If you ask us about any old video game, a Super Mario Bros. In this series of games, the design is born from a 2D camera or, what is the same, a game that is seen in profile or foreshortened ( from which the current 2.5D emerged).
All arts evolve; For its part, the video game began to explore new design lines and the 3D camera appeared, which allowed us to rotate the point of view of our character in 360 degrees. The world in three dimensions gave a new depth to the artistic section of video games. It was no longer worth making flat landscapes if not backgrounds with depth and elements that we could see from any perspective.
This amalgam of novelties implied that the rest of the elements (console and control) had to improve their software and layout.
Almost all of us remember the first controller of the original PlayStation: it did not even have a single joystick, only the famous keypad (x, square, circle and triangle) and a d-pad (popularly known as a crosshead). It was not until three years later that the redesign with two levers or joysticks arrived and that, a year later, it included the vibration motor.
Nintendo 64 had reached the market and its games in 3D and its joystick control forced Sony to put the batteries. Super Mario 64 came out of its pipeline to completely alter the paradigm of video game design : a camera that allowed us to explore the environment and controls so polished that they are still used for open-world Super Mario, such as the recent Super Mario Odyssey.
If the Super Mario are known for something, it is because they only use one verb to be able to explode an entire universe: jump . The first Super Mario were designed so that anyone could play them; those in Kyoto wanted to reach as many people as possible and their obsession was to make a simple but convincing control. As Mario has evolved, the number of verbs has also expanded. From the jump to the long jump, through the supported jump, the triple jump, the bomb jump in Mario 64, and the infinity of jumps that the Mario Odyssey cap allows us.
All this theory translates to the command, which acts as an interpreter between the design of the controls and the player . The purpose of a developer is to make us feel from the command that a normal jump is not the same as a long jump, since the way to invoke them changes. This way of feeling the controls and communicating with the player is kinesthetic.
Limbo, one of the indie games par excellence, understands this concept perfectly. The character we are handling makes very small jumps and the difference between the smallest and the largest jump is minimal but essential to overcome some areas, which forces the player to think every time they press the jump button.
Battlefield is another great example of kinesthetics, when we press the reload button too quickly the weapon jams us like a real one. At that moment your hands understand that you are not with a command but with a weapon and you cannot press the buttons in any way.
Bioshock or Dishonored has another way of understanding the concept: we have the two sides of the triggers completely differentiated. In our left hand are the powers of the protagonist and in the right hand his firearm and, this translates to command. That differentiation in both the game and the controller is what makes us feel powerful in a video game.
Of course, another important part in this communication is the vibration of the controller : how you can regulate the intensity in a video game is marked by the same vibration. In any horror game in which our steps or a door that closes does not produce the same vibration as when a ghost chases us; that’s the vibration’s way of transferring weight and level of distress to the player.
It should be clarified that this relationship is not exclusive to consoles and the PC mouse has proven to be a more than competent rival with Half Life 2.
One of the best known weapons is the gravity pistol , which allows us to launch any object into the air and that many of us have spent countless hours throwing countless objects. But it is not the sensation of throwing objects that is satisfactory but the small explosion that floods the screen every time we throw something, that feeling of power is transmitted to our right hand and allows a perfect synergy between player and game.
Finally, we could not forget Shadow Of the Colossus, the great work of Fumito Ueda. In it we control a human who must defeat sixteen colossi to save his beloved.
Each confrontation is different, but there is a pattern that repeats itself, we have to climb the colossus and hit its weak points until we kill it. But climbing up to the gigantic enemy is not easy at all since we have to climb through the fur and the time that our protagonist holds is very little.
Its controls aroused much criticism at its launch, but the passing of the years ended up giving the reason to the game. When we hold on to the leg of a colossus we have to pay attention to the energy that we have left, try to find a foothold where we can recover it and be careful that the colossus does not shake us. Taking into consideration that he is a human character, like us, he gives him a realism and kinesthetics little seen in many video games.
The way in which we communicate with the controller or mouse is different in each gender, and we must assimilate that the only way we have to transfer the abilities of our character to ours is through kinesthetics.
