictable enough that can we we can perceive patterns. This is an image of Pegle, which if any of you played is is a little like Pachenko, and it's a very interesting game because it teeters right on the edge of being completely unpredictable.

um there's a very very um small window of things that you can predict. And so there's a lot of um there's a lot of anticipatory play in the when you're playing Pegle because you're spending a lot of time figuring out, you know, exactly how do I do this shot? What's possible for me to do? And then quite often it it completely fails, but it it succeeds often enough that you have a sense that the system is something you can grasp with and it gives you something to hang on to when you're trying to understand it. But at the same time, too much predictability is problematic. You also need a a degree of uncertainty because just as if we encounter the same situation over and over again, we feel like it's become played out, there's no longer ant any anticipatory play. If a game is too predictable, if it's too obvious what's what's going to happen, then we can run through anticipatory play very very quickly, have a whole series of of of anticipatory events that happen and happen in in rapid succession. And when that happens, by the time we actually get to those

situations within the game, they feel as though they're played out. They feel as though there is in fact no more play to be had with them. So on almost every game we encounter, we find that there is some degree of randomness, some degree of uncertainty. And it's kind of curious. It's like why should we have games that have this sort of uncertainty within them when um in many cases players want to succeed? You have obvious you uncertainties of of of dice rolls or um random number generators. You have playing multiplayer, which is almost the most the most uncertain situation you always have. And it comes down to having to a way to establish this uh a way so that we have imperfect information about the future. We don't want to be able to anticipate too perfectly because that destroys our ability to have anticipatory play. And finally the satisfaction. Um it's very frustrating to to to like you can have a space that's very interesting to explore like oh there's all sorts of things I can do but if you work your way

through all the possible ramifications and discover that none of them lead to anything that you think is successful then it doesn't matter whether it's fun to play or not. There has to be some way that we think we can move forward. Now it doesn't really matter whether or not we actually can move forward because what matters is what the player thinks is going to happen. So, for example, if you if you there's a clear a clear solution to a problem, but you don't know what it is, you can't figure it out, that's no different from there a solution not existing at all. At the same time, if you think you know what the solution is, you might have fun playing even if you're in an almost impossible situation. Uh this is an image from a game called a thousand1 spikes which is um you know a uh um from a genre known as troll core or masoor where the whole point has put people in what feel like almost impossible situations and when you're in an impossible situation you have this continual iteration over possibilities that exist within the play space um even though you're continually being frustrated with the actual gameplay.

So we can summarize what the anticipatory play space consists of. It is a pause in the action. It is a moment of stillness in the the unfolding of game that is followed by a rapid flurry of interpretive moves within the uh within the player's mind. This eventually converges on a satisfying new understanding of the play space. Either what the play space is, how it's organized, or the player sense of what they can do. And then this is this understanding is then disrupted as the play as the play space continues to evolve and the game continues. So the way I like to look at games is a game is an engine for generating interesting situations. And this is where an interesting situation is any situation that's that satisfies the heruristics. And what's interesting about this is that this definition of how games operate says nothing about rules or mechanics or feedback loops. All or even interaction. All of these things are tools for creating interesting situations for anticipatory

play. But they're not each one is not necessary. You don't necessarily have to have really good feedback. You don't necessarily have to have really good interaction. It's easier to create interesting situations if you use those tools, but there are other ways to do it as well. So, a couple of key points designing for anticipatory play. The first thing is interp interpretive moves take time. As I said, when we were designing um um Rogue Spear and Ghost Recon, we would purposfully design in points where nothing was happening for the player because it takes as much time to process what what can potentially happen as it does is to actually respond to immediate events. And one of my concerns with games is that because we prioritize interactivity, we tend to fill empty space. We tend to say, "Oh, this is this is a boring dead spot." But actually, those dead spots can be really really crucial for crafting player experience. The second point is that anticipation is shaped by player knowledge because the dividing line between game and player is not um um so hard and fast that that the

game is actually includes the knowledge the player has the world and so much of the game happens in the player's head. It's very very sensitive to what players know about the world. And so in many cases this goes well beyond tutorials. We need to be convincing players of what sort of games they are playing. We need to be saying to them um because you've had this experience because we give this sort of theming to it. This is the set of rules should be you should be operating in to um to play these anticipatory games. And this is true even if the game that they're playing is different from the game as actually constituted in the rules that make it up. And finally to think of interpreta to think of interaction as the validation of of anticipation. Inter interaction is not fun into itself. It is not some something that is essential to games. It's a way to sort to move games forward and to restart the the engine of anticipatory play. Once you've played through a a horizon and you sort of know how things you you sort of know how things are going, an interactive moment can move things

