Affordances as tropes and why they’re a creative gold mine
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Lately we’ve been talking a lot about affordances in games. For those who doesn’t know affordances are what a player perceives as an opportunity to play. Affordances are present in all design, like how a door might have a handle on one end and a bar on the other. It simply makes the act of pulling or pushing the door more intuitive. Some affordances are actually a real opportunity to play, like when you’re exploring a game and you see a door that you can interact with. You can break it down, or pick the lock, or write a message on it that brings out representatives of the lollipop guild. Awesome. Other affordances are just perceived, you see a door and it turns out that it’s just a painting on the wall. Some lazy google fu textures on the border of game space. Or In Batman Arkham Asylum that gives you plastic explosives that can knock out a beefcake of a bruiser, but will only destroy old wood paneling and glass. Bogus. This door, and indeed some other classic perceived affordances like vehicles you can’t actually drive or ships you can’t actually board, have become so engrained into the gamer consciousness that they’re practically tropes. We don’t really expect those doors in the castle corridors of Resident Evil 4 to be interactive, so it doesn’t bother us, it doesn’t detract from our ”fun”. We’re so used with fake doors that we just ignore them. Some games might turn one of these perceived affordances into an integral part of the dynamic. In fact that’s been a way of being ”unique” in the market for quite some time. Like in Lego City Undercover where the vehicles are all driveable and at the core of the gameplay (yes I could have said GTA, what do you want from me, GTA SUCKS). Or Portal that lets you create your own doors. But a lot remains to be explored for game designers, look around in your favourite games and look at what could have been perceived as affordances. Look at all the things that might have been opportunities to play. I always thought that a space sim element would have been a natural fit in Mass Effect, especially given the shooter elements in KOTOR, Biowares earlier sci-fi adventure. What if you could have directed the fleets last stand against the reapers, or actually controlled the normandy during the attack on the collector base? What if the space bars on omega had allowed you to take bartending into your own hands and mix that asshole who poisoned you some really nasty stuff, like maybe an appletini? Ok that last one is a stretch, or is it? I think it would be awesome with a game where you are the proprietor of a bar in outer space. You’d have to deal with different alien nutrient needs and tolerances, stave off extra terrestrial drunkards with superpowers that go haywire if they get the wrong kind of sedative in their blood. Talk to your regulars and get information that you’d then sell to the space pirates for a turn of the profit… Maybe harbor fugitives in a secret cellar and help them hide from some kind of space empire persecution. Serve the soldiers and try and keep peace and a cheerful mood while war rages outside. This sounds great, right?  |
