Homework 14: Indirect Control

Assigned: October 31, 2014
Due: November 7, 2014

For this project, please describe the various ways that your game addresses the issue of indirect control. What elements of your game (characters, interface, scenery, art) contribute to the indirect (or direct) control of the player. The book discusses five categories of indirect control. Please address them, and add any other forms of indirect control that may apply to your game.

Story and Game Structures can be Artfully Merged with Indirect Control:

The Feeling of Freedom

Indirect Control Method #1: Constraints, giving an answerer to freedom of choice, would definitely play a big part of our game. For once the choosing between one path to the left or right can lead to a successful and gratifying ending. The second freedom would be in the form of choosing potions that could save the player’s life in any defining moment of risk.

Ultimately players could choose from different combinations!!

Indirect Control Method #2: Goals, design goals is a good reason to have players care about your game. If a player has two doors they can go through, don’t really knowing which one leads to a secret area, they would enter anyway giving them a random chance to find more items and more secrets even if the second door leads to the same place than the first door at the end.

Indirect Control Method #3: Interface, something else to consider about the interface is indirect

control because players want interfaces to be transparent, they don’t really think about the interface, if they can help it. Limiting the players to a single activity due to a simple choice of controls is partly about who a player will relate to, but it is also about implicitly limiting the player’s options. In Purgatory that player would have the standard w,a,s,d which is been proven to give players plenty of choices as well as combining a python script for mouse look to give a convincing look around the avatar.

Indirect Control Method #4: Visual Design, having a controlling effect on were the audience would look in visual design is a very powerful weapon. As an art student, we are thought to design keeping a clear and readable image of the focal point, the most important element in the narrative. This can be achieve by making the focal point brighter in color than the rest of the elements.

Indirect Control Method #5: Characters, using your storytelling ability to make the player actually care about the characters, that is willingly wanting to obey them, protect them, help them, or destroy them is what suddenly can generate an excellent tool to control what the player will and will not try to do.

Indirect Control Method #6: Music, designers think of adding music to a game, they usually think of the

mood they want to create, and the atmosphere of the game. But music can also have a significant effect on what players do. After listening to the feedback given in class on game critique day, my team and I decided to have the avatar heart rate increase as well as the intensity and pace of the music to influence the player’s reaction and fear of the game. This would be an attempt to make the game immersive and scarier.

My contributions to my team game during the past 7-10 days. Has been to design and create the game poster from scratch, writing the game document, communicating with my team via email as well as face to face meetings to delegate duties in order to meet the deadlines.