forward into the next cycle of ant of anticipation. So anticipatory play can operate even in very very low interaction situations. So, for example, it's possible to play Sim City and not touch your city for half an hour, an hour. You can you can set things up and just watch it evolve. And what makes Sim City interesting to watch evolve is because each time the the game procedurally um evolves, it opens up a new set of possibilities that we could potentially act on. and sitting there and watching your your your your city as it as it grows on its own um is entertaining on its own because of the anticipation that happens as we're watching it. So we can create a situation where the little thread we have back and forth between um whatever the simulation is that's running on on your computer and the human being can be very very thin. We can have a tiny little trickle of um of uh interaction and that can work as

long as whatever that tiny trickle is that it's occurring is feeding the much larger cycles of interpretive play that is happening in the head of the player. So this is a way of setting up experiential games. So if you have a game like Dear Esther, you have a game where there's um you have an interesting play experience with almost no interaction at all. The the number of things you can do within Dear Ester is very very tiny. You can walk around, you can look at things, there are things that get triggered as you move through it, but as long as the game continues to provide us interesting situations to explore, we can enjoy an experience like this even though our interaction is very minimal. and to understand why things can be interesting in a game like Destritz and and I'm going to introduce another concept and that is the idea of an interpretive play. So, so far as I've been talking about anticipatory play, I've been mostly been talking about like understanding you know what you can do in the world. What is your what is your situation and how can you act within it?

But interpretive play is an anticipatory play that is directed towards meaning. You're not just saying what's going on here, but you're saying to yourself, what does this mean? Why do I care? What does this say about me? What does this say about the world? And being able to operate within that sort of cycle when you're moving from moment to moment within a space is um is what drives a game like Dear Esther. It's not about solving puzzles with a game like this. It's about finding an interpretation that feels whole and complete as you're moving through the space. So in order to discuss this, I'm going to take a little detour and talk about previously I mentioned that one of the heristics is satisfaction. And obviously when you win it's satisfying. you find like a good way to move through a level that's very satisfying. That's a that's a a successful resolution of anticipatory play. But in many of these games, we don't have a way to win. And how do we go about delivering satisfaction to a player in a situation when there when winning is trivial or when there's no obvious success state? So, there's actually a good body of

research that's been done on this um from pen and paper role playing game theory. Uh there's a website called the forge which did a lot of research about this um mostly about discussion among themselves um back in the 90s and what they discovered is that they they were look at looking at the question is why do some people like some sorts of RPGs and other people like other sorts of RPGs and they broke it down into they realized that they had three basic categories of player. They were looking for different things out of the game. They had games and games were looking to win. They're looking for ways to move through the RPG that would like advance them somehow. Even though in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, there's not an obvious win state. You can level up. You can get more treasure. There's a winning. There's a there's a a gesture towards winning. Then there are the simulationists. And the simulationists just wanted to see how things would play out. They're like, "Well, what you know you um um what if I actually pretend to be um an evil overlord? What are the ramifications of that?" They didn't care. You could die. For simulation, for a simulationist, dying feels like

success as long as it felt like it was honestly earned. And obviously, this is a bad thing to mix with gamers because gamers are trying to avoid dying at all costs, even if they it violates the simulation. And finally, they had narrativists. And narrativists were interested in good stories and like making it interesting whether or not it was realistic for the simulationists or whether or not it led towards winning. So we've already talked about goals in the term in terms of winning for for achieving satisfaction. But we can talk about two other valuation strategies that people use when they're playing games. And these are coherence and closure. Coherence is what the simulationists are using. They're trying to hold one thing steady and see what happens. And closure is what the narrativists are doing. They're trying to seek out situations within the play space that either open up or close off opportunities for future play. I'm going to explain a little more about this. So coherence is finding an interpretation that causes minimal disruption to a previous understanding. So you're holding one set of constraints

constant. How are things going to play out if I hold this one thing constant? And this can be difficult in certain situations. So enclosure is finding an interpretation that either opens off or closes off future interpretive play. So you can say like, oh, I'm going to um choose to interpret this in a way that increases the ambiguity of this sit situation or that either red or that reduces the ambiguity of the situation. And what you pick tends to depend on where you think you are within a within a game. If you're at the very beginning of a game, people tend to open up the play space. I'm going to do something that kind of makes things feel more open. I'm going to interpret things in a way that makes uh it easier to me to make future interpretive moves. Whereas if you do this at the end, players work to close off the interpretive space. They're trying to find closure. They're trying to find a way to encompass the whole thing in a fixed understanding. So, I'm going to illustrate this. If any of you have seen the the Lego movie, there's a moment where um things look very, very grim. Uh Cloud Cuckoo Land has been destroyed. The heroes have been

