How Choreographic Thinking Can Improve Game Design

Choreographic Thinking and Games

Boris Willis, Associate Professor

Computer Game Design

George Mason University

bwillis3@gmu.edu

@boriswillis

boriswillismoves.com

blackrussiangames.com

Warm Up

Build a Phrase

1 to 10

Discussion

• Tools

• Iterations

• Design choices

• Observing

• Generating new ideas

• Awareness of self and others

• Puzzles

• Write down what you were thinking and discovering in the process.

• Warm up

• Build a phrase

• 1 to 10

What is a choreographer?

Games are a series of interesting decisions

-Sid Meier

Choreographer designs a series of interesting decisions.

Anything a game can be, choreography can be!

What is a choreographer?

• Designs experiences for an audience using movement, lighting, sound, costumes, props, sets, voice, text or multimedia.

• Crafts movement performed by a dancer, usually for an audience.

Defining Dance

Dance is a transient mode of expression, performed in a given form and style by the human body moving in space. Dance occurs through purposefully selected and controlled rhythmic movements; the resulting phenomenon is recognized as dance both by the performer and the observing members of a given group.

–Joann Kealiinohomoku

Defining Games

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.

- Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

Dance and Games

•A choreographer doesn’t create a game.

•A game designer doesn’t create a dance.

Michael Jackson's Moonwalker

https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/system/images/photo_albums/michael -jackson-videogames/large/michael-jackson-moonwalker-1.jpg?1384968217 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/600x315/34/41/0f/34410fe4529aa3766e9f594b2a662249.jpg

Dance CentralJust Dance

Types of Dance

• Court Dance

• Concert Dance

• Social Dance

• Folk Dance

• Religious Dance

• …and more

Susan RethorstChoreographic Thinking

• “a kind of spatial emotional map of a situation, the emotional psychological reading of place, and of people in relation to that place and each other”

William Forsythe

• “A choreographic object is not a substitute for the body, but rather an alternative site for the understanding of potential instigation and organization of action to reside. Ideally, choreographic ideas in this form would draw an attentive, diverse readership that would eventually understand and, hopefully, champion the innumerable manifestations, old and new, of choreographic thinking.”

Dance

• The body is the driver of the experience.

• Movement is primary

• Space can move through the body

• Body can move through space

• Focus on body parts

• Focus on space

• Focus on objects

BoundPlastic Studios

Natasha: A Game of DanceBlack Russian Games

Company E

Natasha: A Game of Dance

▪Natasha offers an example of transmedia storytelling that takes place across multiple platforms and, in doing so, transforms audience members into gamers.

Bound

• Staniszewski says of Bound, “we don’t have a story, but we have a meaning” Thus, Bound can be said to function or “feel” more like a poem or artwork than like a goal-oriented mission that a player must achieve or win.

Comparisons

Dance and Gesture

Audience/Performers/Creators

Movement/Gesture/Gesticulate

Movement for movement/Story

Games and Play

Players/Designers/Audience

Play/Games

Ludology/Narratology

Choreographic Thinking in Games

Simplicity- Does the player understand where they are and what they need to do right now? Can they do it, if not do they know how to figure it out?

Surprise- Does the player regularly experience something unexpected yet believable?

Transformation- Does your game regularly change the player in some way or give them a new outlook? Is the player or world different from the game start?

Repetition- Does your game reinforce established ideas so the player feels grounded?

Tools

William ForsytheSynchronous Objects

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/

Dance Exchange Toolboxhttp://danceexchange.org/

StoryNarrative

Write about

• Write about a time that you felt successful

1

Divide

• Divide the story into a beginning middle and end

2

Highlight

• Highlight the action words and verbs

3

Movement/Rules

Draw

• Draw a outline of your house or a house you would like to live in

1

Choose

• Choose three objects in the house

2

Choose

• Choose a number from 1-10

3

Action

• Do head shoulders knees toes and stop on final number

4

Movement

Decide Decide if you want to change the order of the movement. begin by stating the action words/verbs Consider timing, sound, size of house

Manipulate Manipulate the third object into the first object with the body part from the first room. Tell the end of the story

Transform Transform your body into the second object and locomote to the third object in the third room. Tell the second part of the story.

Move Move the first object with the body part you ended on to the second object in the second room. Tell the first part of the story

Discussion

Design a level based

on your house

Use the toolsUse

Change levelsChange

Change speedChange

Use turnsUse

How does the player know what to do?

• Audience Engagement

Simplicity

• Affordance

• Clarity

• Feedback

• Understanding

• Familiarity

Surprise• Unexpected but possible based on how you

establish the world

Transformation • Player, story, world, gameplay must be different and altered in some way at the end of the game

Repetition

• Establishing that what player is seeing is intended

• Reminding the player what they need to do by repeating it

• Reinforcing ideas

Game design as a walk in the woods

Choreographic Thinking and Games

Boris Willis, Associate Professor

Computer Game Design

George Mason University

bwillis3@gmu.edu

@boriswillis

boriswillismoves.com

blackrussiangames.com

End

Body Controller Typical Controller

• Doesn't feel like dance. Feels like running.

Peter BaylissLocus of manipulation

Bayliss argues that a player’s sense of involvement in the actions of game-play “can take many divergent forms” and the sense of “being-in-the-game- world arises from the player’s ability to control the locus of manipulation and by extension their experience of the game”

Feels like dancing.

Feels like jumping.

Henrik Smed Nielsen

• Nielsen links this transformational experience to a somatic undertaking: “my relation to the game does not disengage me from the world, rather it re-enacts my condition of Being-in-the-world as a body... It is a somatic experience that both naturalizes and decouples our relation to the world” (Nielsen, 2010)

Rikke Toft Nørgaard

• Nørgaard’s research aligns with Henry Jenkins’s theories about video games as forms of “kinesthetic engagement, more akin to experiences of architecture or dance than film.”

Evgenia Chetvertkova

• Her style is a mixture of different body techniques mostly based on butohand improvisation. In her work as dancer and performer she focuses on how does her body and internal psychological state may create a meaningful movement composition. She also often works with visual images as well as with soundscapes to complete dance-body-performance practice.

Self-Portrait in Movement3 day laboratory with Evgenia Chetvertkova

• The idea of laboratory is to find the way how to create self-portrait in dance, considering dance as a body-movement metaphor.

1. Represent your vision of yourself in different modalities: visual and auditory2. And then use these representations as material, starting point to create through movements body existence and manner of presence3. Find words to define and analyze some characteristics or interesting points that underline personal representations

Through comparing (or even becoming) ourselves to objects, textures, colors, sounds, animals, countries, texts, buildings and others we will find a creative force of dance and body imagination.Set up a question if body thinking (embodiment) as interpretation metaphor of an abstract concept is possible. Embodiment can be understand as creating movement image based on inner sensations, mental images of inner landscape that sometimes are difficult to be verbalized but vivid, touching and emotional.We will work on sensibility and awareness of the body, presence, quality of movements.

We will work on dance not as set of movements in time and space, but rather on presence that produce a kind of energy by means of body.

It is possible to regard this laboratory as art-diagnostics of characteristics of individuality that may appear as a unit or as a movement or as an energy which takes shape(form) and represents itself in the world through materiality, relations, thoughts, meanings or way of doing something.