#christopher totten

How would you design an open space that draws the players attention to landmarks in the context of environmental storytelling?

Chris: When I want to draw player attention to a specific place on a map, I try to think not only about the environment art used to make that destination distinct, but also how environment art around the destination supports it and guides the player’s eye. If I want a player to go to a tall mountain, for example, I would frame it with shorter mountains or objects that get taller as the player’s eye navigates to the mountain I want them to notice. I’d also maybe use color to emphasize the mountain against the rest of the environment (sunset behind the mountain, fire coming out of it, light emanating from it, snow on top when others have none, etc.) Think of it as a relay race: each time the player’s gaze reaches an interesting object, their eyes will run to the next more interesting object until they hit the visual “finish line.”

Heather: Players are much more likely to notice motion in an environment than things that are still. This can be achieved in a number of ways, from pumping machinery above a door to a quiet stream of fireflies floating across a field. You can use continual motion, specifically that line of motion, to draw attention to more still things in the environment.

This is a reading I picked up from an article on Kill Screen, originally written by Yannick Joye and Jan Verpooten. It’s a scientific investigation into how religious architecture influences subjects psychologically, which I normally wouldn’t go for, but I found it to be pretty applicable to what I’m thinking about, so decided to dive in. I won’t spend too much time of the specifics of the article, as it becomes less and less relevant to my research as it goes on, but it does link in nicely with a key reading from my Honours work, so I’ll instead spend some time discussing those two articles in relation to one another.

Joye and Verpooten spend the first part of their article discussing current understandings of how monumental architecture might influence those who see and experience said architecture. According to their research, monumental architecture, such as towers and pyramids, evoke awe in those who experience them because subconsciously we understand them as “a non ambiguous and reliable signal of power.” Essentially:

“Building monumental architecture required massive amounts of energy, and only those who actually had power and controlled it could have been capable of recruiting and managing the energy and labor necessary for building such edifices.” 

An easy example would be the Citadel from Half-Life 2, which towers over you from the very first moment you step outside in the game, and can be seen from almost any level.

These kind of monuments emphasize the seperation between the people who have the resources to build something that gigantic, and the submissive working classes who don’t. This works within the fiction of the game; the Citadel is an obvious power symbol for the citizens of City 17, just as much as it is a goal for the player. We could also consider this concept within the politics and culture of game production. As I mentioned in my last post, there’s a real strictness on where financial resources are devoted. So when Hideo Kojima includes some detailed ‘stumbling’ animations in the introduction sequence to The Phantom Pain, but never again, that could be read as a signal of his influence and prestige as a designer, which allows him to bypass the general rules on budgeting and reusable assets.

This could also be tied into further claim from Joye and Verpooten. Just as Kojima’s “wasteful” use of production resources can be seen as a signal of his power over publisher Konami, the building of monuments in a society could be seen as being wasteful, as these buildings are often off-limits to the public, and often only serve a restricted use, such as a tomb. The pyramids of Egypt signal not only that that society had the resources and labour to build such a gigantic structure, but also that they had enough resources and labour to “waste” on a single-use pyramid, rather than houses or other, more useful buildings. 

Of course in virtual space, this becomes less of an issue. During the production of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for example, it was probably a lot easier to model this tower:

Than it was to model the boat that Link sails around in during his adventure:

In the physical world, the opposite would be true; the tower would take years of planning, resource gathering, expertise, and physical labour and ingenuity to construct, whereas the boat would probably only take a small team a few months to design, build, and paint. And yet we still feel a sense of awe when approaching that tower, or any other, in a video game. It could be argued that it still takes a level of expertise to design, model, texture, and light that tower, but the same could be said of any object in the game world. In terms of labour, the amount of work it would take to create that tower could be equal or less than any other virtual object. So how can we account for this feeling of awe? Joye and Verpooten offer some more thoughts:

“The history of architecture shows us that during different epochs and among different cultures wasteful advertising through monumentality mainly occurred by erecting structures who most constant and distinctive feature is their very large size, most often expressed through height (cfr., towers, pyramids, ziggurats).”

The scale of a monument is something that usually carries over between physical and virtual worlds. Whether you’re in a third or first-person perspective, impressive monumental architecture tends to tower over you, often leading to a sense of inferiority and/or wonder. Joye and Verpooten attribute this feeling to encounters with parents and other authority figures during childhood, in which we learn to associate physical size with social power. This is a phenomenon which continues into adult life as well; winners in sporting events are placed on the top of a podium, musicians are placed above their audience on a well-lit stage, and the director of a company usually has their office in the upper floors of a building. My supervisor’s office is a few floors above mine. In this sense, social superiority is often conveyed through height. The article calls this a “sensitivity for bigness”.

So we’ve established that height is generally associated with importance, in both physical and virtual spaces. But a sense of inferiority is not all the we might feel when confronted with a monument of extreme height. These structures can also evoke affects and emotions like “admiration, beauty, delight, goose bumps, aesthetic chills, fear, dizziness, romance, or hope.” An astute virtual traveller might also note that it’s not just looking up at monumental architecture that could evoke these feelings; it could also be the sensation of looking down at a landscape, or across some particularily stunning landscape, or entering into an intricately detailed space. Joye and Verpooten therefore posit that it’s contrast, rather than scale, which can evoke these feelings in regard to monumental architecture. The Citadel from Half-Life 2 inspires awe not just because it is gigantic, but also because the structures which surround it are small and cluttered. It’s this premise that hellojed’s The Tower Inverted almost solely rests on. 

