Ludomancy

(Please re-read the title, it is not “Experimental”, it is “Experiential”)

I was reading Raph Koster’s “Influences” speech at the Project Horseshoe, where he showed his Andean Bird Demo, a sort of Jonathan Livingston Seagull game. He explained that he wanted to make a game about flapping. Not a simulator, fighting, strategy or any kind of challenge.

These experiential games are about giving the player the chance to experience something that might be outside his reach: flying by flapping, dragging clouds around or being a pulsating being in a psychedelic world. When I first met these kind of games, I disregarded them as failed attempts at making a *real* game. But maybe there is something untapped behind them. But what is an experiential game?

I think there are two factors that sets them apart from other games:

• They lack force-fed goals: the player will choose his own goals
• They provide experience-oriented tools so the player can actually feel the experience

The first one is obvious, if you are fantasizing about being a huge robot crushing cities, you don’t think “Whoa! I have to be careful not to tread over the pointy buildings, it would reduce my hull integrity!”: you’re smashing stuff and feeling powerful and that’s it. Feeling compelled to add goals to these games is the trap most designers fall over (unfortunately, Raph Koster ended up putting goals to the flapping game). A pure experiential game should have no goals whatsoever, not even for teaching the player to play.

The second factor is not so obvious. We like to point out that games are different than movies and books because of interaction, but most of the time we don’t give much thought into it. In Andean Bird, Raph wanted you to experience flapping and not flying. So you use the controls to move the wings. If he wanted you to experience flying, he would have chosen an easier way to control the bird (like mouse controls), and more feedback on the experience of flying. In Shadow of the Colossus, you gain speed while riding by spurring with a button tap, that felt quite like horseriding; If it was a strategy game experience instead, you would have moved the horse by clicking on the destination.

The experience is defined by the way it’s manipulated by the player, so every interaction tool must be part of the core experience the game wants to convey, which is very fragile. A misplaced tool or feedback, and it is ruined.

Sometimes you get hints that maybe there is a niche for this kind of games. Some people enjoy crushing cockroaches in Half-Life instead of gunning their way out of Mesa. Cloud is a well received game.

It would be interesting to see more of these games: They are great for introducing non-gamers.