Steve Swink

"Game Feel" exposes "feel" as a hidden language in game design that no one has fully articulated yet. The language could be compared to the building blocks of music (time signatures, chord progressions, verse) - no matter the instruments, style or time period - these building blocks come into play. Feel and sensation are similar building blocks where game design is concerned. They create the meta-sensation of involvement with a game. The understanding of how game designers create feel, and affect feel are only partially understood by most in the field and tends to be overlooked as a method or course of study, yet a game's feel is central to a game's success. This book brings the subject of feel to light by consolidating existing theories into a cohesive book. The book covers topics like the role of sound, ancillary indicators, the importance of metaphor, how people perceive things, and a brief history of feel in games. The associated web site contains a playset with ready-made tools to design feel in games, six key components to creating virtual sensation. There's a play palette too, so the desiger can first experience the importance of that component by altering variables and feeling the results. The playset allows the reader to experience each of the sensations described in the book, and then allows them to apply them to their own projects. Creating game feel without having to program, essentially. The final version of the playset will have enough flexibility that the reader will be able to use it as a companion to the exercises in the book, working through each one to create the feel described.

A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation

Game Feel

Haley Park

The perceptual field gives us a way to understand that game feel is as much about how players feel about a particular space and that space they keep in their minds to help them deal with and understand events in that game world. The dry details are important—they represent the player's understanding of the physics and rules of the game world and are a great way to find dissonance that causes player confusion—but they are not everything. 

Eyes, ears, tactile sense, proprioception—there's no separation when a person perceives something. 

The bodily space is different from the external space in that it exists only as long as there are degrees of freedom and a skillful use of this freedom. The bodily space is mainly given by the subject's specific potentials for action. 

The pianos (think input devices) of Ludwig Van Beethoven's day were flimsy, cheap things. In the course of his exuberant performances, he often broke 10 to 15 piano strings, sometimes damaging the piano beyond repair. It was not just is playing that destroyed the pianos, but the music itself: it was not written for the pianos of his day. Part of Beethoven's genius was his ability to look beyond the physical limitations of the piano and define a space of a greater virtuosity and musical expressivity than the one actually presented by the piano itself. When he looked at a rickety Viennese piano, he saw the robust grand pianos of today. 

What Beethoven was able to see clearly—and exceed—were the physical and mental limitations imposed upon him. He understood that a tool or instrument inherently shapes and influences the activities that can be carried out employing it, both physically and mentally. 

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