Game Feel

1) "In each [game], a device overwrites one of my senses. The screen becomes vision, speakers hearing and rumble motors the sense of touch. The feedback from these devices enables me to experience things in a game as if they were objects in my immediate physical reality. I have the sense of moving around a physical space, touching and interacting with objects. The screen, speakers and controller have become an extension of my senses into the game world. The game world becomes real because the senses are directly overwritten by feedback from the game. By hooking into the various senses, a screen, a speaker or a joystick can make the virtual feel real.
When game designers create camera behavior, implement sound effects or trigger rumble motors, they're not defining what players see, hear and feel. Rather, they are defining how players will be able to see, feel and hear in the game. The task is to overwrite real senses with virtual ones. In defining game feel, we must acknowledge this fact and embrace it. To experience game feel is to see through different eyes, hear through different ears and touch with a different body."

2) "How does this concept of avatar as perceptual substitute, rather than extending tool, relate to proxied embodiment? Because a game world represents its own reality external to its avatar's bodily space, it seems much more like a substitution than an extension. The same might be said for identity. We said that objects outside ourselves---and objects in a game world---can become extensions of identity. Vessels for identity might be more accurate. The view of tool as extension of body defines the 'self' is in terms of perception. The percceptual self is the immediate surrounding environment and your ability to interact with it, your potential for action. To say 'he hit me!' instead of 'he hit my car' or 'his car hit my car' is an artifact of the way we perceive the immediate environment around us and the fact that an inanimate object can become a part of the perceptual self, part of the perceptual field. You literally perceive the world through the car as you actively conrol it. Again, though, the way we perceive game feel seems to be much more of a substitution than an extension. I perceive the world of Hyrule as Link, via his virtual body space. My identity intermingles with Link's as I take over and make my own his skills and abilities, his bodily space."

3) "Context, then, is the unique physical reality of the game world---the simulated space---including the way that objects interact and the layout of space. Like the abilities and actions of the avatar, it is designed. The game designer creates a game space that has its own unique physics, extents and constraints. The designer simultaneously creates the content that fills that world and defines its spatial relationships.
Almost every game has a contextual aspect of some kind, be it tracks in Gran Turismo or tracks in Guitar Hero. Tracks, puzzles, stages, levels, worlds: most games have some kind of designed context against the mechanics' functions. In most cases, this is called level design. The objective is to find the most interesting pieces of the mechanic and emphasize them by trying to provide the most interesting interactions possible with the mechanics."

4) "In Super Mario 64, if you examine these relationships individually from a design perspective, they seem to make no sense. Like squash and stretch in animation, 'realism' is ignored in favor of player perception. But Mario 64 nevertheless manages to feel powerfully tactile and cohesive. How? The secret is this: everything---the effects, the relationships, the control---is tuned based on its impact on the player's perception. From tiny, subtle clues, the player infers broad generalizations about the physics of this world. When these conceptions are ultimately confirmed by additional interactions, the world begins to seem 'real.' The polish is exactly what it needs to be, selling a robust, nuanced sense of physical interaction with the smallest possible clues. The size, spacing and nature of objects in Mario's world are almost perfectly balanced against his motion. In fact, nearly everything about Super Mario 64 is in harmony with a single, cohesive vision of a unique physical reality. The world is fantastic, but it's self-consistent, and stands up to scrutiny, even when perceived actively."

5) "After exploring what game feel is and how to measure it, and stepping through a number of examples using our taxonomy of game feel---input, response, context, polish, metaphor and rules---it's time to set forth some general principles for creating games with good game feel. They are:
- Predictable results---When players take action, they get the response they expect.
- Instantaneous response---The player feels the response to their input is immediate.
- Easy but deep---The game takes minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.
- Novelty---Though the result of an input is predictable, there is enough subtlety and expressiveness to keep the controls feeling fresh and interesting through hours and hours of play.
- Appealing response---The sensation of control is aesthetically appealing and compelling, separate from context.
- Organic motion---Controlling the avatar creates appealing arcs of motion.
- Harmony---Each element of a game's feel supports a single, cohesive perception of a unique physical reality for the player."

Game Feel is an interesting look at the phenomenon of controls in video games having "feel," whether they feel "floaty", "heavy", etc. Swink discusses at length what each of these descriptors means and how they are achieved. By examining these phenomena and illustrating his points with several case studies of popular games, Swink is able to construct metrics for defining game feel and ideas for how game designers can best use it to create their desired user experience. The book is filled with insightful non-digital analogies of how we control objects and utilize proprioception, and how we might relate those experiences to the game world.

Despite very readable prose and colloquial examples, I was tempted to read this as an academic book. That's not how it was intended, so I caution any game theorists approaching the book from that position. If you read this as an academic book, you will find several "holes" in Swink's "argument," particularly his theories about the extension of self that connects the player with their avatar. Keep in mind that this is a book for designers, and as such it is extremely useful: "feel" is certainly an observable phenomenon in games, and Swink's examination is thoughtful and could indeed serve as the basis for more "academic" inquiries into the nature of feel and the extension of the self into the game world.