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Sensual Grammar - Wanna Shake Your Tree
By Corvus | November 14, 2006
The Round Table this month asks us to address the grammar used in games. While it may be easy to conflate grammar with design elements (and, in fact, design elements truly are grammatical elements by my definition), discussing the grammar used by designers goes a bit deeper and addresses what the designer is attempting to communicate, not merely how. Of course, the how is terribly important as well, given that attempts to express elements non-traditionally, or inconsistently, may be considered as big a faux pas as bad grammar at a formal dinner.
All right, exploration of the definition of grammar aside, Raph recently posed two very interesting grammatical puzzlers at Project Horseshoe (link) . First he laments that games are basically complicated spreadsheets.
And I think we’re prisoners of our math.
It’s ironic, because we keep chasing story, right? We chase after story, and we suck at story. I’m sorry, but we are really really really fuckin’ bad moviemakers, people [laughter]. We really are. We’re just no good at it. So what we do is we make bad movies, and we stick in some gameplay which we mostly stole from five years ago [laughter] and we say, “in order to get to the next episode, you must do this…” Right? That’s advancing the medium. That’s what we’re doing. It’s like, great, so in order to get to the next page of Gone With the Wind I have to play with a spreadsheet, and then you get the next chapter.
Long ago, the whole Deist philosophy… the metaphor for God was “the watchmaker.” And I’ve started to wonder whether games make the world into clockwork. And whether this is honest.
So much of what Raph says during this talk I agree with wholeheartedly - except for two things, one not particularly grammar related which I’ll share first - I think math is beautiful and there’s no shame in constructing worlds mathematically. When we see something beautiful we are, on some level, appreciating the mathematic “purity” of it. Movement can be described, even predicted, by math. The challenge lies in not being constrained by the math, or to focus on the math. Math ought to be an expression, not the point.
My second reaction is grammar related. We’re building games on computers. What do computers do? They compute. They break everything down into… math. The most minute grammatic tools at our disposal are mathematic functions. Even if we’re attempting to produce a participatory literary work of text on the computer… we’re using math to accomplish it. There’s no way around it. It’s the toolbox provided by the medium. The idea is to not allow the math to be the point of your design, but to use the math to pursue something more.
But the main grammar issue I want to address today is Raph quote which Brian Green picked up on for his weekend challenge (link.
…and why is there no game about the taste of a freshly picked peach, straight from the tree, with the smells and dust of the working orchard? How do you make a game about that?
Brian took this quote and issued the following challenge:
So, can you make a game about the taste of a peach (or, more generally, the eating of a peach) that the average player would understand? How can you include other sensory aspects besides just visuals and audio? Is Raph right to point out the fact that poetry can communicate this feeling, and by extension games should be able to as well?
I have long lamented that the toolbox of English grammar has lacked proper terms for the sense of taste and smell. Sight and touch we’ve got plenty of descriptors for and hearing has its fair share as well. When attempting to describe a scent, or a taste, however, I find myself resorting to metaphor. Much as a poem about eating a peach probably would. I’ve even suggested a DRPG titled The Sweet Smell of Success wherein scent is communicated through a visual metaphor of color (link).
Bruno Schulz, author of The Street of Crocodiles is particularly apt at mixing sensory impressions in order to describe a scene.
Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.
The dark first floor apartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked hear of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor; the sound of a barrel-organ rising from the deepest golden vein of day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.
Consistently throughout his work, Schulz assaults your senses while setting his stage. He does so with such mastery that it’s not long before you’re walking about hearing the sunshine, smelling the color of walls, and seeing the scent of food.
The key to portraying something like taste in a game is to include in your design grammar a comprehensive and consistent set of metonyms. Metonymy is the simple, and logical, replacement of one word for another within a text. Using the word crown to mean king, for example. When you say, “The crown is displeased,” people generally know you mean the ruler wearing the crown is displeased, not the piece of jewelry itself. Game design grammar is already full of metonyms. For example - red bars are substituted for life, blue bars for mana. It’s understood by the player that when the red bar is smaller, it’s life which is in jeopardy, not the characters red bar. So let’s explore some methods of building a taste grammar which would allow a designer to express what it’s like to eat a peach.
