ShakeYaMouse
Try it before reading today’s entry
Spoilers are ahead.
Driving the player with curiosity
…instead of spectacle, recognition, or new power.
Twisting motive after start
It begins about mouse shaking, and quickly reveals to the player that there’s something more than that. The extra surprise isn’t much, but it’s enough of a deviation from the user’s expectation to warrant a great deal more time spent shaking the mouse. It almost becomes a “scratch off” application - mechanically a cousin of JoyOfDishes.
Finishing what’s started
A player may well give up trying to reach 1,000, but continue motion to finish ‘dusting off’ the hidden phrase and strange encouragement messages. This mechanism of invested energy is at the heart of why MirrorMaze has succeeded in persuading some players to spend a gross amount of time performing a frustrating task that they would never have agreed to do otherwise.
Here, the player doesn’t even intentionally start the activity that pulls him or her him. It happens as an unexpected side effect of the activity the player has acknowledged, however the factor is present all the same.
This device that can redirect mental investment concerns me greatly outside of game design - what aspects of my life and thinking have I developed in response to this type of trap? And in the lives of people I care about?
Whether it is “good” or “bad” is likely beside the point; I suspect that this type of mechanism is a natural and largely unavoidable part of life as a social creature. It seems to be partly sunk cost thinking, partly an appeal to the will that drives discovery, and perhaps outside this context it might also include elements of peer pressure or family expectation. In all cases, what seems unsettling or strange about it is that the direction and nature of future decisions are altogether derailed from the track that a person intended to travel by.
It gets unabashedly awkward
Mixing vaguely “bedroom talk” with coach or parental-type encouragement is a formula almost guaranteed to disturb - more so because it doesn’t get out of hand. Expectation goes unsatiated, dragging out silent anticipation. Taken in context of the player’s aggressive motion via arm (mouse) or finger (laptop track pad), the whole thing is a little stranger still. This approach comes roughly half-way through, suggesting that things could be on their way to becoming significantly more perverse… and while they of course don’t, the uncertainty of where it’s headed is one more way that the curiosity compulsion is used to keep the player mouse shaking.
Translation into shock value
It has an awkward allure very much like the sleeping bag scene in the film Superbad. The scene that I am referring to is the one in which the main characters, two male high school students, wind up very drunk, very late at night, and very close to one another in a private setting. Viewers stare, locked into every second of the scene, not sure what to expect, able to handle anything that might happen, but still kept on edge by what might happen next. In other words, a mean-looking person that acts nicely is more likely to be remembered for it than a gentle-looking person that acts equally, or perhaps even more, friendly. Shock value only works via contrast.
It almost goes without saying that South Park having four children as the main characters helps the show’s shock value tremendously. Imagine if the show presented the story of four adults!
Exploiting inaccurate first impression
Compare, for sake of illustration, the contrast between this game’s title (an allusion to a rap by Mystikal) and what this game is really about (philosophy and meaning), or the way this game is “marketed” (shiny question mark icon that never shows up in the game) versus how it appears (plain white text on borderless black), to the ways that Superbad was advertised (silly and childish humor) versus how the film itself was presented (crude and sometimes edgy humor). The discrepancy establishes a false first impression, and everything thereafter stretches and plucks at it.
Foot-in-the-door persuasion
The opening message to full screen the browser is helpful to playing the game - but it’s also an opportunity to get the player to “comply” with something the game asks of him or her. Someone agreeing to a small decision is more likely to make future decisions that are consistent with that behavior, whether it comes in the form of wearing a support pin for a politician (then becoming a zealot around friends), reciting the pledge of allegiance daily in school (and giving ones native country benefit of the doubt), or picking up a toothbrush from a drug store (and returning for prescriptions).
This game, rather directly but without calling attention to itself, gets the player to say “yes” before it even starts.
Ending aligns with both the game’s mechanics and its meaning
With regard to mechanics, the ending is itself a curiosity compulsion (importantly: not spectacle, not recognition, not power), giving the player something to be curious about, hopefully followed by a google search for the words provided. A little digging will reveal that it’s a book’s title, and that book - as well as the key metaphor driving the book - conveys meaning related to this game’s core mechanics.
Foreign language made recognition harder, increasing curiosity
The book’s actual title is in the language shown. An added advantage to selecting a foreign book title is that the letter-by-letter replacement is considerably harder to fill in, since it isn’t clear until nearly the end that the message is necessarily anything other than English.
As General Ourumov would say…
You can’t win. Absolutely, positively, regardless of special hardware or tactics, a score of 1000 cannot be reached. The scoring system asymptotes sharply at 999, a player would be hard pressed to get near that mark, and even then it likely wouldn’t last long enough to be register visually with anyone watching.
Playable antithesis
If you haven’t done so before, consider taking a moment to try Candy.
This entry is a known trainwreck of poorly organized and largely disconnected thoughts - I’m choosing to embrace this strangely half-living, half-wastebasket irregular style for today
Not only is the information still here in this format, but even more of the thoughts made it down than I could have shared were I contriving the ideas into a more cohesive, sequentially developed body with consistent main ideas.
The information in this entry - spare the pop culture allusions - was mainly intended to be communicated by the game itself and the greater discovery process that potentially follows. Trying to put into words a message that was designed to be communicated via automated feedback systems naturally is going to require some mangling. Allowing myself some latitude in style, I believe, serves a useful function in my search for better understanding what “games” may be better suited for than words; the 24 hour delay provides only a limited degree of freedom from needing to think of the concepts verbally prior to developing them. By not binding myself to fill a preconceived format, I’m less likely to wind up designing towards it as I go on to create projects 70, 71, 72…
Three questions left for reader reflection:
- How would the message and nature of this interaction be affected by displaying a “highest score achieved so far” someplace on the screen? Ex. if a player manages to shake up to 873, then displaying that someplace on-screen, until either that personal maximum fell behind or the program restarted.
- How would this abstract systems construct have played out differently without the changing encouragement text or decrypting message? I.e. how long might someone have played trying to get to 1,000 points before giving up? What would that player think/feel afterward? (Hatred? Frustration? Inadequacy? Confusion? Cleverness or insightfulness perhaps at “getting” the trick?)
- Tuning the time investment and speed requirements to reveal and then advance the encouragement messages and hidden phrase posed a complicated challenge to me as the developer. What considerations might have made this particular decision more difficult than other thinking about the project’s direction?
Thank you for reading.
In a different tone every day, interactively and verbally,
-Chris
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 am
Personally, I’d given up reaching 1000 but continued thanks to enjoying the fundamental activity, shaking the pen and seeing how high I could get. Only when I eventually gave up through exhaustion (having reached 960) did I notice the lower message had changed.
I never imagined shaking the pen could be so fun. If there’s a lesson here, for me it was to enjoy the process, not just the result.
February 2nd, 2008 at 5:55 am
I’m glad it was well received on your end - and a bit surprised that you made it so long without the bottom message calling attention to itself, but as always, I’m thankful for the extra data point(s).
As to the fun of shaking input devices… do you have a Wii?