rescued by the pirate Metalbeard. Out of nowhere, the Millennium Falcon shows up and Batman, Lego Batman, abandons them. He goes off. He's like, "I'm going to go off and party with the guys of the Millennium Falcon. That's that's much better than hanging out with you losers. So, if you're playing a coherence game, your response to this point in the plot is to say, "Well, I know that looks like Batman is ditching him, but he's got to have some sort of secret plan. There's got to be something going on because I believe I know who Batman is." And figuring out how to reconcile what Batman is doing with the fixed constraint of who you believe Batman is. That's an interesting game to play. That's something that requires a series of interpretive moves to work out, well, why could he be doing this? what's going on. But you can also do closure play with this situation. You can say, "Well, god, maybe it's true. Maybe Batman's really a bad guy. He's a he's a huge jerk. He's kind of been treating Wild Styles um poorly." But if Batman is a is a bad guy, well, that opens up all sorts of possibilities. That's changes everything. And that also that opens up

the play space. And so you have these two different things in tension with each other. You have the idea that that um something that you will hold one constraint constant but that's difficult to reconcile with what's happening or you have a way to choose a complete completely upend your understanding of the situation but that um um creates a whole lot of ramifications to to work through. So our understanding of any situation with the game is a network of related propositions and tension with each other. We think we know what's going on and we have these propositions that sort of that sort of all hang together in a coherent model. And this is true whether you're talking about a story, whether you're talking about a level in a shooter, whether you're talking about a strategy game, we think we know what's going on and we think we know how things are going to unfold. But if something changes in the situation that doesn't make sense to us that we have some some new bit of information, then we work to restore the stability that exists within within this network without disrupt disrupting our normative assumptions. we either work to

we work to resolve the tension that exists between holding certain things constant and by trying to broaden things as much as possible to encompass whatever new information that happened. And it's these two motivations um to either achieve closure or to um uh to maintain coherence that drive satisfaction with anticipatory play. So winning, when we talk about creating games that allow us to win, that's an arbitrary condition that the rules impose on play spaces. And we can create lots of play spaces that include winning, but this is always in addition to an intuitive pull towards coherence and closure. And we know this these these this pull is there because we experience sometimes even in games that have very strong winning conditions. If you're really into a game, you're playing really really strongly and all of a sudden you win abruptly just like that. It feels like a cheat. It feels sort of strangely unsatisfying. We want to win at the moment we we can feel it coming together. We want to have that sense that everything is converging to a satisfying resolution. We want that

closure at the same time that we have um the actual the actual physical the actual legal victory condition. and understanding the way that that draw towards closure affects the way we want games to end that takes place even in situations where it seems like everything is is driven by winning alone. So I'm going to take a look at um at three case studies now um and and sort of show how this plays out when we have more experiential games. Uh the first one is a game from Blendo Games uh done by uh Brendan Chung. Uh it's called 30 Flights of Loving. Um, it's a fairly small indie game, but um, I think it's a really good illustration of how these things work out. So, 30 Flights of Loving is about a heist gone bad, but it's not quite clear how the heist goes bad or what happened to to lead up to that. There's a little be there's a little um interlude at the beginning where things are set up. You meet the two main characters. It's first person 3D. You meet the two main

characters other than yourself, uh, Nidita and and Bourjes, who are clearly you're um you're you're going to be committing some sort of crime with them. You're not sure what. Something's being planned. And then quite quickly, you get dropped into this scene. Um, it's after something has gone badly wrong. Um, Anita is wounded and she's trying to kill you. And this is the title screen. But the problem is that there's no indication of what it was that happened previously. So almost immediately, you're presented with choices. What? What happened here? What does this all mean? Interpretive play requires that you have choices. There has to be some sort of ambiguity in what in what's being presented to you. There has to be a situation where it's unclear to you how you should interpret it. Was there a betrayal, an accident, some sort of screw-up? There's no obvious right answer to this puzzle. There's not like, oh yeah, I got it. Okay, I know what it is. We want to work towards something that given the information we have satisfies this feeling of both coherence and closure. After

um the the initial scene with um with Anita, you discover that Boures is also wounded. And you leave Anita behind, which is new bit of information. Why would that be happening? And you escape with Boures through the Cougat airport. Um and there's this um long um the sequence where you you get him in a luggage cart and he's bleeding and you push him around through the crowds and there's interaction space. You're having to move through the space and and and and navigate with these crowds, but it's very very low, very of a very thin trickle of what's going on. You have a lot of time to think about what you just saw and why that matters. Why why why was she trying to kill you? Why doesn't why is he not why are you escaping with him? So variety, what new information did I just learn from moment to moment within this interpretive space? And how does that alter my previous interpretation? Um from moment to moment within 30 flights of loving, you're always going to sense that this um that things are continually changing under um the ground is continually shifting under your feet. There are new things that are happening that require you to make these sorts of interpretive moves. Interpretive play

