A Medium of Interactivity
Humans have five senses; touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell. Music works with our sense of hearing. We pick up the sounds from the air and our brains tell us whether or not it is pleasurable. Books are a little more complicated, we see the letters on the page, but then translate them in our minds to sounds. I guess we can call that two senses, sight and sound. Television is more obvious, it's sight and sound as well. But games are a little more complex. The average video game seems to be made up of image and sound, appealing to our senses of sight and hearing, and perhaps touch for the pieces. But there's also something else there, something that isn't a sense, but which is crucial to the gaming experience. Without decision, there can be no game. Without control, a video game is just television. Where we understand music through hearing and television through sight, we understand games through control and reaction. Control is the medium through which we understand games, and like any other media, we can understand more about a game through how it manipulates its medium.
To think about how video games utilize control in different ways, we can look at how another technology attempted to do something similar: Virtual Reality. The idea behind Virtual Reality was to utilize most (if not all) of one's senses in order to transport them to another world. Users of VR dawned giant helmets to feed them stereoscopic images and to block off stimuli from the outside world. To move one's arm in the VR world, in a perfect system, one would only have to move one's arm in the real world, or perhaps, like in some science fiction, just think of doing so. However, transcendence into the virtual world came at the cost of separating one's self from the real world. The helmet would block out most other stimuli, and any movement would be useful only in the virtual realm. With the video game, we've taken a step back and reevaluated our priorities. As games show, a virtual realm does not need to separate itself from the real world to be involving. Controls can be simplified, from moving one's arm to pressing a button, and still be useful. Though video games are much more efficient than VR, where moving about the world means getting up and walking as opposed to sitting and pressing a joystick forward, we can still interact successfully within its world. The controls have simply been abstracted, like words into the alphabet.
Thus moving forward becomes pressing up on the joystick, and hopping becomes pressing the “X” button. Complicated actions simplified into small clicks. However, abstraction can also lead to greater complication. Buttons can be used together and linked sequentially to perform other actions. In Super Smash Bros., Mario can throw a fireball by pressing the B button. In Street Fighter II, Ryu can throw a fireball (or “Hadouken” in the game) by pressing down, then down+right, then right, then one of three punch buttons.
How games implement control foundationally changes how the games are played and experienced. For Mario in Super Smash Bros., there is no challenge in throwing the fireball. The player just presses the defined “fireball” button, and it happens. This action is so simple that it becomes automatic, in the same way that letters instantly become audible words when we read something. Ryu has it harder. For him, the player must press the correct sequence of buttons at the right time, and if they are successful, Ryu shoots a great blue fireball from his hands. This action is much more complicated. If Mario's fireball is like reading the Sunday paper, then Ryu's fireball is like reading House of Leaves. It requires practice and thought.
What Mario uses is an example of a transparent control scheme, one that simplifies the control enough that we stop thinking about how to make Mario jump and just do it, much in the same way a typist just types instead of looking for each key, or how we just speak instead of thinking through every word we know to find the right one. The player learns to “speak” Mario, and luckily the grammar in Mario is pretty easy to catch.
What is happening when a player speaks Mario is that they're making the controller “go away.” When first playing, we might expect a player to look down on the controller to find the button they would like to use. They're learning to speak. When they find it and get used to using it, they stop having to look for it. Their train of thought goes from “I want to jump – where's the jump button? -- I press the jump button – Mario jumps” to “I want to jump – I press the jump button – Mario jumps,” and then finally to “I want to jump – Mario jumps.” The intermediate steps disappear as the player relates his or her direct actions to the reactions in the game. This is why I call this control “transparent.”
Let's go back to Ryu. Speaking Ryu is hard. Even when you think you might have it down, you can always make a small mistake. Controlling Ryu remains challenging much longer than controlling Mario, to the point that “mastering” Ryu may not be possible (or at least very likely). In other words, even the best player's may not be able to perform the Hadouken 100 times in a row without making a mistake, or at least moving around the screen unintentionally.
As the player controls Ryu, they have to concentrate on what buttons they are pressing, in what order, and with what timing. This means that the control is constantly in their mind. It is “opaque,” in that the player's attention will be drawn to the controls themselves instead of the game world several times during a play session.
The control setup, either transparent or opaque, determine what challenges the player must overcome when playing. If the control scheme is transparent, then the player should be able to master navigating the virtual world quickly. Thus, the player will be preoccupied with what move they should make next, instead of how to make that move. The focus in the game is moved from the controller to the game world. For example, in Super Smash Bros., the player must worry more about what attack to use than how to perform it. Thus, SSB's mechanics rely more on choosing the right counter-attacks rather than being able to perform them.
In an opaque scheme players worry less about what move to make than how to perform it. The focus is placed both in the gamespace and on the controller, as the player is limited by their ability to perform “special” moves. Challenge arises as players attempt the moves, though they may have some idea of what they need to do. For example, in Street Fighter: Third Strike, player's may “parry” moves by pressing the control stick at an exact moment in the right direction. By performing this move successfully, the player is able to avoid any damage they might receive from the other player. However, since many of the moves in Third Strike are combination moves and the player must parry more than once in very quick secession, making the task very difficult. In this case, the player knows what to do, as they see the attack coming, and they know how to do it, but actually succeeding relies on how fast and accurately they can twitch their thumbs on the joystick in the physical world.
When designing a game, it can be very useful to think about how you're using the controls. A game with a transparent control scheme allows the player to sink themselves deeper into the world the game is presenting them. Opaque controls, on the other hand, can offer a different type of challenge for players, and, especially in fighting games, creates a nice imbalance between competing players of skill, which can drive players to want to be the best, or at least better than they are. Game mechanics can be helped by one system and made more frustrating by another, but that depends on what those mechanics are. A puzzle game should most likely have transparent controls, while a hack-and-slash game might benefit by a bit of opaque control.
It should be remembered that whether designed to be opaque or transparent, every control system is opaque to the beginner. Both of these schemes require a bit of game literacy to be truly enjoyed, though a controller like the Wii remote has been successful in making the controls intuitive enough to be transparent to the beginner.
