Games seek to bond with players

Leading game developer David Braben takes issue with the recent assertion by Laura Fryer, director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, that games are still something for just "geeks and guys".

Game seeks to create emotional bond with the player

Games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and the Sims have already crossed the gender divide with broad appeal across the ages, and there are more to come.

Aspects which help games move out of the "geeks and guys" stereotype are the inclusion of emotion and humour coupled with the avoidance of pointless killing and death.

It is far easier in a game to show something exploding than to have a character showing emotion. This leads to the "shoot-it-if-it-moves" mechanic of games like Quake - a fundamentally empty experience (unless you're fighting people you know well).

Even in Elite, we made shooting another space craft illegal, so the player had to think before opening fire, in theory, at least.

Emotion is something that many in the games business have looked at, but it is hard to achieve in practice.

Deeper than speech

At Frontier we started working on the issues involved many years ago, but pretty soon realised body-language is vital.

But humour is frequently forced so falls flat on its face and the games business is still learning how to do this in an interactive form

Human communication goes far deeper than just speech. A character standing with their arms by their side with only their lips moving is utterly soulless, irrespective of what they are saying.

As a starting point, we have been looking at emotion and communication in animals. After all they communicate almost entirely by body language.

Animals have appeared in games before, from Sonic the Hedgehog to Crash Bandicoot, but these are really justifications for some special ability, and do not really address body language or emotion.

In Black and White, developers Lionhead made major strides in this direction with the player teaching behaviour to mythical creatures and in the process creating an emotional bond to them.

We have tried to achieve this emotional bond by making a dog behave and move much like a real one, hopefully achieving this emotional bond directly from the body language of the animal.

The results can be seen in our game Dog's Life on Playstation 2. Although it is not released until next month, it is already proving popular with people who would not normally describe themselves as gamers, as well as those that do.

The dogs in the game move smoothly and naturally, so look 'alive', and the player can tell how hungry or happy the dog is purely by its body language.

Fun and games

Humour is another difficult field, but when it works in a game does bring the game appeal outside the "geek and guy" arena.

Games like Sonic did not address emotion

I first saw this working in the 1980s, in the text adventure game of Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But humour is frequently forced so falls flat on its face and the games business is still learning how to do this in an interactive form.

I am a huge fan of Aardman and Nick Park, and we have been lucky enough to work with them on the first Wallace and Gromit game, out next month, and have learnt a great deal about how to make humour work.

Their appeal rests on the gentle, quirky humour evident in their relationship and situations, and therefore easily crosses age, gender and cultural boundaries.

So, though many games still do fall into the "geeks and guys" mould, we in the games business are working hard to broaden their appeal, and our games will be all the better as a result.

David Braben, who wrote his first game, Elite, more than 20 years ago, is the founder of Frontier Developments.