requires that our situation keep changing. And then after you you escape with all of a sudden you get you start getting flashbacks and you get flashbacks to what happened before the beginning of the game, what happened when the the um um before the heist was even being planned. And you find that you and Anita have a history there. Um there's a scene of of of her alone peeling oranges and she sort of smiles at you as you walk past her. You the all three of you are going to a wedding together. There are these different um um um moments, different beats that give shifts to what your interpretations could be. And what's interesting about this is that these these shifts have consequence. So when you're making interpretive moves, it's not just sort of idle speculation. you're actually directing your speculation towards situations that will can trigger other interpretive moves. So what are the ramifications of this interpretation? How does one shift in understanding invite other shifts in

understanding? So that um it's not a case of just like oh I wonder what Anita was doing there but it seems very very significant that that Anita is there. It's very significant for knowing what you know about what comes later that she be there um peeling an orange looking at you in that way. As I said, the three of you wind up going to a wedding together. And this is all clearly this all clearly takes place before anything that any of the heist that happens. And so, um, we now get into the realm of predictability. And in the case of interpretive play, um, we're looking to say, can I make sense of what's going on? Can I anticipate what might go next? At this point, we we're in this whole stew of possible things that might happen. interpretive play requires that you're able to form a sense of how things are likely to unfold. And one of the things that's really interesting is once we start when we talk about um sort of typical action games, the rules are something that we present to the player. They're sort of an abstraction that the player has to learn. But when we start talking about interpretive play, our

ability to predict is to a great deal predicated on our knowledge of day-to-day life or our knowledge of literary tropes or knowledge of film or knowledge of other um types of experiential games. So the rules that make up the rules that allow us to predict what's happening this in this situation rely on our understanding of like what are the relationships between people like this? Was there a love triangle here? They all went to a wedding together. What does that mean? Um what sort of friends were we that we all went to a wedding together? There there's a lot of real world knowledge that gets mixed into creating predictable situations whenever we're talking about um experiential games. And then finally after the wedding um you apparently sleep with Anita. It's not spelled out explicitly. You both get drunk. You go back to the hideout that you were staying in and she's waiting for you um on on this makeshift bed that exists. And at this point as you walk towards her, you get dropped back into the um the the um uh experience in in in

the airport. But what happens with the the continual shift is you get this sense of uncertainty that that once you once you discover that there is this romantic entanglement between you and Anita, which has not been hinted at before, except for the a few of these looks. Is it possible that all the predictions I had previously were incorrect? Is there something that I that I've overlooked? you have this sense of that the world underneath your feet is is unstable. And because of that, you go back and revisit your previous interpretations. You're not fixed and settled. It's not like, right, I knew what happened. I moved on. But each new element that is added has the potential to undermine what came previously. So interpretive play requires that we continually revisit our existing understanding of the situation. We're never really sure we know what's coming next. So eventually you escape with Boures. Um, there's a a great sort of interactive moment where you use Borges on his luggage car to prevent a gate from coming down. And then when you finally make it out of the airport, you get another another flashback. And this

flashes you back all the way to um something even before the wedding. We know it's before the wedding because you're riding on motorbikes together. And you can tell that you're you're carrying the uh the bottles that you you take to the wedding as a wedding present. And um right at the moment where Anita turns around and looks lovingly at you, again, another sort of moment that invites uh coherence and closure exploration, um she's not paying attention and she gets hit by a truck and the two of you are apparently killed. And now this really throws things into confusion because um how do we interpret this now? Was this a really a romance going wrong? Was it some sort of stupid mistake in in the heist? Intentional betrayal? Did the heist even happen? Is it metaphoric? Is there uh is the entire thing some sort of like afterlife dream? This final movement of of of the the death of you and Anita in one way or another really breaks open the um the the possible interpretive space and then encourages you to work on a whole variety of levels towards

satisfaction. So you're no longer at this point trying to say okay is this can I understand what's going on? You're trying to say, can I understand thematically something that will make this satisfying to me? How does it how does this make me feel? How do I want to close this off? And it makes me that it makes this feel whole and complete in an interpretation that intellectually and emotionally that I can I I can feel good about. And it's this convergence on an interpretation that we like is what is at the heart of this sort of interpretive play. And this isn't about winning. This isn't about getting the puzzle right. It's not about solving what happened between Boures and Anita. It's like it's about taking the situation is presented to us and using it as a way to work through our own personal interpretation of what feels satisfying in these sorts of situations. Okay. My second example is going to be um something that you're more likely to have played. It's the uh the Silent Hills playable trailer that came out this fall PT u for PlayStation 4. And

what's very interesting about this um in terms of of uh uh interpretive play and interactivity is that there's again only the thinnest trickle of interactivity in this space. It's a very tiny repetitive level. Um about the the only action you have is to be able to look more closely at things. And in a really interesting design choice, the feedback cues are really confusing. Um, in preparing this talk, I I played way more of PT than is probably healthy. And I actually tweeted I was like I'm like I had not anticipated the fact that um talking about PT would require me to immerse myself in PT. Um, and I also watched a lot of of walkthrough videos of people playing PT. And one of the interesting things about the walkthrough videos is that people will are trying to show things and they have absolutely no idea how to trigger the things they're showing. And you have these people saying, I think I need to do this. that even with people who are really obsessed with the game, there's a degree of confusion over what the feedback is actually doing. Yet, we get hours hours of interpretive

