Moments Of Inaction In Games-Scully-Blaker
#notesFromPaper
Year : Tags : Authors: Scully-Blaker
!stasis and !stillness These ideas are integral to the ordinary player experience
non-interactivity is nonsensical here because even within stasis and stillness players are “interacting” with the game.
Speed in games is generally considered good (speedrunning)
Parkins and Craig began the slow living project to examine social and cultural movements that emphasize “taking time” and promote taking time as a fulfilling way to live.
Sharma argues against this idea claiming that the ability to live slow is a privilege and slow living risks exacerbating social inequalities.
Designed Stasis
Until Dawn uses a tactile game approach to stasis by forcing the player to not move their controller while hiding from an enemy.
Resident Evil 4 forces the player to watch overly detailed cutscenes of their avatar’s death as punishment for failure.
Injected Stasis (When the player creates moments of stasis themselves, without the dev putting it in the game.)
Unlike RE4, the Man vs Wild game had a badly done quicktime event that, when Let's Players ignored the event, it turned a serious moment into a comedic moment.
There was a Mario Party 2 video where someone just did nothing and won a minigame. These two events highlight that a game designers not accounting for injected stasis can cause moments to undercut the intended aesthetics of a game.
My thoughts: Conversation typically follows the cooperative principle. I wonder if there is literature on a similar principle for games… Oh well, I'll make the note anyways. These instances of injected stasis show how games fall apart when the cooperative principle is broken.
Most instances of injected stasis don’t go beyond a desire to see what happens.
Stillness
Resistance: Fall of Man includes a section where, after an intense firefight, the player is given the chance to explore a large cathedral. It is pretty.
In Animal Crossing there is little benefit to running, but there are downsides: Flowers can get trampled, insects and fish run away, and running into NPCs can anger them. #MDA
You can’t design for stillness (because forcing it just becomes stasis), but you can design towards it and encourage it.
Encouraged, but not enforced stasis can also lead to stillness. An inviting bench where players can sit as long as they want is a sort of stasis, but it’s more stillness.
Injected Stillness
A form of trifling. WoW players sometimes tried to reach level cap without killing anything.
Stasis and especially stillness are ways for a player to informally critique a game.
Design Takeaways:
Stasis is a powerful design tool, though opportunities for injected stasis can subvert game aesthetics. Stillness is similarly powerful, and finally devs should create opportunities for injected stillness and alternative play modes.