Let’s assume an audience which has never eaten a peach. If we cant’ communicate the experience to peach consuming neophytes, we haven’t really done our job, have we? This means we need to build a grammatical toolset of taste, in order to communicate the devouring of multiple foods. For our purposes we can even limit it to fruit.
First off, we need to decide what sensations about eating fruit we want to communicate. Defining a scale between tart and sweet would be a good start. Crisp to mushy would be another scale to consider. How juicy the fruit is ought to come into play as well, as well as pulpiness. Peaches are the fuzziest of fruits, but other fruits also have some fuzz, so finding a way to express that is important. So, we have the following elements to communicate:
- Tart/Sweet
- Crisp/Mushy
- Juiciness/Pulpiness
- Fuzziness
That’s four taste and texture elements that our game interfaces don’t have the capacity to communicate directly. So with a little exploration we need to create visual, audible, and tactile (assuming we’re not playing a PS3, that is) metonyms. To truly craft a functional and meaningful grammar, we need to be able to fade each effect in and out with every virtual bite of the fruit.
The scene, as I’m picturing it, is the player controls an avatar which is sampling piece of fruit from picnic table in a pastoral area, complete with “natural” sunlight, trees, and perhaps a nearby river. While we’re at it, let’s give the avatar a red striped sport coat and a straw boater.
First off, using the vibrate function of the controller to communicate fuzziness seems pretty logical. The ratio of fuzzy to non-fuzzy fruits is so small as to keep the vibration from becoming annoying. Eating a peach would generate a substantial buzz with each bite, gooseberries would generate light buzzes.
Tart and sweet, although on a flavor scale, can be replaced with two musical instruments. Melodic violins for sweet and… the bright notes of a piccolo for the tart. The more sweet a fruit, the louder the violins will play. The tarter, the louder the piccolos. Of course, this also opens all sorts of license for the music designer to utilize different keys and different melodies for different fruits.
Crisp/mushy and juicy/pulpy are much more textural than flavorful, but still critical to the experience of eating fruit. So lets use visual, textural, metonyms to express these elements. We’ll need to use some post processing filters to change rendering and color on the fly, much like Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did for rendering insanity. For the crisp/mushy range, we can blur the overall scene, the more mushy the fruit - the blurrier the render. Perhaps a water color process would be visually pleasing and still get the point across. The juicy/pulpy range can be expressed via color depth. The juicier the fruit, the deeper and richer the textures on the screen. The puplier, the flatter and duller the color range.
To top this off, let’s add a direct one-to-one metonymy. The light in the scene will change based upon the color of the flesh of the fruit being consumed. The stronger the flavor, the stronger the tint.
With this handful of metonyms we can recreate, not only the experience of eating various fruits, but the experience of eating different qualities of fruit. Ideally, we’d add to this grammatical tool set the existence of rot, mold, and worms to more fully express all aspects of the fruit eating experience. Did we use math to build this grammar? Yes, of course. Is it about the math? No, decidedly not. Particularly, as each piece of fruit can be a unique flavor experience, it detracts from the “what’s the algorithm” syndrome expressed by Raph in his talk.
It’s interesting that this subject came up during the Round Table this month. It’s the perfect example of why thinking of games in terms of media besides movies and other games is so important. The move towards describing games via nouns, verbs, adjectiverbs, and grammar, is a move away from the broken system of copying Hollywood and Doom. It’s also a move towards aligning games with a vastly older, and vastly richer, tradition of storytelling.
I’m going to end with a request. Did this post spark a particularly strong reaction in you? Did it challenge, frustrate, or inspire you? If so, please consider posting your response on your own blog and participating in this month’s Round Table. The submissions deadline is 11:59 on Thursday night, so you’ve got a couple of days. Full details on participating can be found on the Blogs of the Round Table page here at MBB (link). If you don’t have your own blog, feel free to submit as lengthy a comment as you wish!
Tagged:Design, Round Table. |
November 14th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
[...] Among them: Man Bytes Blog arrives at something that he feels may convey a peach, something in fact very similar to the “sense tunneling” approach that many PH attendees favored. He uses the word “metonymy” for it, but I think that a more accurate word perhaps might be “synesthesia.” [...]
November 29th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
[...] A while ago, I linked to Corvus Elrod’s roundtable on Gaming Grammar. I had some trouble understanding what exactly he was talking about when he asked for submissions. But Left Behind made it perfectly clear. [...]