play out of this really simple almost non-interactive space. So, here's the the way um uh I'm not going to show you all PT, but this is this is there's some a few spaces aside from this, but most of PT takes place in this L-shaped hallway with a little bathroom attached. And initially the uh the hallway is very kind of normal. It's it's it's it's well lit. You can kind of see what's going on. Uh you turn a corner, that's the rest of the hallway. It's the bathroom's kind of off to the right. And most of the game play consists of this continual cycling through this L-shaped hallway. And occasionally you'll make a detour in into the bathroom. There's some other some other things that can happen, but it almost all happens in this very very limited space. So why does this work? Why does this work as a play experience? The environmental cues that exist within the space drive anticipatory play. Uh almost everything in the space um feels very very significant and because it's repeated over and over and over again,

there's a hard stillness that exists where you're sort of driven to sort of obsessively look at the various things within within the space and try to consider what it means. Why is it here? Why why am I being placed in this situation? Why should I be looking at this? And it's very important that for most of the game almost nothing is happening because with nothing happening then the interpretive play we can make the interpretive moves that make PT work is a horror experience. So within this hallway there are small areas that have greatformational density. Um and because the triggering is so soft because you're never quite sure if you've actually triggered anything or not you're really encouraged to study details closely. look at things, you're not sure what what do I need to do to advance here? Is it important that I study this? Is there a clue here? What do I need to find? And when you narrow down to look at these tight details, it really it gives you this sort of um um feeling of having blinders on it. Sort of eliminates your

situational awareness. You're not quite sure of anything around you other than that what you're what you're actually looking at. These details all work towards suggesting some sort of awkward and dysfunctional relationships. the various areas around the the the hallway um have this sort of squalor to them. There's like old banana peels, cigarettes, um um pill bottles, like candy wrappers laid around. Um all the the the family portraits seem kind of off. The there's suggestions of drug abuse. And then after a while, you start getting radio messages about murder and and and families um um killing each other. And um there's this pervasive atmosphere of sort of of sort of insanity and dysfunction that that you pick up gradually as you start to study the space around you. You also start seeing things that appear there. There are things that start appearing on the wall. Um uh I don't know if this is readable on the screen, but it says I can hear them calling me from. And if you continue to explore, one of the things the triggering reveals is that it turns into I can hear them

calling to me from hell. And so again, because we've been forced on this sort of obsessive relationship with the world, then all these tiny So if you if you were doing a more actionoriented game, you would blaze right past something on the wall that said, "I can hear them calling me from hell." But because there's nothing else to do, there's nothing else to look at. The the emergence of this thing on the wall feels very very significant and very very powerful. and it triggers again spawns a whole another cycle of interpretive play when it when it when it happens. So there's ways to solve what's going on in PT. We can sort of like work out solutions of what the space is presenting to us, but they all lead to feelings of dread, which is why it's so effective as a horrible as a horror space. They all all our interpretations and views uh abuse, insanity, murder. We're not explicitly told what awful happened, which is what actually makes it even worse because now we um we're giving lots of hints that something is

something awful happened and our imagination is where the horror takes place. So the space is so minimalist that even very small differences feel pretentious. After you've cycled through the uh hallway half a dozen or a dozen times, you turn the it gets dark and you have a flashlight at one point and you turn the corner and at this point instead of having the uh um um the normal lighting of the hallway, um there's a spot that's lit red and I'm looking at the people over here who were played who I played it with at Sony Santa Monica and I can um all of us had the same response when we saw this and that was this and it's really simple. I mean, it's it's like again in a in a game where there's a lot more action going on, the fact that all of a sudden you encountered an area where you had a red light, that wouldn't feel particularly significant. But because the game has given you so little in terms of interpretations, in terms of evidence to

consider, the fact that all of a sudden something like that changes feels very, very significant indeed. Um, on top of that, um, um, PT contains a handful of jump scares. Um, there's a ghost. There's, this is a brief screenshot of her who who appears at sometimes. There's a smashed window that can startle you. There's an unexpected um, attack by the ghost. These happen very, very rarely. In fact, it's it's possible to play the game with only encountering one of them. But because you know that that possibility exists, it always puts you on on edge and it's going to happen again. Now, there's one thing that um I'm going to show that um the baby in the sink. And the baby in the sink, I think, is probably the weakest part of PT. And it's interesting why it's the weakest part. It's really, really creepy. The first time you see this baby, you're locked in the bathroom and there it is sort of muing at you. It's really unsettling situation. But the problem is is that because of the soft triggering that works so well elsewhere in the game, it's possible to get stuck in a state where the baby is there for a long