The work is a series of virtual environments where the ‘goal’ of each is to reach a specific area of the space, usually by moving toward some kind of tower, whether it’s a vertical stream of particles or a piece of architecture in the landscape. It becomes clear quite quickly that your first action each time you are dropped into a new environment should be to look for what part of the scene is contrasted most strongly, whether it’s by size, colour, or movement. Without much else to do except walk and jump, each tower also inspires awe just by the virtue of your inability to do anything except look up and move toward them.  

Joye and Verpooten state that “vastness might also refer to extraordinary craftsmanship”, thus including both size and effort in their definition of monumental architecture. From here, they apply these findings to their investigation of religious monumental architecture, but I’d like to diverge a little and instead extend their findings in relation to another article I’ve read. It’s called Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts, from Christopher Totten. As the name suggests, it’s an article on how various types of spaces may provoke our in-built survival instincts as human beings. As I was looking through the Joye and Verpooten reading, I was thinking that towers and other monuments might appeal to us not only because they represent awe and superiority, but also because they may represent safety. 

As humans, it’s reasonable to assume that we subconsciously seek out higher ground. Just as when we build our offices in order of social or corporate importance, we often try to get above our terrain in our day-to-day life. If a café or restaurant has a second floor, we often find it preferable to grab a table on that second level, and when we go on holiday we often seek “good views” over the landscapes we visit; tourist destinations and high altitude locations incorporate this into their design. To frame this within the context of our survival instincts, it’s reasonable to state that we look for high vantage points to get a read on our surroundings, trying to spot predators, prey, shelter, water sources, and escape routes. The crux of the Totten article is that players are constantly seeking to “overcome” danger in their level designs; we start Metroid Prime as a relatively defenceless Samus Aran who can eventually conquer her environment and enemies through the collection of weapons, armour, and tools. 

“In Hyrule, Zebes, and many other designed digital worlds, players find themselves in environments that act as both safe havens and dangerous wildernesses; using the dichotomy to their advantage and overcome their own disadvantages if possible.”

High vantage points are desirable in many virtual environments, and not only for mechanical purposes. As well as seeking out goals and potential enemies, players can also seek these vistas with the assumption that it will provide a aesthetically pleasing view of the game world, and allow them to feel some sense of power or superiority over the space, as the designers and inhabitants of skyscrapers and other tall monuments might in the real world. Totten cites Batman: Arkham Asylum as a game in which seeking out a high vantage point (usually the game’s gargoyles) as highly desirable. Indeed, trying to make your way to one of these structural elements is often the first thing you may do when entering a new room in the asylum.

“One of the elements of the game that assisted in the player's feeling of power was the level of control they had over the game's environments. Even in the largest rooms of the asylum, Batman can jump and swing from the highest structural elements and maintain his vantage point above his enemies. Fitting the character of Batman, players have incredible freedom over spaces that would be overwhelming and dangerous in other games.”

A key idea here is prospect versus refuge space, where the latter is relatively safe and controlled by the player, allowing them to relax and assess potential threats and opportunities in the prospect space around them. Towers and other monumental architecture can act as a refuge space, allowing you to view and assess the surrounding prospect space of a city or wilderness. While you may be more exposed on the top of a tower than you would be in a cave or tall building, it still allows you a sense of control and superiority over the virtual space, a sense of control which those on the ground wouldn’t have. Assassin’s Creed mechanised this idea by placing lookout points around their virtual cities, which allow players to get a sense of the surrounding areas and add key details to their mini-maps.

This is a strong instinct in virtual environments designed around competitive first-person shooting as well. It’s often advantageous to seek high ground in multiplayer matches, to keep enemy players in view, and to take advantage of the ability to snipe at them from great distances. Totten finishes his article by acknowledging that, while high vantage points in virtual environments may be mechanically and aesthetically advantageous, they can also open players up to danger, or a sense of danger. A good way to combat this, he says, is to shelter the player in a structure, or provide glass or guardrails (a common real-world design tactic) to visually seperate the player from the dangerous drop that accompanies great heights. You can also, if you choose, emphasize this danger:

“The player is open to danger, but in this case, the greatest source of danger is not enemy creatures or combatants but the environment itself. This feeling is known as vertigo. Height used in this way is a very dramatic spatial element. Vertical elements such as structures or shadows can deepen the sense of vertigo by drawing the player's eyes deeper into the chasm.”

So overall, two very useful articles, even if the former doesn’t specifically address virtual environments. To that end, I think I’d like to use this reading for a (hopefully) weekly experiment. I’m going to just briefly put together some kind of explorable virtual environment, and see how I can use knowledge gained in this reading to design some kind of awe-inspiring tower. Hopefully through this process, I’ll also be able to come up with some new ways of inspiring awe in the player.

Joye, Yannick., and Jan Verpooten. "An Exploration of Religious Monumental Architecture From a Darwinian Perspective." Review of General Psychology Vol. 17 No.1 (2013): 53-68.