time. You can have half an hour with the baby there in the sink and after a while it wears off. It's like there's it's played out. There's no more whatever you imagined about what sort of horrors surrounded the existence of this horror this horrible thing in the sink. You don't have any more work to do on it. And at that point when that happens your response is oh yeah the baby. And it stops being scary. And it's really interesting that something that when it first appears as one of the scariest parts of PT quickly can become one of the most boring because it has gotten played out as an interpretive play space. Um the final thing I'm going to talk about uh is uh is Journey which was um um done by Sony Santa Monica. Um my my involvement was very tangential. I was not sort of um the the designer on it, but I got to see a lot of it while it was being developed. U most of you probably know um how how Journey Unfolds. It's a two plat player platformer. Um what's interesting about it is that you're randomly paired with another player. And a key um play mechanic which um is very subtle is that your proximity to the other player re

recharges your jump within your when you're running within the space. So normally when you're running around you have your your scarf that trails behind you and your scarf gets longer over time and your scarf is a meter that tells you how high and how long you can jump. And the scarf will drain when you um when you jump and then you then you then you fall. You can no longer sustain your float. But if you get to to around certain areas, it will recharge and then you can you can you can jump again. But when you're playing with another player, if you get close to them, then your scarves recharge each other. They they they they um um they they light up and they whatever you you burned off from from jumping recharges itself. What's interesting about this is that even though there's no direct communication in the game, the mechanics themselves, this one very subtle mechanic drives a particular social behavior. And that is that if you want to proceed effectively for the platforming part of the game, sticking together is a good thing to do. And this instinct towards sticking together becomes a strategy you sort of internalize almost unconsciously as

you're playing the game. This sort of unconscious internalization of this sort of this sort of strategy actually exists in other games as well. in Eco. Um, Yorda has a similar function. She acts as a key and also she's very vulnerable and whenever you're not with Yorda, you feel very very nervous when you're playing Eco. And what it means is that the mechanics drive you to the sense of like, oh, I should really always be with Yorda. I should really always be with Yorda. And this sort of reinforces a particular way of existing within the game world. You have the same thing with this guy in Portal. Um, in fact, I I think I cared more about the cube than I did about Yorda. um because it's a real ally where it's where it's presented. It blocks energy pulses that you can kill. You pick it up and you use it as shield. It protects you and then um the only way to get through the through the level is to place it on trigger plates. So, it opens doors for you. It's it really is a valuable ally for the 10 or so minutes you have it. And then so again, the sense of that I need this cube. I need it to be with me. The mechanics drive a

particular way of thinking about your existence within the space. So within journey, the same thing happens. the mechanics have driven you to think about um a certain way of existing within the space, but then you get to the snowfield near the end of the game. And in the snowfield, there's nothing really to jump to. You can still jump for the heck of it, but there's not really any point anymore. And the cold begins to drain away your scars. Even without jumping, you're losing your the ability to jump. And what that does is that is this draining happens. Um I've watched every time you play, people tend to stick together. They want to keep their star their scarves sort of um um fully charged. And so the the this reflexive mechanic encourages sort of a c a certain ah a certain way to be this has particular poignance when you get to the point in the snowfield where where you both die and I'm I'm sorry if I'm spoiling journey for you. Um you you don't make it through that part alive and you both collapse. At the very end your scarves have melted away to nothing. They've been destroyed by the winter by by the cold. But every time I

play Journey, I've never not seen both people stay together right to the very end. They march shoulderto-shoulder right up to the moment where they both die. What's fascinating about this is that that it feels really, really natural to stick together at that point. It feels wrong not to stick together. And so Journey contains within it this lingering tendency towards togetherness. That's sort of the meaning that inheres within Journey or at least that's the meaning that to me because I'm reading Journey through my own particular u interpretive my own particular set of interpretive moves that I experienced as I played it. You may experience something very different but the sense is that baked into the mech. So it's not just like story moments that create the sort of meaning making. It's also in the mechanics themselves. Uh I'm I'm going to speed up a little because I realize I'm I'm running short. Uh an interesting cool thing I discovered um when I was replaying this for um the uh um for the presentation um this together this encourages players when they walk when you you're resurrected and walk into the light of

the end um they recreate the silhouette of the mountain uh unconsciously and I actually asked um somebody from the Chinese room if this was intentional. It was completely accidental. This was uh just sort of a natural convergence during creation. I'm going to talk very briefly about everybody's gone to the rapture. I wish I could talk more, but unfortunately um almost nothing's been released about it yet. Um I've been allowed to show one one screenshot. So when we're designing Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, what we're looking for is creating a space that's largely empty of empty of interaction. There's plenty of stillness in this space. There are triggered beats that will happen as you explore this space. They alter your understanding of the story. There are things there are ways to interpret what's going on, but they're designed to be both ambiguous and for the space itself to offer you plenty of stillness in order to consider the the ramifications of what you're seeing. So, just to just in conclusion, I'm

going to talk a little about meaningful play. I mean, we want games to become a powerful art form. We want games to be something that are meaningful. And I think the way to this is by realizing that meaning is the residue of interpretive play. If you're talking about just sort of like what your strategies are for winning a game, okay, that has application to the game itself that's internal to the game. But once you start talking about doing interpretive play, because that ties into our own understanding of the world, we're drawing on our understanding of human relationships of of human power structures. Because we're drawing on that, then the interpretive moves that we make in order to navigate these sort of anticipatory spaces lead to a a lingering meaning that exists even after you finish playing. So in ways the meaning of a game that ex of a game is the final position of the pieces as they exist on the interpretive board. They're the final set of of of ways of understanding through coherence and closure what it is we were doing as we

play. What this means is that if we're trying to make games that are meaningful, it's not a good idea to think of them as a transfer of information. We're not trying to pump meaning into the player. We're not trying to encode meaning, as a way for them to like decode as a puzzle. Even though sometimes even literature is taught this way, we want to think about um um meaningful games as existing as a sense of discovery and a way of of having strategies of anticipation that lead to particular interpretations. So the rules that put bounds and sorts of meaning that you can discover um are constraints that are defined by the mechanics of the game as they are in Journey. They're described by situations, the situations you're put into PT. They're characters. So um with within with the characters that are that are presented within um 30 flights of loving and they're also driven by the player's own knowledge of themselves in the world. there there's it's not possible to cleanly separate uh out mechanics or story or narrative the all of these things as as as is as distinct

parts of meaning making. They all contribute to the sorts of interpretive moves we can make and they don't need to be um um presented linearly. We're accustomed to stories being told in a linear fashion because that's the way stories have always been told. Again, in addition to being interactive, games can also be really nonlinear and you can put these constraints in that encourage players to like search for interpretation in a wide variety of different orders or even deliver them procedurally. But again, the goal is not to have people decipher things, but rather find their way towards something that satisfies either coherence or closure. So I said previously a game is an engine for generating interesting situations. But by the same token a story is an engine for generating interesting situations. A symphony is a is engine for generating interesting situations. Um a painting is a is an engine for generating interesting situations. There's a wide variety of different ways to produce this sorts of these sorts of play. As game designers, we have a unique ability with the sort

of tools we have, the interactive tools, the ways we can have things evolve procedurally to deliver these sorts of things. But it's a it's it's in it's similar in many ways to what is done with other forms of art. So if you're interested about more of this sort of thinking, um I have 300 pages of it in a book called The Aesthetic of Play. Uh it's coming out in about two weeks and um I this talk is drawn almost entirely from stuff I've talked about here. Um and if you just want to talk about it um I um would love to hear I have interlocators on Twitter. I'm BBTON on Twitter or if you want to send me email, this is my this is my email address and I think they have like five minutes. [Applause] Hi, I was wondering if you've considered uh the selection or more specifically uh

the rejection of opportunities to take action uh as its own kind of potent decision in gameplay uh with its own affirmations. If you could comment on that. Oh yeah. Uh so the question is um if um rejecting a call to action is its own um its own type of gameplay. And I think absolutely. Uh, I think some of the most interesting play experiences are when um people refuse to play games the way that they're um maybe intended to be played. I think there's the opportunity for um a lot of meaning making in situations where you say, "Oh, um I reject the framework of play that is being given me to to me by the game designer. I'm going to find my own fun with this and I'm going to do something that's entirely different." I think that's that's a um um a really powerful way to play. And I think people who uh either break games or refuse to engage with games um are doing something really interesting. I I even have my own personal example um in Shadow of the Colossus. Um I refused to finish Shadow of the Colossus even though I really

loved it because I didn't want to be the sort of person who was going to kill the Colossi. Um like I don't I don't like being this guy. And um and so it was almost like a little this this sort of little um sort of moment of protest, but also it felt like that was a really significant move to make. It felt like that for me the sh the not finishing Shadow of the Colossus was more important than whatever fun it was giving me. Thanks. Hi. Um you talked about um the elements that you find in the game when you're uh trying to elicit interpretative play and you talk about adding every elements that's going to shift your interpretation and you mention for example in PT those points where you have a concentration of information. So is there like what is the balance because clearly if you look at uh the arresttor or you look at even everybody has gone to the rapture you have even in

just the screenshot there is necessarily something a way to design those spaces so that you have those elements there that allow so there necessarily or you think there would be some kind of balance to strike And some kind of also uh taste in choosing how you place ingredients that allow for interpretation and that have this conflicting allow for this those conflicting and some search for a satisfactory interpretation. Um I'm supposed to repeat that question but I don't think I can. So I'm just going to answer it I think as best I can. Um, I I think that one of the tricky things about designing play spaces like this is that you have to make a lot more assumptions about the player because it's because it's so much of what's happening is based off of people's own feelings and prior knowledge of things. And so I think that

that there are there are very clear things we can do mechanically as designers to draw people towards areas of interest. So, like in in the the shop for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, um if you're walking through a field and there is a a barn with a big open door, you're probably going to go over and look in the barn. And if you go over and look in the barn, you'll probably find something that's an interesting beat. Uh I think that there's there's a real art towards finding ways to to seduce people into gathering the information they might need. But at the same time, you want to always part of what would makes it interesting in in an interactive space like this is that you can create situations where people might miss stuff. You might you and the fact that you might get part of the story or part of the interpretation that's actually part of the gameplay in this um that that you may be working with fragmentaryary information and if it's designed properly, the ambiguity itself produced by that helps lead to an interesting exploratory experience. So, I'm pretty sure the only reason um

I'm pretty sure anticipatory play and interpretive play are the only reason I've ever played video games. Uh now that now that you articulate it like that. Um and I'm I'm wondering especially in the case of interpretive play uh the thing you were saying about meaning be the final moves on the interpretive board. um that strikes me as very uh accurate. And I'm wondering in the case of uh serious games, activist games, uh games that kind of purport to address serious topics in complex ways. Uh we need those games of course, but a lot of them are very focused on like message transmission. And I'm wondering how do you bring this concept of interpretive meaning and really giving the player the freedom to kind of arrive at their own conclusion um to to that space or or do you feel like that's uh that's especially hard for political reasons or is it impossible? I think that um I mean we're all human beings and we all most of us occupy very

similar interpretive communities. Um and there's there's a fair amount of um sort of um literary theory on the side of how do we actually communicate with each other? And I think the answer is that if you try to explicitly tell somebody what you want them to hear, try to have a really explicit message, then it's going to find it's going to feel very dactic and feel very sort of like um on the nose. It's feel like it's really being hammered home and kind of like like it's being forced on you. But I think because we sort of know if we know our audience well and we have a sense of how they're going to respond. I mean I have a sense of the sort of interpretive moves people will make even if I can't know exactly what they will make. So if I if I put cues out that allow them to sort of find their own way into something that is that that is likely then I think we can transmit something that's kind of close to what we intend without having to deliver it directly. And again, the

example I'll use is is is journey. I mean, um, journey really creates this strong sense of that that that fellowship and and and combined struggle is important, but it never actually like says that to you at any point. It just encourages you to live your way through it. And when you live your way through it, that kind of lingers with you. And so I think it's it's um it's possible to do this because we have similarities between us and we can anticipate the way players are likely to what what interpretive moves they're likely to make by making interpret assumptions about what their background is. And this is I I didn't intend this for this to be a diversity talk, but this is one reason why it's really important for to have diversity in games because it's very easy um if you come from a very narrow community, if you're one sort of person, to assume that your assumptions about how interpretation is going to happen are going to be the same for everybody. And it's really useful to have people who have very different voices and very different backgrounds because what that does is it gives a range of possible

ways that this interpretive play can can can play out and gives you a sense of what is possible with the the sort of situations you're setting up. Hi. Um, a lot of the stuff you're talking about actually I couldn't help thinking constantly about the film Primer. Uh I don't know if everyone here has seen that but uh uh that film leads to for me in any case re-watching it many many times and trying to piece together and looking on online forums and trying to figure out what on earth is going on and that of course has has no interactivity whatsoever. Um so in a sense I guess the question is if if we can create this interpretive play uh with a film like primer um what is the point of any interactivity at all really? I mean um why well in the first place I agree that um this is this sort of interpretive play exists in um in all

mediums um and I think that's my my point is that um there are things that we can do that they can't and that interaction is interesting like a feeling of agency is interesting a feeling of like oh I'm responsible for this or I I I I lived through it or I I made decisions that made that happen. All of those things are interesting things that go into the interpretive mix. So it's not really a case of like oh we can do interpretation with everything so why not why go to the the trouble making a game. It's more a case of saying okay we have a set of tools that we can we can use. We can um by by having interaction or giving players agency we can tell different sorts of experiences than you could have with a movie. We could you can you can implicate people in things. You can immerse people in things. There are different approaches that you can take. And so it's like saying, you know, why do we need to have movies um and their ability to have cuts and close-ups? Why not just have stage plays? And the answer is, well, because there's some things you can do with cuts and

close-ups that you can't get with stage plays. And I think that the the goal for us as designers is not to um say, how can I make everything about interactivity, but how can I use interactivity to feed into interpretive play in an interesting way for our for our own medium? Okay, thanks. It was a bit of a cheeky question. No, that's fine. I like cheeky questions. Oh, sorry. Can we uh I think Amy needs to wrap up. So, can we move it outside? Sure. Absolutely.